TSMC chipmaking factories rocked by magnitude 7.0 earthquake that was the strongest in 27 years, but facilities escaped unharmed — company’s earthquake protection measures pay off

Yesterday, the ground shook off the coast of Taiwan, slamming the country with the strongest earthquake in 27 years. The seismic wave registered 7.0 in Taiwan’s scales, or 6.6 to 6.7 according to the USGS standard. Thankfu…

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Nexperia China seeks new wafer suppliers amid legal standoff with Dutch parent, could take 6 months for qualification — chip shortages have suspended some automotive production lines as Nexperia faces wafer shortage

Nexperia’s China unit is moving to line up new wafer suppliers over the next six to nine months amid a deepening legal and operational dispute with its Dutch parent company.
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ChatGPT could prioritize sponsored content as part of ad strategy — sponsored content could allegedly be given preferential treatment in LLM’s responses, OpenAI to use chat data to deliver highly personalized results

OpenAI is reportedly still working on baking in ads into ChatGPT’s results despite Altman’s ‘Code Red’ earlier this month.
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Nvidia reportedly backs away from its effort to make its own public cloud, team reorg eases friction with customers — chipmaker shifts unit’s focus to internal R&D

Nvidia has reorganized its cloud computing group, further scaling back its ambitions to operate a public cloud service that would directly compete with Amazon Web Services.
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How China’s control of battery supply chains is becoming a critical risk for U.S. military power and AI initiatives — reducing reliance will take nearly a decade

According to a special report by the New York Times, the U.S. government is concerned about how China sits at the center of that ecosystem, controlling large portions of battery manufacturing and processing.
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Intel displays tech to build extreme multi-chiplet packages 12 times the size of the largest AI processors, beating TSMC’s biggest — floorplan the size of a cellphone, armed with HBM5, 14A compute tiles and 18A SRAM

Intel Foundry has released a video of a multi-chiplet 2.5D/3D processor with a 10,296 mm^2 silicon footprint, including leading-edge technologies such as 14A and 18A.
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Elon Musk says xAI will have more AI compute than everyone else combined within five years — Macrohard-branded Colossus 2 data center a nod to Musk’s AI project to challenge Microsoft

Elon Musk claimed on X that xAI will have more computing power than everyone else combined in less than five years.

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AI data centers may soon be powered by retired Navy nuclear reactors from aircraft carriers and submarines — firm asks U.S. DOE for a loan guarantee to start the project

A Texas energy startup proposes repurposing retired U.S. Navy nuclear reactors for use in AI data centers.

Nvidia buys AI chip startup Groq’s assets for $20 billion in the company’s biggest deal ever — Transaction includes acquihires of key Groq employees, including CEO

Groq, a rival to Nvidia in the AI chip race, has entered into a non-exclusive agreement with the Green Team, with a deal valued at $20 billion, roughly $13 billion more than Groq’s last evaluation. Nvidia will also hire th…

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China chipmaker SMIC raises wafer prices by about 10% as memory demand tightens capacity

The adjustment comes as China’s largest foundry runs near full utilization and faces sustained demand from domestic customers building inventories of memory and logic chips.
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