Semiconductor giant Intel has reached a tentative agreement with Taiwan’s TSMC and some U.S. firms to create a joint venture that would assume operating responsibility for Intel’s chip fabrication plants here. TSMC will reportedly hold a 20 percent stake in the JV, while Intel and the other investors would control the remaining 80 percent. This specific JV is limited to Intel’s foundry unit, which posted a 2024 operating loss of $13.4 billion in 2024 and is not expected to break even until 2027. New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said at last week’s Intel Vision conference that he will spin off all non-core units. Continue reading TSMC Reportedly Ready for Joint Venture with Intel Foundries

China’s Ant Group is using local semiconductors to train AI at a cost that is 20 percent less than companies typically spend, according to reports. Ant used domestic chips — from companies including Alibaba, an investor in Ant, and Huawei — to launch a unique Mixture of Experts (MoE) training approach that produced results commensurate to training with Nvidia H800 chips. Ant is the latest Chinese company to focus on low cost training, joining a competition triggered by DeepSeek, which in January announced it could build AI comparable to the models released by U.S. companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google for billions less. Continue reading Ant Group Stacks Chips to Reduce Development Costs for AI

Meta Platforms has reportedly begun “a small deployment” of its first in-house chip designed for AI training. The accelerator chip is engineered around the open-standard RISC-V architecture. TSMC produced the working samples now being tested. The goal is to create purpose-specific chips that are more efficient than Nvidia’s general purpose GPUs, enjoying the cost-savings that would come with wide use and reducing reliance on outside chip suppliers in a tight market. If the tests go well, Meta plans to scale up production for expanded use by 2026. Details of the new chip’s specifications remain unknown at this time. Continue reading Meta Tests New AI Accelerator Chip Designed with Broadcom

Taiwan semiconductor firm TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker, has vowed to add another $100 billion to its existing $65 billion plan to expand its U.S. manufacturing base. The total allocation — $165 billion over the next four years — sees TSMC further building out its advanced semiconductor fabrication complex in Phoenix, Arizona, which has been producing at volume since late 2024. The expansion plays a key role in strengthening the U.S. computer ecosystem by increasing U.S. production of advanced semiconductors, TSMC says, adding that it will “complete the domestic AI supply chain” with advanced packaging investments. Continue reading TSMC Will Boost Its Factory Build-Out in U.S. by $100 Billion

Microsoft has created a quantum computing chip, Majorana 1, that relies on what it says is a “new state of matter” — one that exists beyond the primary liquid, solid, gas states that have underpinned science since Ancient Greece. Research into this fourth physical existence, called a “topological state,” earned three theoretical physicists the Nobel Prize in Physics in October. Unlike solids, liquids or gases, a topological state is not defined locally by how its particles are arranged, but by how their quantum wavefunction behaves — wrapping around itself globally, across the entire material. Continue reading Microsoft Calls New Topoconductor a Quantum Breakthrough

OpenAI is getting close to finalizing its first custom chip design, according to an exclusive report from Reuters that emphasizes the Microsoft-backed AI giant’s goal of reducing its dependency on Nvidia chips. The blueprint for the first-generation OpenAI chip could be finalized as soon as the next few months and sent to Taiwan’s TSMC for fabrication, which will take about six months — “unless OpenAI pays substantially more for expedited manufacturing” — according to the report. Even by usual standards, the training-focused chip is already on a fast track to deployment. Continue reading OpenAI In-House Chip Could Be Ready for Testing This Year

Ayar Labs, which develops optical interconnect chips for large-scale AI workloads, has secured $155 million in financing, including from competing processor companies Nvidia, Intel and AMD. Founded in 2017, the Silicon Valley-based company is pursuing a different processing path — combining photonic elements with electronic circuits on each chip for what it says provides faster, more efficient processing for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. “This brings the company’s total funding to $370 million and raises the company’s valuation to above $1 billion,” Ayar notes, adding that the new funding allows the company to scale its optical I/O tech. Continue reading Nvidia, Intel and AMD Invest in AI Chiplet Developer Ayar Labs

Manufacturers that make Arm chips license tech from British developer Arm Holdings, with the option of licensing Arm’s instruction set to build proprietary CPU designs or licensing one of Arm’s Cortex CPU designs. Amid a legal dispute that started two years ago over Qualcomm’s $1.4 billion acquisition of silicon design firm Nuvia, Arm has given its longtime partner Qualcomm a 60-day notice of its license cancellation. If the two companies do not come to an agreement in that time, Qualcomm will have to cease manufacturing Arm chips, which could have a significant impact on the global supply chain, Qualcomm’s revenue, and smartphone makers that use Qualcomm chips. Continue reading Arm Cancels Qualcomm Architecture License in Legal Dispute

Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which the company says has “the world’s fastest mobile CPU,” a custom version of the second generation Qualcomm Oryon. The platform is purpose-built to power on-device generative AI, “built to handle the complexities of multi-modal AI seamlessly while prioritizing privacy,” per Qualcomm. Smartphone brands and OEMs including Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Opposite, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo and Xiaomi are onboard to launch devices powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, starting before the end of the year, according to Qualcomm’s announcement. Continue reading Qualcomm Says Snapdragon 8 Elite Has ‘Fastest Mobile CPU’

Competing chipmakers Intel and AMD are joining forces on an advisory group for x86 computing. Invented by Intel and launched in 1978, the x86 architecture remains one of the most widely used platforms in the world, but has already been displaced by ARM in mobile, and is now fending off a challenge from that architecture in the AI space. Also participating in the x86 advisory are Broadcom, Dell, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Red Hat, joined by tech luminaries Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, and Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. Continue reading Rivals Intel and AMD Team Up to Launch x86 Advisory Group

IBM is the first cloud customer for Intel’s Gaudi 3 AI accelerator chip, which it will make available in early 2025. The Gaudi 3 will be available for hybrid and on-site environments via the IBM Cloud, as part of Watsonx AI and on IBM data platforms. Gaudi 3, which began shipping in Q2 and is expected to go into mass production later this year, is IBM’s AI challenger to GPU accelerators from Nvidia and AMD, the latter having in January begun shipping its own HPC solution, the MI300X. Unlike that chip and Nvidia’s Hopper H100 and more recent Blackwell B200, the Gaudi 3 is not a GPU, but built on an architecture specifically for inference and deep learning. Continue reading IBM Cloud Is First to Widely Implement Intel Gaudi 3 AI Chips

Rene Haas, CEO of UK chip designer Arm Holdings, thinks his company’s platform architecture could nab as much as 50 percent of the Windows PC market by 2030. That would essentially be a 400 percent leap from its current 11 percent share in a market dominated by Intel’s x86 design. Because Arm was developed for smartphones, it was driven by energy efficiency, an approach that is paying off in the era of power-hungry AI applications. Now the technology is being used for the first wave of Microsoft Copilot+ Windows laptops, and Arm has also set its sights on desktop PCs. Continue reading Arm CEO Says Company Aims to Capture Half of PC Market

Intel launched new Xeon 6 processors built for high-density AI work in data centers. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger emphasized performance and power efficiency as he introduced the next-gen Xeon, and said that the Gaudi 3 chips for AI model training and deployment that were released two months ago are less expensive than comparable silicon from Intel rivals. “Intel is one of the only companies in the world innovating across the full spectrum of the AI market opportunity — from semiconductor manufacturing to PC, network, edge and data center systems,” Gelsinger said, embracing open standards during his keynote at Computex. Continue reading Intel’s Xeon 6 Coming to Data Centers and Lunar Lake to PCs

Qualcomm is expanding beyond mobile and into the desktop market in a big way, bringing its AI-enabled Snapdragon X series chips to “all PC form factors,” CEO Cristiano Amon said onstage at Computex this week. Under the theme of “the PC reborn,” Amon said the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus processors powering Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC experiences are also upping their mobile game. In addition to improving AI experiences with “the world’s fastest and most efficient NPU for laptops,” the chips can deliver “up to multiple days of battery life,” unfettered those on the go from power outlets. Continue reading Qualcomm All-In on Copilot+ PCs Boosting Speed, Battery Life

At Computex Taipei this week, AMD revealed its AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series third generation of AI-enabled mobile processors for next-generation laptops. It joins Intel’s upcoming Lunar Lake and the Snapdragon X platform from Qualcomm among the chips vying for a place in the exploding market for artificial intelligence processing, an area dominated by Nvidia. However, with AI PCs and laptops just hitting the market that field is somewhat in play. The Ryzen AI 300s are among those that will be used to power laptops equipped with Microsoft Copilot+ AI. At Computex, AMD also unveiled its Ryzen 9000 Series processors for desktop PCs. Continue reading AMD Unveils Its Next-Gen AI Chips in Battle for Market Share