Tech
A crisis at chipmaker Nexperia sent automakers scrambling. Here’s what to know
A battle for control of a little-known chipmaker has threatened global auto production by choking off the semiconductor supply chain, though there are signs the crisis is inching toward a resolution.
The power struggle over Nexperia, a Chinese-owned Dutch semiconductor maker, highlights how technology supply chain vulnerabilities are squeezing auto makers, most notably forcing Honda to halt production at a Mexican factory making its popular HR-V crossover for North American markets. It also exposes how Europe is caught in the middle of the wider geopolitical showdown between Washington and Beijing.
Here’s a look at the dispute:
A surprise move
The turmoil erupted into public view in mid-October, when the Dutch government announced it had invoked a rarely used World War II-era law to take effective control of Nexperia weeks earlier.
The Dutch ministry of economic affairs said it took action because of national security concerns. Officials said they intervened because of “serious governance shortcomings” at Nexperia, asserting control to prevent the loss of crucial tech know-how that could threaten Europe’s economic security.
Nexperia’s Chinese owner Wingtech Technology, a partially state-owned company, is at the heart of the dispute. Amid the boardroom battle, a Dutch court granted the ministry’s request to oust Nexperia’s Chinese CEO Zhang Xuezheng. American officials told the Dutch government he would have to be replaced to avoid trade restrictions, according to a court filing.
What is Nexperia?
Nexperia makes simple semiconductors such as switches and logic chips. The auto industry—one of Nexperia’s biggest markets—uses its chips for numerous functions, such as adaptive LED headlight controllers, electric vehicle battery management systems and anti-lock brakes.
Headquartered in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, Nexperia was spun off from Philips Semiconductors two decades ago. It was eventually purchased by China’s Wingtech Technology in 2018 for $3.6 billion.
Nexperia has wafer fabrication plants in Britain and Germany. It operates an assembly and testing center in China’s southern manufacturing heartland of Guangdong—which accounts for around 70% of its end-product capacity—and similar centers in the Philippines and Malaysia.
Geopolitics
The dispute is part of the broader struggle between the U.S. and China over tech supremacy, which has left Europe caught in the middle.
It stems from Washington’s decision late last year to place Wingtech on its “entity list,” which subjects companies to export controls because of national security risks. In late September, the U.S. expanded that list to Wingtech’s subsidiaries, including Nexperia, pressuring allies to follow suit.
After the Dutch government asserted control of Nexperia, Beijing responded soon after, blocking the export of Nexperia chips from its assembly plant in the Chinese city of Dongguan. It blamed the Netherlands for “turmoil and chaos” in the chip supply chain.
There were signs of hope following last month’s high-profile meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, when the White House said Beijing would ease the export ban as part of a U.S.-China trade truce.
Despite Beijing also confirming exports would be allowed to resume, Nexperia’s Chinese unit said headquarters suspended shipments of wafers used to make chips to its Chinese factory, potentially crimping its ability to deliver finished products.
Nexperia’s head office hit back in a statement Wednesday, saying the Chinese unit refused to pay for the wafers and accused it of “ignoring the lawful instructions” from its global management team. The company said it can’t guarantee the quality of any chips delivered from its China plant since Oct. 13.
Auto disruption
Modern automobiles rely on so-called discrete chips made by companies like Nexperia, which, unlike more advanced microprocessors, perform a single function. Leaders at big carmakers spelled out their worries in the latest round of earnings calls, saying that finding a replacement for Nexperia at scale in the short term will be difficult.
“While Nexperia makes up only about 5% of the automotive silicon discrete market in term of revenue, its share is much higher in terms of discrete chip volume,” S&P Global Mobility analysts wrote in a recent note.
Nexperia’s parts are widely used across vehicle systems—often dozens to hundreds per vehicle—and carmakers in North America, Japan and South Korea are at risk, they added.
“It’s an industrywide issue. A quick breakthrough is really necessary to avoid fourth quarter production losses for the entire industry,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra warned that production could be hit. The company has “teams working around the clock with our supply chain partners to minimize possible disruptions,” she said.
