As Frank Yeary retires from Intel, the company picks an engineer to chair its board — Intel Foundry governance issues to be resolved, and looking back at the Yeary years

Intel’s board of directors is getting a new independent chair, effective May 13, following the company’s Annual Stockholders’ Meeting.
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China’s top chip execs claim ASML alternative ‘small, fragmented, and weak’ — Chinese industry titans call for national effort to invest in advanced chipmaking tools

China’s most senior semiconductor executives issued a public call this week for a consolidated national effort to build a domestic alternative to Dutch lithography giant ASML.
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China seeks to enhance rare earth advantages, take ‘extraordinary measures’ to achieve semiconductor breakthroughs — new five-year plan marks doubling down on technological self-reliance

China just released the latest draft of its five-year plan, which mentions it goal of building a more robust “response mechanism” to supply chain threats and focusing on enhancing its “competitive advantages in rare earths…

Spiralling memory spot prices could trigger ‘industry cycle collapse,’ report warns — NAND wafer costs surge 25% in a single month

DDR5 16G (2Gx8) chips averaged $39, up 7.4% month-over-month, while 1Tb TLC flash wafers jumped 25% to $25.

OpenAI building GitHub alternative after frequent platform outages and disruptions — a public OpenAI code repository would directly compete with one of its biggest investors

OpenAI is building its own code repository, prompted by a rise in GitHub outages and disruptions that left its engineers unable to work for hours at a time.
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Intel CEO embraces its 18A node for external customers as 18A-P gets ‘inbound interest’ — company cites increasing yields

Intel sees ‘inbound interest’ for 18A-P process technology despite 18A process variability.

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Europe achieves record-breaking gigabit per second data transfer between a geostationary satellite and an aircraft

The European Space Agency has successfully tested a 2.6 Gbps data transmission from a laser satellite orbiting Earth 36,000 km away.
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Taiwan expects power demand to increase by more than 5GW by 2030, enough to power nearly 4 million homes — rise in electricity consumption driven by semiconductor manufacturing and AI data center deployments

New semiconductor fabs and data centers are fueling Taiwan’s growing power demand, with the island expected to require more than 5GW of new electricity sources and power infrastructure to keep up.
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Trump summons tech giants to White House to pledge power payment commitments — ‘ratepayer protection plan’ will make data center operators negotiate discrete payment structure for electricity use

Some of the U.S.’s biggest AI tech companies are expected to go to the White House to sign the “ratepayer protection pledge” that promises they will pay for all of their electricity usage and not pass on the burden of incr…

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Nvidia invests $4 billion into photonics firms in a bid to bolster data center interconnect supply chains — Lumentum and Coherent investment to fund U.S. R&D and manufacturing facilities, supports capacity rights and future access

Nvidia has invested a combined $4 billion USD in photonics and networking companies Lumentum and Coherent in a deal that will see both building U.S. facilities, while locking down access rights and capacity for future tech…