The U.S.-China technology conflict is spreading deeper into the systems that determine which products can be exported, certified, and sold.

China’s Ministry of Commerce on Wednesday announced new restrictions covering drone exports to the United States, product-certification work involving American organizations, imported office equipment, and business dealings with seven U.S. entities. Beijing presented the measures as a response to recent U.S. restrictions on Chinese companies and technology products.

For multinational businesses, the immediate concern is not another tariff increase. It is the growing risk that licensing, certification, and sourcing rules can change with little warning across two of the world’s largest markets.

What China’s new restrictions cover

China’s response was not a blanket retaliation but a series of targeted measures across trade, technology, and regulation, according to Reuters.

The country tightened export controls on drones and related technologies bound for the U.S., requiring stricter licensing reviews that could slow shipments. Beijing also suspended certification follow-up activities involving U.S. organizations and opened a national security review into imported U.S. software and office equipment.

Chinese residents and companies were also prohibited from conducting business with seven U.S. entities. China said the organizations had supported recent U.S. measures against Chinese companies.

Why Beijing says it imposed the measures

According to the Los Angeles Times, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce said Washington had “seriously violated” the consensus reached during recent China-U.S. economic and trade consultations by continuing to impose new restrictions despite recent bilateral agreements.

Chinese officials cited expanded Federal Communications Commission restrictions on Chinese technology products and the addition of several Chinese entities to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) Entity List.

Beijing has repeatedly rejected the U.S.’s national security and forced-labor allegations, arguing they are aimed at containing China’s technological development.

China described the measures as intended to safeguard its economic and security interests.

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China may consider further restrictions

In a July 7 report, Reuters said China was considering restrictions on overseas access to its most advanced AI models, although the discussions had not resulted in a formal policy. Such a move would mark another step in Beijing’s effort to treat domestic technology as a source of strategic leverage.

The discussions come after Washington blocked foreign access to Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models and reportedly weighed additional limits on advanced U.S. AI systems. The Commerce Department lifted the restrictions weeks later.

If adopted, China’s proposal could cut off global access to Chinese AI models that have gained overseas adoption partly because of their cost and performance.

Who gets to feel this most?

The immediate impact will be felt by companies caught up in the new restrictions, but the longer-term consequences extend much further.

Each new round of export controls, sanctions, or certification limits adds another layer of uncertainty to global technology supply chains, making it harder for businesses to predict where products can be built, sold, or sourced.

That uncertainty is changing the role of regulation itself. Rather than serving only as a framework for market oversight, it is increasingly being used as a strategic tool in geopolitical competition.

For multinational companies, compliance is no longer just a legal requirement — it is becoming a business risk that can reshape operations overnight.

The broader result is a more fragmented technology industry.

As Washington and Beijing continue to tighten control over strategic technologies, enterprises may find themselves planning around performance, pricing, and innovation, and on which country’s technology ecosystem they can realistically depend. That eventually trickles down to every individual reliant on one technology product or the other.

Other News: Apple is challenging a new UK government order that would require access to encrypted iCloud data for British users, arguing that creating a backdoor would weaken user privacy and security.

Disney and TikTok are bringing selected fan-made videos into Disney+, giving Disney a new way to move fans from a social clip to a full movie or show without leaving the app.

Under the global deal announced August 5, the companies will start with a US pilot in the coming months. Videos from creators who opt in will appear on both TikTok and Disney+.

The videos will run in Verts, a vertical feed Disney+ launched in March. On mobile, viewers can swipe through scenes from Disney movies and shows, add a title to their watchlist, or start playing it. The TikTok partnership adds creator-made fan videos to that experience.

Disney is bringing social discovery into its own app

According to Disney’s announcement, TikTok will give participating creators access to approved assets connected to hundreds of Disney films and series, including titles from Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and FX. The companies say the fan videos will be refreshed regularly around current conversations and trends.

Disney and TikTok will also run a Creator Ambassador Program offering selected creators rewards, added visibility, access to events, and career development opportunities. The announcement does not explain how those rewards will work or whether creators will receive direct payment.

Unlike a typical social campaign, these videos will sit inside the subscription app, close to the movies and shows that inspired them. Disney can use creator enthusiasm to help subscribers find something to watch without sending them to another platform.

The deal also fits Disney’s push to make Disney+ the center of its streaming business. The company has been moving toward a more unified app as it integrates Hulu content, profiles, recommendations, and other services into Disney+.

The real test is whether clips lead to viewing

TikTok says users shared an average of 6.5 million film- and television-related posts each day last year. In a TikTok-commissioned Ipsos survey, nearly half of respondents said they watched a movie or show after discovering related entertainment content on TikTok.