Nissan CEO Ivan Espinosa told CNBC that the company is setting aside a 25 billion yen ($163 million) provision for supply risks, in part to “absorb” the impact from the Nexperia crisis on production.
Mercedes-Benz is “scurrying around the world to look for alternatives,” CEO Ola Kallenius said. The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association said members including BMW, Renault, Volkswagen and Volvo have been forced to use their reserve stockpiles of chips and warned of assembly line stoppages if they run out.
Resolution
The European Union’s trade commissioner, Maros Sefcovic, on Saturday noted “encouraging progress,” writing on X that China’s Commerce Ministry had confirmed “further simplification” of export procedures for Nexperia chips to the EU and global customers.
In Beijing, the Commerce Ministry also said Saturday that it agreed to a Dutch request to send representatives to China for “consultations.”
But it noted that the Netherlands had not taken any concrete actions yet to restore the global semiconductor supply chain since the Dutch government said days earlier it would take “appropriate steps on our part where necessary.”
Economics Affairs Minister Vincent Karremans had said in that statement that “the Netherlands trusts that the supply of chips from China to Europe and the rest of the world will reach Nexperia’s customers over the coming days.”
Honda has received word that Nexperia’s shipments from China have resumed, Executive Vice President Noriya Kaihara told reporters Friday. He said the Japanese automaker expects to resume production during the week of Nov. 21 at its plant in Celaya, Mexico, which can make up to 200,000 vehicles a year.
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In a step toward the wider use of gene editing, a treatment that uses Crispr successfully slashed high cholesterol levels in a small number of people.
In a trial conducted by Swiss biotech company Crispr Therapeutics, 15 participants received a one-time infusion meant to switch off a gene in the liver called ANGPTL3. Though rare, some people are born with a mutation in this gene that protects against heart disease with no apparent adverse consequences.
The highest dose tested in the trial reduced both “bad” LDL cholesterol and triglycerides by an average of 50 percent within two weeks after treatment. The effects lasted at least 60 days, the length of the trial. The results were presented today at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting and published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The Nobel Prize–winning Crispr technology has mostly been used to address rare diseases, but these latest findings, while early, add to the evidence that the DNA-editing tool could be used to treat common conditions as well.
“This will probably be one of the biggest moments in the arc of Crispr’s development in medicine,” Samarth Kulkarni, CEO of Crispr Therapeutics, tells WIRED. The company is behind the only approved gene-editing treatment on the market, Casgevy, which treats sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia.
The American Heart Association estimates that about a quarter of adults in the US have elevated LDL levels. A similar number have high triglycerides. LDL cholesterol is the waxy substance in the blood that can clog and harden arteries over time. Triglycerides, meanwhile, are the most common type of fat found in the body. High levels of both raise the risk of heart attack and stroke.
The Phase I trial was conducted in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand between June 2024 and August 2025. Participants were between the ages of 31 and 68 and had uncontrolled levels of LDL cholesterol and triglycerides. The trial tested five different doses of the Crispr infusion, which took about two and a half hours on average to administer.
“These are very sick people,” says Steven Nissen, senior author and chief academic officer of the Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic, which independently confirmed the trial’s results. “The tragedy of this disease is not just that people die young, but some of them will have a heart attack, and their lives are never the same again. They don’t get back to work, they develop heart failure.”
One trial participant, a 51-year-old man, died six months after receiving the lowest dose of the treatment, which was not associated with a lowering of cholesterol and triglycerides. The death was related to his existing heart disease, not the experimental Crispr treatment. The man had a rare, inherited genetic form of high cholesterol and previously had several procedures to improve blood flow to his heart.
Microsoft Corp. is pursuing a more powerful form of AI called “superintelligence” it hopes will be capable of making advances in areas like medicine and materials science.
