Chip Industry Week In Review


Computex in Taiwan: Arm and Nvidia introduced an AI PC platform, RTX Spark, with an Arm-based Grace CPU, Blackwell RTX GPU, and unified memory. Cadence announced a fully autonomous virtual agentic AI design engineer, enabling customers to run dynamic simulations in automated workflows. Intel launched Xeon 6+, its first data-center CPU built on Intel Foundry's 18A process. The company... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Advanced nodes and packaging AMD announced more than $10B in Taiwan ecosystem investments to scale advanced packaging manufacturing for AI infrastructure. The effort includes EFB-based 2.5D packaging collaborations with ASE and others. AMD also announced the start of its production ramp of its Venice processors on TSMC's 2nm process. Lam Research established a panel-level packaging cen... » read more

Foundry Capacity Is Limiting Who Competes At Leading Edge Nodes


Key Takeaways: Leading-edge node access is increasingly reserved for hyperscalers, squeezing smaller chip developers. Chiplets and advanced packaging offer a path forward, but raise cost, complexity, and risk — especially for smaller teams. Chip architecture is now driven as much by capacity, yield, and economics as by technical goals. The benefits of device scaling are sl... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Acquisitions and business pivots Teradyne acquired Israel-based TestInsight, a semiconductor test provider with pattern conversion, validation, and virtual test capabilities. Credo plans to acquire DustPhotonics, a developer of silicon photonics PICs for optical transceivers. Molex plans to acquire Teramount, a provider of detachable, passive-alignment fiber-to-chip connectivity solu... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals, Funding Intel will join Elon Musk’s Terafab chip manufacturing project alongside Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Intel described its role as helping refactor silicon fab technology for a project targeting production of 1 TW/year of compute for AI and robotics applications. Intel and Google are expanding a multi-year collaboration on AI and cloud infrastructure, with Intel Xeon processo... » read more

All AI Data Center Interconnects Will Be Optical Within 5 Years


I spent several days at OFC (Optical Fiber Communications Conference) 2026 in LA. The crowds were huge and the enthusiasm intense. Long-time attendees noted the shift from telecom to data center AI in just a few years. Nvidia GTC 2026 took place simultaneously in San Jose. OFC and GTC are entangled because data center AI needs optical interconnect to keep compute fed. Optical interconnect... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


War impacts The Iran War's toll on the chip industry is widening. Over 95% of Taiwan's energy is imported, causing the country to secure alternative sources. Korea is also heavily dependent on energy imports from the Middle East. Shortages of key materials are cropping up everywhere. Helium from Qatar, the second largest producer behind the U.S., is constrained by hostilities in the Per... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Disruptions caused by the Iran conflict have taken about one third of the global helium supply off the market, an essential gas for semiconductor manufacturing, reports the World Economic Forum. Other potential impacts for the chip industry include bromine and other chemical shortages, logistical disruptions, and higher energy prices incurred by fabs in Asia. Top Deals IBM and Lam R... » read more

Scale Up, Scale Out Get a New Partner


Key Takeaways: Three AI data center scaling strategies are scale-up, scale-out, and scale-across. Scale-up is within a rack; scale-out is between racks; scale-across is between data centers. Each of the three uses a different interconnect strategy to optimize either latency or jitter. As today’s data center workloads — especially for AI and HPC — outgrow the physical, ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Big Deals and Fundings Rapidus secured US$1.7B in a new funding round from the Japanese government and the private sector to ramp 2nm production by next year. Open AI announced a $110B in new funding, with $30B from Nvidia, $30B from Softbank and $50B from Amazon. In a $100B multi-year deal, Meta will power its AI infrastructure with up to 6GW of AMD's GPUs. SambaNova and Intel ar... » read more

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