Disney is betting that some of that behavior will carry over when the clips appear inside Disney+. The key action is not the swipe itself, but what comes next: opening a full title, saving it, or returning to the app.

Streaming companies are trying several ways to make their apps feel less like static libraries. Netflix has reportedly explored always-on channels and bundles, while Disney is using a mobile feed built around familiar characters and fan reactions.

The creator side is less defined. Meta’s Creator Fast Track program offers guaranteed payments to lure established TikTok and YouTube creators to Facebook. Disney and TikTok are offering access, visibility, and rewards, but have not disclosed payment or revenue-sharing terms.

Disney says the videos will be thoughtfully curated, but it has not detailed how they will be approved or removed. That gives Disney a new job inside the app: deciding which fan videos belong beside its own movies and shows.

The bet behind the deal is simple: use the language of TikTok to move fans from a quick clip to a full movie or episode without leaving Disney+.

Also read: Fox’s $22 billion Roku deal would combine content, distribution, and advertising across nearly 100 million streaming households.

Uptime Institute’s eighth annual outage analysis found good news and bad news for data center operators worldwide. The good news is that outage frequency is down. The bad news is that the price tag for those outages continues to rise.

The Annual Outage Analysis 2026 report found that outage prevention remains a focus for data center operators. Driven by escalating demand growth and the need to support AI-driven workloads, modern data centers can ill afford any kind of power outage. A rack of GPUs served by liquid cooling costs a lot of money. Even a brief cooling interruption can force GPU systems to throttle or shut down, disrupting expensive AI workloads. Hence, the survey’s finding that outage frequency on a per-site basis has been declining for five straight years is welcome news.

“Outages overall have slowed down, and overall, digital infrastructure is remarkably resilient. But further resiliency gains are becoming harder to achieve,” said Andy Lawrence, founding member and executive director of Uptime Intelligence, in a press release. “We believe that over time, failures will increasingly not be the result of a single point of failure, but instead be linked to complex interactions between systems, including software, networks, and external dependencies.”

Lawrence added that the pace of improvement in outage frequency has slowed. Separately, the report found that external infrastructure failures have become more prominent, particularly in publicly reported outages. This may be indicative of a long-term trend related to the rise in fiber- and connectivity-related outage issues, which can cause extended disruptions. The report added that growth in AI workloads is likely to place greater demands on network performance.

Outage Costs Rising

Outage costs are also edging upward, according to Uptime Institute. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000. One in five said costs exceeded $1 million.

Uptime attributed the increases partly to inflation, rising labor and hardware costs, service-level agreement penalties, and longer recovery times. The report said the primary factor is the increasing number of services and businesses that may depend, directly or indirectly, on a single data center or availability zone.

While fiber and connectivity concerns are growing, outage frequency continues to be dominated by power failures. These have a variety of causes, with outages related to uninterruptible power supply systems, transfer switches, and generators among the most frequent and damaging. Grid bottlenecks and high-density workloads are also introducing new pressure points.

“While site-based electrical and mechanical infrastructure remain a critical building block that needs to be resilient, digital infrastructure is becoming more distributed with outages originating outside the data center, including those tied to power availability, network connectivity or the reliance on external cloud services playing a larger role,” said Lawrence.

More about data centers

Data Center Response

There is so much investment in data center operations that tolerance of the occasional outage is dwindling. Hence, operators are instituting a range of safeguards to keep their systems online.

Lawrence noted that data centers are investing in areas such as automation and control systems to manage complexity. Another approach is to conduct resiliency assessments. These have traditionally focused on internal systems, but Uptime said operators will increasingly need to assess external and systemic risks as well.

Further, data centers are being required to take more responsibility for their impact on the grid. While traditional UPS systems protected data centers from grid outages and power-quality issues, grid operators are now examining the effects that large-scale AI data centers can have on the power network. These include:

If a large AI data center trips offline or transfers to backup power because of a minor grid fault, hundreds of megawatts can suddenly disappear from grid demand. NERC has documented large-load reduction events of approximately 1,500 MW, including events involving data centers and other power-electronic loads. Such abrupt changes can affect grid frequency and voltage. In response, some data center operators are deploying battery energy storage systems to improve facility resilience and help manage interactions with the local power network.

Data centers traditionally represented a relatively stable power draw from the grid. AI training facilities, however, can produce rapid fluctuations and oscillations in electrical demand. In response, operators are adding advanced controls and power-electronics systems to protect local electrical networks from sudden changes in demand.

“The scale of modern data centers could lead to load swings of 1 GW multiple times per minute, which creates frequency variations and oscillations that the grid can’t handle,” ON.energy CTO Ricardo de Azevedo said in an interview.

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