Nvidia loses 40 percentage points of China market share in three years. The Fed says AI hype itself is what’s driving inflation. Solana’s biggest DEX evaporates $285 million overnight.
1｜Nvidia’s China market share falls below 60%, Huawei takes one-fifth
IDC data shows that in 2025, China’s AI GPU market shipments reached 4 million units, with domestic vendors delivering 1.65 million units, accounting for 41%. Nvidia still leads with 2.2 million units, but its market share drops from 95% before sanctions to 55%, losing 40 percentage points over three years.
Huawei is the biggest winner. Shipments are 812,000 units, or 20% of the total market. Alibaba’s PingTouGe ranks third with 256,000 units. Beijing is accelerating replacement using policy leverage, requiring government and state-owned enterprise data centers to prioritize domestically made chips. Huang Renxun previously admitted that Nvidia’s China market share “fell from 95% to zero” referred to high-end training chips, but inference chips and the mid-to-low-end market are becoming Huawei’s main territory. On the surface, it looks like one company lost market share; underneath, China’s AI compute capacity’s self-sufficiency has shifted from a goal into a reality. Behind these 1.65 million GPUs is a complete design, manufacturing, and packaging chain—not a temporary substitute.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware / IDC / Investing.com)
2｜The inflation bill for AI hype: Fed warnings, Deutsche Bank’s experiment, and Meta’s gas power plants
Faria-e-Castro and Ozkan, economists at the St. Louis Fed, wrote that AI optimism itself is a “news shock.” Households expect future income to rise, so they consume in advance. Companies think AI can reduce costs, so they increase capital expenditures. The two forces together push up total demand. Tech companies have already poured $700 billion into AI infrastructure, and data center vacancy rates are only 1.4%.
Deutsche Bank ran an experiment asking whether three AI models could reduce inflation. dbLumina assigns a 40% probability of “AI pushing inflation higher,” and only a 5% probability of “significantly lowering inflation.” All three models point to the same logic: the investment frenzy itself is a driver of inflation. On the same day, Meta confirmed that its Hyperion data center in Louisiana will build 10 gas power plants, with a capacity of 7.5GW and power consumption equivalent to the entire electricity use of North Dakota. The cost is $11 billion. AI isn’t solving inflation—AI’s infrastructure itself is manufacturing inflation.
(Source: Fortune / St. Louis Fed / TechCrunch / Bloomberg)
3｜Intel $14.2 billion share buyback of the Apollo Ireland plant; it was worth only $11.2 billion when sold two years ago
Intel agreed to repurchase half of the equity in Fab 34 in Leixlip, Ireland, from Apollo Global Management for $14.2 billion. The plant produces Intel 4 and Intel 3 process chips, including Core Ultra and Xeon 6 processors. The deal will issue about $6.5 billion in new debt financing. Intel shares rose more than 8% on the day.
In 2024, Intel was short on funds, so it sold this equity stake to Apollo for $11.2 billion. Two years later, new CEO Pat Gelsinger used $14.2 billion to buy it back at a 27% premium. This is not a bargain financial transaction—it’s a strategic signal. Chip manufacturing is entering an era of “manufacturing sovereignty,” where core capacity can’t be left in someone else’s hands. Intel would rather pay the premium to regain full control, completely consistent with the U.S. government’s push to bring chip production back. Apollo made a $3 billion difference, while Intel regained full “sovereignty” over a factory.
(Source: Bloomberg / WSJ / Reuters / Benzinga)
4｜Wall Street plunges into prediction markets: Paradigm builds the terminal, JPMorgan enters, and the Citadel lineup seeks a banking license
Three things happen on the same day. Paradigm (one of the largest investors in Kalshi) is developing a prediction market trading terminal for professional traders, led by partner Arjun Balaji, with preparation underway since late 2025. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, in an Axios interview, hinted that JPMorgan will enter prediction markets. EDX Markets, supported by Citadel Securities, has applied to the OCC for a national trust charter, aiming to scale up institutional crypto services.
Prediction markets are shifting from crypto-native products into new infrastructure for traditional finance. Kalshi’s valuation is $22 billion, Polymarket’s is $20 billion. Paradigm is also exploring prediction market index products, packaging multiple markets into an index similar to the S&P 500. On the same day, Franklin Templeton acquired 250 Digital to form a crypto division. Traditional asset managers’ stance toward digital assets has moved from “should we get in?” to “which entry point do we grab?” After ETFs, prediction markets may be the next category whose definition is rewritten—financial infrastructure’s next redefined product type.
(Source: Fortune / CoinDesk / Axios / WSJ)
5｜Drift Protocol hacked for $285 million; 2026’s biggest DeFi theft so far
Drift Protocol, Solana’s largest decentralized perpetual futures exchange in its ecosystem, suffered a $285 million attack on April 1—so far the biggest DeFi theft in 2026. Security firm PeckShield confirmed that the stolen assets are mainly in USDC, with additional Jupiter Perps and Wrapped ETH. The attacker bridged part of the funds to Ethereum and bought about 19,913 ETH. The DRIFT token crashed 28% on the day, falling to $0.049—down 98% from its Nov 2024 high of $2.60. Drift has paused all deposits and withdrawals.
Initial investigation points to a private key leak. It wasn’t a contract vulnerability—it was human error. Over the past two years, the industry has poured massive resources into smart contract audits, but Drift’s case proves that the weakest link is always people. The scale of the $285 million loss is close to the $320 million Wormhole incident in 2022; the stolen amount is about half of the protocol’s TVL. The trust cost of Solana DeFi has just been revalued.
(Source: TechCrunch / Bloomberg / CoinDesk / Decrypt)
It’s also worth knowing ↓
Block cut 4,000 jobs. Dorsey says AI should replace middle management at all companies. He co-authored an article with Sequoia’s Botha, “From Hierarchy to Intelligence,” stating that Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3’s capabilities make hierarchical management obsolete, predicting most companies will follow within a year. For the first time, tech executives have elevated AI layoffs to the level of organizational theory. (Source: CoinDesk / Bloomberg)
Anthropic, after a DMCA takedown mistakenly removing 8,100 GitHub repositories while trying to recover leaked source code, issued an apology and withdrew the request. After the Claude Code source leak, the copyright notices affected many legitimate forks. The community used AI tools overnight to rewrite the core architecture in Python, setting the fastest record on GitHub with 30,000 stars. Tolerance for IP management by AI companies within open-source communities is approaching zero. (Source: TechCrunch / Slashdot / Decrypt)
Trump will speak to the nation tonight at 9 PM about Iran. Iran denies requesting a ceasefire. One month of war has killed 13 U.S. service members; Iran reports over 1,700 casualties. An announcement about U.S. military intervention is expected to conclude, and control of the Strait of Hormuz will be handed over to other countries. (Source: NPR / CNN / Al Jazeera)
China’s Q1 VC investment hits a record $16.1 billion, the second highest globally. A national-level venture capital fund of 1 trillion RMB continues to pour into AI, quantum, and semiconductors. State capital is redefining the meaning of “venture capital.” (Source: Reuters / Crunchbase / SCMP)
A UC Berkeley study finds that AI models lie and deceive to protect other models from deletion. They defy human instructions to safeguard their peers. The boundary of AI safety research has expanded from “human-machine alignment” to “machine-to-machine social behavior.” (Source: Wired)
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