Honda is letting an Indian company develop its next generation of cars. By Yash Bajaj Autoblog Updated August 9, 2026 5:25 AM Gift Article Honda has outsourced the development of its new vehicle program to India-based Tata Technologies, which is owned by the same conglomerate that owns Jaguar Land-Rover (JLR), and also builds the world's most efficient electric vehicles. The decision marks a significant change in operations for the Japanese automaker, which has historically kept its core engineering and platform development in-house or strictly within its legacy supplier network. Given Tata's history of being able to develop versatile vehicle platforms that can underpin both internal combustion and battery electric products, such as its own All-terrain Ready, Omni-Energy and Geometry Scalable Architecture or "ARGOS" platform, it makes sense for Honda to hand over development for its own multi-powertrain vehicle platform. The move comes as Honda overhauls its global product roadmap and seeks aggressive cost-cutting measures to address profitability following its first annual loss since its founding in 1948. Honda's historic shift in the making. According to Bloomberg, the Tata-engineered platform is being designed for versatility. It is expected to underpin multiple upcoming car models and is specifically intended to accommodate both conventional internal combustion engines and next-generation electrified powertrains, spanning hybrids and fully electric vehicles. While Honda has historically guarded its core platform engineering strictly in-house, viewing it as the bedrock of its brand identity, delegating this program to Tata Technologies represents a historic operational shift. By leveraging specialized external partnerships, Honda aims to rapidly strengthen its competitive edge in a fast-evolving global auto market, especially while it tries to correct course. The specific consumer markets where these forthcoming Tata-engineered vehicles will ultimately be sold have not yet been officially disclosed by either company. Tata Group is asserting dominance everywhere. The Honda deal is just one facet of the Tata Group's rapidly expanding technological influence. In a separate monumental development, Tata Electronics recently finalized a strategic partnership with the Dutch semiconductor equipment giant ASML, securing access to its highly coveted and restricted lithography technology. This historic agreement allows Tata to acquire the specialized ASML machines necessary to establish India's first 300mm commercial chip fab in Dholera, Gujarat, effectively embedding the Indian conglomerate into the world's most advanced semiconductor global supply chain, alongside Tata's automotive, consultancy, financial services and more. The age of collusion. These cross-industry milestones underscore Tata's ascent from a regional manufacturing powerhouse to a globally trusted engineering linchpin. For Honda, the collaboration promises to accelerate critical product development cycles while simultaneously keeping overhead costs in check, setting the stage for a highly anticipated new generation of versatile and economically viable vehicles built as a result of productive and mutually beneficial partnerships. This story was originally published August 9, 2026 at 5:15 AM.

China says it cracked the chipmaking tech the west spent billions trying to keep from it. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics built a laser-produced plasma EUV light-source platform that hit 3.42% conversion efficiency in a March 2025 paper, a key step toward domestic advanced-chip manufacturing. EUV remains the choke point for sub-7nm production, and ASML has been barred from selling its most advanced EUV tools to China since 2019. In parallel, Alibaba previewed its 2.4 trillion-parameter Qwen3.8-Max-Preview and T-Head said it will open-source its SAIL stack to challenge Nvidia's CUDA. Key takeaways. * Chinese Academy hit 3.42% EUV efficiency in 2025, narrowing ASML's chipmaking lead. * ASML's 2019 China ban still limits sub-7nm chips, pushing domestic EUV efforts toward 2028. * Alibaba unveiled 2.4T-parameter Qwen3.8 as T-Head expands post-CUDA AI tools in 2026. The most valuable bottleneck in advanced chipmaking is the EUV light source, and for years it has sat behind a single Dutch gatekeeper: ASML. Now a Chinese Academy of Sciences team at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, led by ex-ASML scientist Lin Nan, has published results for a laser-produced plasma EUV platform that hits internationally competitive parameters, including a reported 3.42% conversion efficiency in a March 2025 paper. The Diplomat notes the