North Korean leader's sister says her country will never see South as diplomatic partner
Seoul (AP): The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said her country will never see South Korea as a partner for diplomacy, state media reported on Wednesday in what was her latest taunt of Seoul's new efforts to mend ties.
Kim Yo Jong, who is one of her brother's top foreign policy officials, denounced the ongoing South Korea-US military drills as a “reckless” invasion rehearsal and claimed Seoul's peace gestures conceal a “sinister intention” against Pyongyang.
Her comments came during a meeting on Tuesday with senior Foreign Ministry officials about her brother's diplomatic strategies in the face of persistent threats from rivals and a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape, the North's official Korean Central News Agency said.
On Monday, Kim Jong Un condemned the South Korean-US military drills and vowed a rapid expansion of his nuclear forces as he inspected his most advanced warship being fitted with nuclear-capable systems.
The North's news agency said Kim Yo Jong condemned the South as the “top-class faithful dog” of the United States and that the reparation of inter-Korean relations desired by Seoul “will never” happen.
The siblings' back-to-back statements followed the latest outreach by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, who said last week that Seoul would seek to restore a 2018 inter-Korean military agreement aimed at reducing border tensions, while urging Pyongyang to reciprocate by rebuilding trust and resuming dialogue.
Since taking office in June, Lee has moved to repair relations that worsened under his conservative predecessor's hard-line policies, including removing front-line speakers that broadcast anti-North Korean propaganda and K-pop.
In a nationally televised speech Friday, Lee said his government respects North Korea's current system and that the wealthier South “will not pursue any form of unification by absorption and has no intention of engaging in hostile acts”.
But he also stressed that the South remains committed to an international push to denuclearise the North and urged Pyongyang to resume dialogue with Washington and Seoul.
Angered by expanding South Korean-US military drills, Kim Jong Un last year declared that North Korea was abandoning long-standing goals of a peaceful unification with South Korea and rewrote the North's constitution to mark the South as a permanent enemy.
Kim Yo Jong has repeatedly dismissed calls to revive negotiations aimed at winding down the North's nuclear and missile programmes, which derailed in 2019 following her brother's collapsed summit with US President Donald Trump during his first term.
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Kim Jong Un has made Moscow the priority of his foreign policy, sending troops and weapons to support President Vladimir Putin's war, while also using the conflict as a distraction to accelerate his military nuclear programme.
In her meeting on Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong suggested that Pyongyang seeks to compete with Seoul diplomatically, claiming the South “will not even have a subordinate role in the regional diplomatic arena,” which she claimed will be centred on the North.
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Ambani, Adani pledge USD 210 bn for India's AI push
New Delhi (PTI): Conglomerates run by billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani committed USD 210 billion investment to creating infrastructure that will help India emerge as an AI development hub.
At the India AI Impact Summit, Ambani announced a Rs 10 lakh crore (about USD 110 billion) investment in artificial intelligence over the next seven years in gigawatt-scale AI-ready data centres in Jamnagar, leveraging up to 10 GW of green power surplus, and a nationwide edge-compute layer integrated with telecom and digital operator Jio's networks to deliver low-latency AI across India.
"Our resolve is clear: make intelligence as ubiquitous as connectivity," he said. "When compute becomes infrastructure, innovation will become inevitable."
Adani, on the other hand, unveiled a USD 100-billion investment to develop renewable-energy-powered, hyperscale AI-ready data centres by 2035 -- one of the world's largest integrated energy-compute commitments.
The initiative is expected to catalyse an additional USD 150 billion across server manufacturing, cloud platforms, and supporting industries, creating a projected USD 250 billion AI infrastructure ecosystem in India.
India must architect its own artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure rather than rely on imports, Adani Group executive director Jeet Adani said on Thursday, warning that AI will redefine national sovereignty.
Other major investments announced at the Summit included USD 50 billion commitment by Microsoft by the end of the decade to expand artificial intelligence access across the Global South. "India, not surprisingly, is one of the largest," its vice chair and president, Brad Smith, said.
The firm had unveiled USD 17.5 billion investment in AI investments in India last year.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new subsea cable initiative to boost AI connectivity between India, the US and other locations, alongside partnerships for cloud infrastructure platform support to over 20 million public servants across 800 districts.
Yotta Data Services, backed by a real estate group headed by Niranjan Hiranandani, announced over USD 2 billion spend on Nvidia's latest chips in an artificial intelligence computing hub it is setting up just outside the national capital.
While Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) signed up ChatGPT parent OpenAI as its first customer for its data centre unit under the global AI infrastructure initiative Stargate, infrastructure major Larsen & Toubro announced a proposed venture with Nvidia to build AI-ready data centre infrastructure, advanced computing platforms, and ecosystem enablement required to support large-scale AI workloads.
