BYD’s Yangwang U9 “Xtreme” supercar recorded a blistering top speed of 496.22km/h (308 miles per hour) at a test track in Germany earlier this month, the Chinese EV maker said.

That’s a record for a production car, handily beating the 490.5 km/h (304.7 mph) set by Bugatti’s Chiron Super Sport in 2019 and marking the first time the title of world’s fastest car has been held by an EV.

The Xtreme is a high-performance version of Yangwang U9, BYD’s pothole-jumping hypercar, which costs around $233,000 in China.

BYD said just 30 units of the ultra-fast variant, which features an upgraded powertrain and battery system, will be made.

It means that as well as boasting the world’s cheapest EVs, China is now home to the fastest.

Research students at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa have developed the country’s first large-scale large language model (LLM) that exclusively include Sinhala, a breakthrough in advancing local language computing.

This project was jointly supervised by Dr Surangika Ranathunga (Massey University, New Zealand), Dr Nisansa de Silva (University of Moratuwa) and Dr Rishemjit Kaur (Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, India).

The model, named “SinLlama,” was built by continually pre-training Llama-3-8B with nearly 10 million Sinhala sentences. According to the research team, SinLlama is the largest Sinhala LLM to date and has already outperformed Llama-3-8B on Sinhala text classification benchmarks.

The government has completed all necessary procedures to launch Starlink services in Sri Lanka, says Deputy Minister of Digital Economy Eranga Weerarathna.

According to State Minister Weerarathna, once the expected information dashboard is received from Starlink, the service could be launched without any operational delays.

He made this statement while attending a bilateral meeting organized by the Sri Lankan High Commission in Singapore, held alongside the 2025 Tech Summit Asia in Singapore.

The matter was discussed during a meeting between State Minister of Digital Economy Eranga Weeraratne and Ambassador Stephan Lang, the United States’ Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy at the U.S. Department of State.

Several other strategic areas of collaboration were discussed: Continued support for Sri Lanka’s digital transformation with leading global tech companies such as Google and Meta; Establishment of data centers in the country; Integration of artificial intelligence (AI) across various sectors, including the development of AI-based data centers; The advancement of the Cybersecurity Bill and the strengthening of the Agency for Cyber Security; Amendments to the existing Online Safety Bill; Revisions to the Data Protection Act.

Ambassador Lang also emphasized the importance and urgency of these initiatives, describing them as both challenging and essential for Sri Lanka’s digital future.

He reiterated the United States’ continued commitment to supporting Sri Lanka in implementing these transformative digital policies and programs.