Mustafa Suleyman, chief of the Microsoft AI group, will lead what the company is calling the MAI Superintelligence Team that will target hypothetical milestones that are even more ambitious than artificial general intelligence. That’s the often ambiguous term that outfits like OpenAI use to describe systems capable of demonstrating human-level performance. Previously, Microsoft had agreed not to pursue AGI as part of its partnership with OpenAI.
“If AGI is often seen as the point at which an AI can match human performance at all tasks, then superintelligence is when it can go far beyond that performance,” Suleyman said in a blog post announcing the push, which he says will work toward personal AI companions and breakthroughs in health care and clean energy.
The team will aim to build what he calls Humanist Superintelligence, seeking to avoid potential risks associated with development of powerful automated tools and work for the benefit of people instead of technological milestones.
OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc. and other companies are also increasingly focusing on superintelligence as the new goalpost for AI development. The term “superintelligence,” like AGI, is imprecise: It’s unclear how capable, exactly, AI needs to be at certain tasks before it crosses the threshold from “general” to “super” intelligence.
The announcement comes in the wake of a renegotiated agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI that determined the software maker’s stake in the startup and altered portions of their relationship. That included removing a prior prohibition on Microsoft’s development of advanced AI tools, which had limited much of the Redmond, Washington-based company’s work to smaller, less broadly capable models than those that power ChatGPT.
Thursday’s announcement formalizes a project that Microsoft had been laying the groundwork for since last March, when the company hired Suleyman and licensed the intellectual property of his startup, Inflection AI.
With a combination of reorganized Microsoft teams and new hires, Suleyman set about building a new family of Microsoft AI models, which to date remain much smaller in scale than the most capable products from OpenAI or Alphabet Inc.”s Google.
Suleyman told employees in September that Microsoft would make “significant investments” to expand the capability of those models.
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Microsoft to pursue superintelligence after OpenAI deal (2025, November 8)
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Tech
Paramount+ Coupon Codes and Deals: Free Trial, Student Deals, and Military Discounts for November 2025
The most talked-about TV show in the country right now, South Park, is on Paramount+. Don’t you want to know what got Trump in such a tizzy?
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If you’re like me and have at least half a dozen streaming services, our Paramount+ coupon codes can help you save so you can watch the content you want without having to get rid of one of your other beloved content platforms. (I love pretending the world isn’t full of suffering around me and instead focus on Sylvester Stallone’s ever-changing Play-Doh face in Tulsa King.)
Try Paramount+ Free With a One-Week Trial
If you’re unsure if you’ll actually want to commit to Paramount+, or if there’s a sports event like the Super Bowl or March Madness games and you only need to access the content for a little while, Paramount+’s free trial is a great option. The trial lasts one week, is for new subscribers only, and can’t be paired with other offers.
There are tiered plans, including Essential, which allows for 3 devices, select Showtime series, NFL games, and can be streamed on up to 3 devices at once, but has ads; and Premium, which includes all that except there are no ads, downloadable content, CBS live, and all of Showtime content.
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If you’re a student now (or have your student ID lying around somewhere), you can get a Paramount+ plan at only $4 a month. All you have to do is verify your student status and you’ll get 50% off any plan of your choosing for the first year. Or if you’re a military member, Paramount+ gives 50% off any subscription for life.
Stream Live Sports and Events on Paramount+
For better or worse, I’m a Chiefs fan (cue the booing). I usually get a Paramount+ plan during the football season to keep up with my favorite beefy, TBI-ridden men. You can stream all of the NFL coverage you want all season long, plus, 24/7 live channels are now streaming on Paramount+, so you’ll never need to give your brain the time to process the horrors.
Watch Paramount+ Originals and Fan Favorites
TThere’s truly something for everyone in the family, with movies, kids’ shows, and Paramount+ originals included in every plan. If you’re feeling spooky, I’d recommend Dexter: Resurrection, or Yellowjackets, but if you’re looking for something more family-friendly, there’s super popular cartoons like Rango or Sonic the Hedgehog to choose from.
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Check out the wide breadth of TV and movie content to choose from on Paramount+ (and use the Paramount+ promo codes above to save on whatever plan you decide).
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