Custom Silicon
Trump Weighs Expanded Semiconductor Tariffs to Drive Reshoring, Raising Alarm Over U.S. AI Growth: Report
The Trump administration is weighing a sweeping expansion of semiconductor tariffs that could extend to laptops, gaming hardware, and data center servers. The preliminary proposal, as reported by POLITICO, aims to pressure tech giants into shifting manufacturing to U.S. soil, but it has sparked intense opposition from industry groups warning of severe economic fallout for […]
Jon Swartz · Aug 27, 2026 · 2 min
OpenAI Found a Crack in Nvidia’s AI Fortress
Nvidia has built one of the strongest competitive positions the technology industry has ever seen. It dominates the market for artificial intelligence accelerators, owns the CUDA software ecosystem that developers have spent years learning and has expanded beyond individual GPUs into networking, rack-scale systems and increasingly complete AI infrastructure. OpenAI’s first custom processor is not […]
Alan Shimel · Aug 27, 2026 · 8 min
IBM Unveils Dual-Architecture Mainframe Processor With Native Arm Support
IBM is developing a new processor that would bring Arm-native applications directly to its IBM Z mainframes and LinuxONE systems, allowing both Arm and IBM’s mainframe instructions to run side by side on the same processor cores. That would allow organizations to run Arm-native Linux applications alongside existing z/OS and Linux workloads on the same […]
Andy Patrizio · Aug 25, 2026 · 2 min
IBM and Arm Unveil Dual-Architecture Chip Plan for Future Z and LinuxONE Mainframes
IBM and Arm have unveiled a processor design intended to bring Arm-native Linux software directly onto future IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. Well, this is different. At the Hot Chips conference, IBM and Arm revealed they’re working on an Arm chip in which each core can natively execute IBM Z or LinuxONE instructions and ARM […]
Steven Vaughan-Nichols · Aug 24, 2026 · 3 min
Broadcom Eyes Up to $100 Billion in Financing for AI Chip Build-Out
Broadcom is in discussions to arrange a massive debt package to finance AI chips and infrastructure for Anthropic and other AI companies, an initiative that demonstrates how tech vendors are moving beyond sales and are now helping finance deals with customers. The proposed structure could include roughly $30 billion of junior debt and $60 billion […]
James Maguire · Aug 21, 2026 · 2 min
Google Inks $12.2B Custom AI Chip Deal with Marvell, Spurring Tech Stock Shift
Marvell Technology Inc. shares spiked nearly 10% following a regulatory filing revealing that Google has secured the option to buy up to $12.2 billion in Marvell stock. The agreement signals a major expansion in their custom silicon partnership as tech titans rush to build cheaper, viable alternatives to NVIDIA Corp.’s dominant artificial intelligence (AI) processors. […]
Jon Swartz · Aug 20, 2026 · 2 min
Anthropic Plans Custom AI Chip Strategy for Claude
Anthropic is assembling an in-house chip design team to develop custom processors for its Claude family of AI models, a key step in the company’s effort to reduce infrastructure costs and improve AI performance. The company plans to design future AI models alongside custom hardware rather than adapting software to commercially available processors. That approach […]
James Maguire · Aug 6, 2026 · 2 min
AMD Challenges NVIDIA’s Dominance with New AI Hardware, Billion-Dollar Partnerships
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is launching a powerful new lineup of artificial intelligence (AI) data center hardware on Thursday, directly targeting market leader NVIDIA Corp. The news, unveiled at an industry event in San Francisco, centers around AMD’s efforts to capture market share in both AI training and inference, the computational work behind processing queries […]
Jon Swartz · Jul 23, 2026 · 2 min
Google Is Betting the AI Model Is Ready to Become the Machine
For most of computing history, progress meant separating the software from the machine. Software could be changed, upgraded and replaced without throwing away the computer beneath it. Hardware became increasingly general purpose, while software developers gained the freedom to decide what those machines would do. The decoupling of hardware and software helped create the modern […]