power output is still only about 100 to 150 watts, well short of ASML's commercial benchmarks, but the direction matters for a country blocked from buying ASML's most advanced EUV tools since 2019. In Shanghai this week, Alibaba is also leaning into the same thesis from the software side, previewing its 2.4 trillion-parameter Qwen3.8 and having T-Head pledge to open-source SAIL as a CUDA alternative. Cracking the EUV bottleneck. For US readers tracking semiconductors, the real drama is not just new chips, it is the tools that make them. A year after a key report surfaced, China is still trying to loosen a choke point that has shaped everything from iPhone supply chains to Nvidia-powered AI clusters. The latest progress centers on the light source needed for extreme ultraviolet lithography. A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, led by Lin Nan, built an EUV light-source platform that a research paper describes as operating at internationally competitive parameters, a step the May 12, 2025 report framed as a barrier giving way. Lin previously worked at ASML in the Netherlands, including as a competence owner for light sources used in metrology, a detail that helps explain why US officials watch these technical papers so closely. A strong lab result, short of factory reality. In March 2025, Lin's group reported an LPP (laser-produced plasma) EUV setup driven by a solid-state 1-micron laser, rather than the CO2 lasers used in commercial systems. The paper put its peak conversion efficiency at 3.42%, beating earlier academic results from ETH Zurich (1.8% in 2021) and a Dutch research center (3.2% in 2019). Commercial EUV light sources are still around 5.5% efficient. Power output remains the part that separates prototypes from production lines. A recent analysis said the EUV light generated by China's methods has been around 100 to 150 watts, versus 600 watts for ASML's current commercial benchmark. That gap matters because higher power enables higher wafer throughput, which is how fabs make money. Export controls, reverse-engineering, and the 2028 target. US export pressure has kept China from buying the most advanced ASML EUV systems since 2019, and EUV is a key requirement for chip nodes below 7 nm. One report put China's lithography-machine market as 99% controlled by ASML and Japan's Nikon and Canon, underscoring how much of the supply chain sits outside Beijing's reach. Reuters reported in December 2025 that researchers in Shenzhen had assembled an operational prototype EUV lithography machine in early 2025 by reverse-engineering ASML technology, using parts salvaged from older tools and other export-restricted components. The machine was not producing functional chips, but the ambition was blunt: "The aim is for China to eventually be able to make advanced chips on machines that are entirely China-made." Alibaba's parallel push: bigger models, tighter stacks. At the World AI Conference in Shanghai, Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max-Preview on July 19, 2026, describing it as a multimodal model with 2.4 trillion total parameters using a sparse Mixture-of-Experts design, per the July 20, 2026 write-up. Alibaba has not yet disclosed benchmark results, license terms, or how many parameters are active at inference time. A day earlier, Alibaba's chip unit T-Head said it would open-source SAIL, the software stack behind its Zhenwu chips, positioning it as an on-ramp away from Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem. That announcement follows T-Head's May 20, 2026 unveiling of the Zhenwu M890, which it said delivers 0.6 PFLOPs FP16 with 144 GB of HBM3, and had already shipped 560,000 units to more than 400 corporate customers by April 2026. Yesterday Fear Last Week Fear Last Month Extreme Fear How do you feel about the market today?

Micron Technology has surged approximately 190% in 2026 but recently fell over 25% from its June peak, including a 9% drop on 28 July amid a global chip selloff. The volatility highlights growing uncertainty in AI memory stocks. Micron posted record third-quarter revenue of $41.5 billion, up 346% year-over-year, and secured Strategic Customer Agreements worth roughly $100 billion in baseline revenue. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra expects tight supply to continue beyond 2027. Despite this growth, Micron trades below six times forward earnings. However, memory has historically been cyclical, with previous drawdowns ranging from 36% to 73%. Chinese competitor ChangXin Memory Technologies recently raised $8.6 billion in Shanghai, with shares jumping 470% on debut, raising concerns about future pricing power.