Just in time for Labour Day, China makes it illegal to fire humans if AI takes their jobs
PLUS: Samsung cashes in on RAM prices; Booze from space fetches huge price; China's hyperscalers surge
A Chinese court has ruled that it’s illegal to replace human workers with AI.
China’s State Council, the nation’s highest executive and administrative authority, saw fit to publish a state media report about the case, which saw the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court consider the case of a worker who was hired for duties including “matching user queries with large language models and filtering illegal or privacy-violating content, among others, to ensure accurate output by AI models.”
The worker’s employer started using AI for some of that work and offered the employee a demotion and reduced salary.
The worker, identified only by their surname Zhou, challenged that decision and won.
According to the report shared by the State Council, the case established the legal principle that using AI to perform a worker’s job does not automatically justify terminating a contract.
The State Council shared news of the judgment on April 30 - the day before the annual Labour Day holiday on May 1 that celebrates workers' rights
Samsung profit soars on memory shortages
Samsung Electronics last week announced Q1 2025 revenue of ₩133.9 trillion ($90.9 billion), its highest-ever quarterly haul. Profit landed at ₩57.2 trillion ($39.9 billion).
Samsung said its memory business posted all-time record quarterly revenue and profit, due to “technological leadership” and “by addressing high-value-added AI demand despite limited supply availability.” The company admitted increasing memory prices helped, too.
The launch of this year’s Galaxy S premium smartphones helped, too, by pushing devices revenue 19 percent higher quarter-over-quarter.
The company also announced it’s getting into the business laptop market with the new Galaxy Book6 Enterprise Edition.
Samsung thinks the notebooks stand out due to support for custom OS imaging, tailored BIOS settings, and asset tagging.
Laptops are a crowded market. The Register can’t imagine Samsung will call them out as a growth engine in future quarterly results.
Superapp GoTo discovers black ink
Indonesian superapp GoTo – the local equivalent of Uber and Amazon, but in a single entity – last week posted its first ever profit.
Formed in 2021 after the merger of predecessors Gojek and Tokopedia, the company has since produced years of losses.
Last week’s IDR 5.4 billion ($311,000) profit, on revenue of IDR 171 billion ($9.8 billion), was therefore quite the moment.
“Achieving net profit for the first time in our history is a big moment for GoTo that demonstrates our business model is working,” said CEO Hans Patuwo. “It reflects years of work from our teams to drive topline growth and cost discipline, while creating real value for our customers – consumers, driver-partners and merchants.”
The CEO said the company is now “well-positioned to navigate the current global environment, and confident in what GoTo can deliver for the millions of Indonesians we serve.”
That last line is important: Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous nation, its economy is growing quickly, and GoTo already has over 100 million monthly customers – which the company mostly serves from Chinese cloud giants Alibaba and Tencent.
The Indonesian company is therefore an important contributor to China’s clouds as they seek to expand beyond the Middle Kingdom.
Speaking of Chinese hyperscalers … they’re growing
Analyst firm Omdia last week found mainland China’s cloud infrastructure services market achieved 26 percent year-on-year growth in the final quarter of 2025.
“As enterprise AI adoption deepened, market growth was increasingly supported not only by model usage, but also by the broader rollout of enterprise AI, the expansion of private AI deployments, and rising demand for traditional cloud resources such as compute, storage, and databases,” the firm found.
Alibaba Cloud scored 37 percent of the $14.7 billion spend, well ahead of Huawei Cloud’s 17 percent share and Tencent Cloud’s ten percent slice of the cake.
Sake from space sells for $690k
A bottle of sake made with mash fermented on the International Space Station last week sold for $690,000
Japanese company Dassai sent sake mash – rice, yeast, water and the fermentation agent koji – to the ISS in 2025 and got it cooking before retrieving it in early 2026.
Earthly distillers then got to work and produced a single 100ml bottle of space sake, which according to Japanese outlet Nikkei last week sold for ¥110 million ($690,000). Dassai gave the money to space researchers.
The company sent the mash to the ISS to test whether it will be possible to brew sake at a future Moon base, because the company thinks residents of a future lunar habitat may enjoy the chance to tuck into some booze. ®