Alan Shimel · Jul 23, 2026 · 9 min
Samsung Negotiates Multimillion-Euro Stake in Mistral AI at $22.8 Billion Valuation
Samsung Electronics is in advanced talks to make a massive financial bet on Europe’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Mistral AI, signaling a critical shift in how global semiconductor leaders compete for dominance in the AI hardware supply chain. According to a report from The Financial Times, South Korea’s Samsung is negotiating an investment of […]
Jon Swartz · Jul 22, 2026 · 2 min
Meta to Begin Production of Custom Iris AI Chips in September in Bid for 14-Gigawatt Power Grid: Report
Meta Platforms Inc. plans to begin manufacturing its next-generation custom artificial intelligence (AI) chip in September, according to an internal memo reviewed by Reuters. Code-named Iris, the in-house silicon is part of a broader effort by the social media giant to double its computing infrastructure capacity to 14 gigawatts by next year and reduce its […]
Jon Swartz · Jul 14, 2026 · 2 min
MIT Researchers Unveil Petabit Photonic Networking Chip
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they have made a series of breakthroughs that could pave the way for computer chips capable of transmitting more than a petabit of data per second while consuming far less energy. The work comes from MIT’s Future of Integrated Photonics and Electronics Microsystems (FUTUR-IC) research program, […]
Andy Patrizio · Jul 13, 2026 · 2 min
Unpatchable Bug Found in Older Apple CPUs
A security research firm has published details of a new vulnerability affecting two generations of Apple CPUs that cannot be fixed through software updates. Security research firm Paradigm Shift has published details of a vulnerability in the BootROM of Apple’s A12, S4/S5, and A13 mobile chips, along with a working proof-of-concept exploit. The A12 processor […]
Andy Patrizio · Jun 24, 2026 · 2 min
Trump Announces Blockbuster Apple-Intel Chip Deal as ‘RAMmageddon’ Hits Tech Industry
President Donald Trump announced early Thursday that Apple Inc. has agreed to partner with Intel Corp. to design and manufacture its semiconductor chips domestically – a potentially big win for the White House’s aggressive campaign to reshore critical technology manufacturing to the U.S. through targeted tariffs and state-backed investments. Writing on Truth Social, Trump criticized […]
Jon Swartz · Jun 18, 2026 · 3 min
Motive and Latin American Carriers Turn Mobile Infrastructure Into a Growth Engine
Motive’s Entitlement Server transforms Latin American mobile infrastructure into a growth engine for carriers like Claro, Vivo, and Entel.
Keith Kirkpatrick · Jun 10, 2026 · 5 min
Microsoft Unveils Majorana 2 Quantum Computing Chip
Microsoft has introduced Majorana 2, the second generation of its topological quantum processor, promising major advancements in performance. According to Microsoft, Majorana 2 delivers dramatically improved qubit reliability and longer coherence times than its predecessor, with the potential for fault-tolerant quantum computing. The company says the new processor achieves average qubit lifetimes measured in seconds […]
Andy Patrizio · Jun 8, 2026 · 2 min
Salesforce Bets on Contentful to Make Agentic AI and Content Orchestration Table Stakes
Salesforce’s Contentful acquisition makes content orchestration a native AI feature, raising competitive stakes for enterprise software platforms.
Keith Kirkpatrick · Jun 2, 2026 · 4 min
Cerebras’ $95B First Day Valuation Sizes Up the 2028 XPU Opportunity
The Cerebras IPO’s $95B valuation prices in massive 2028 XPU opportunity, signaling exponential custom silicon market growth beyond GPU dominance.
Brendan Burke · May 15, 2026 · 5 min
Tenstorrent’s Galaxy Blackhole: Can RISC-V Processors Expand Fast Inference Globally?
Tenstorrent Galaxy Blackhole compute server enters volume production, offering record-setting inference performance and open-source compatibility.
Brendan Burke · May 4, 2026 · 5 min
Meta’s AWS Pact Reframes the Graviton CPU as an AI Workhorse
Meta deploys tens of millions of AWS Graviton cores to power agentic AI workloads, reframing CPUs as essential AI infrastructure.
Brendan Burke · Apr 27, 2026 · 6 min