IBM plans to invest $150 billion over the next five years to fuel the U.S. economy. Included in the spending plan is more than $30 billion devoted to research and development for mainframe and quantum computers to be manufactured in the U.S. The announcement comes as President Trump is pressing global companies to invest more here, including with trade tariffs that threaten to make products manufactured overseas more expensive to sell at home. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says the company has “been focused on American jobs and manufacturing since our founding 114 years ago.” Continue reading IBM Unveils 5-Year Plan for $150B in Manufacturing and R&D

China’s Huawei Technologies is getting ready to test its newest AI processor, which the company believes is powerful enough to replace high-end chips from U.S. rival Nvidia, whose top-tier products are prohibited from export to China due to a trade embargo. Huawei’s AI ambitions suggest a superpower competition over semiconductors gearing up despite the U.S. government’s attempt to stymie Beijing. Huawei expects to receive its first samples of its latest AI processor, the Ascend 910D, as early as next month, and is reportedly casting about for tech firms capable of testing it out. Continue reading Huawei’s Processor Could Chip Away at Nvidia Market Share

TSMC introduced its new logic process technology, A14, at the company’s North America Technology Symposium in California. Designed to drive AI forward with faster computing and greater power efficiency, the 1.4nm A14 process is expected to be a boon to smartphones, expanding their on-board capabilities. The company says A14 is an improvement over TSMC’s N2 2nm node, set to go into volume production later this year. TSMC plans to begin producing chips using the A14 process in 2028 for AI clients including Nvidia, the company told reporters and analysts on the eve of its conference. Continue reading TSMC Says New A14 Tech Will Make ‘Smartphones Smarter’

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

Japanese tech investment firm Softbank has agreed to acquire Silicon Valley chip startup Ampere for $6.5 billion, indicating that technology originating in smartphones will eventually become integral to global data centers and the future of artificial intelligence. The eight-year-old Ampere sells chips based on Arm technology, the processor type used in virtually all mobile phones. SoftBank purchased Arm in 2016 and has since been working to ensure the technology becomes used more broadly. Softbank says it will allow Ampere to retain its own name, operating it as a wholly-owned subsidiary. Continue reading Softbank Agrees to Acquire Chipmaker Ampere for $6.5 Billion

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

CES’s Eureka Park is a section of exhibits where startups and early-stage products from all over the world solicit feedback and explore opportunities. From this year’s Italian delegates at Eureka Park, our team found EYE2DRIVE, a semiconductor company that develops CMOS chips for digital imaging inspired by the human eye. Their image sensors use AI to mimic the human eye’s ability to adapt its response to changing environmental light conditions. As a result, quality and color of the captured image remains unaffected. While currently focusing on autonomous navigation applications, the tech has potential for media production as well. Continue reading CES: Image Sensors Adapt to Light Changes Like Human Eye

Amazon Web Services is building a supercomputer in collaboration with Anthropic, the AI startup in which the e-commerce giant has an $8 billion minority stake. Hundreds of thousands of AWS’s flagship Trainium chips will be amassed in an “Ultracluster” that when it is completed in 2025 will be one of the largest supercomputers in the world for model training, Amazon says. The company announced the general availability of AWS Trainium2-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual servers as well as Trn2 UltraServers designed to train and deploy AI models and teased next-generation Trainium3 chips. Continue reading AWS Building Trainium-Powered Supercomputer with Anthropic

Amazon reported major revenue and profit increases during its third quarter, beating Wall Street’s forecasts, based largely on the company’s e-commerce sales and increasing demand for its cloud services. Capital expenditure, which reached a record amount following Amazon’s recent investments in artificial intelligence, will maintain its momentum as the company plans $75 billion capex on developing generative AI services over 2024-2025. “The faster we grow demand, the faster we have to invest capital in data centers, network gear and hardware,” explained CEO Andy Jassy. “We invest in all that upfront in advance of when we can monetize it.” Continue reading Amazon Pushes AI, Records Growth in Q3 Revenue and Profit

Huawei Technologies Co. continued to grow revenue for the sixth consecutive quarter, tallying $33.6 billion for the period ending in June, a 33.7 percent increase year-over-year. The privately held company releases limited financial information. The net profit margin at the half-year mark was said to be 13.2 percent, equivalent to $7.7 billion. Bloomberg extrapolated that to profit of about $5 billion for the quarter, which represents an 18.6 percent decline over the same period last year when asset sales boosted results. The overall trend saw Huawei and other Chinese smartphone manufacturers continuing to gain ground against Apple. Continue reading Huawei Flourishes Despite Sanctions as U.S. Trial Approaches

California-based semiconductor manufacturer AMD is looking to take on Nvidia for a bigger share of business from the artificial intelligence boom. AMD plans to purchase data center equipment maker ZT Systems in a cash and stock deal that values the company at $4.9 billion. The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, is part of AMD’s goal of offering a wider selection of chips, software and system designs to big data enterprise clients such as Microsoft, Google, Meta Platforms and Apple. Privately held ZT Systems, based in New Jersey, makes gear and server solutions for cloud computing and related infrastructure. Continue reading AMD Buying ZT Systems to Expand Data Center Capabilities

Samsung Electronics saw net profit rise sixfold in Q2, surging 46 percent — to $7.11 billion — compared to Q1. The buoyant results for the South Korean electronics manufacturer were driven by its semiconductor business and the demand for advanced chips needed to fuel the global boom in artificial intelligence. Although the company is the world’s top smartphone manufacturer, more than half of the quarter’s operating profit came from chip-making for the latest reporting period. Revenue for the April through June quarter resulted in a 23.42 percent increase year-over-year, while profit soared 1,458 percent. Continue reading Demand for Advanced Semiconductors Drives Samsung Profits

Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japan’s SoftBank, wants to transform the tech conglomerate’s Arm subsidiary into an AI powerhouse, and he is investing $64 billion (10 trillion yen) to implement the plan, which includes turning the UK-based unit into an AI chip supplier. Son announced that by spring 2025 Arm is expected to have its first prototype, followed by mass production by contract suppliers and commercial sales in the fall. Arm designs but does not manufacture circuitry, supplying what it calls “chip architecture” to customers including Nvidia and Qualcomm. Continue reading SoftBank’s Arm Plans to Supply AI Chips, Open Data Centers