AI Silicon
AI chips, GPUs, accelerators, and the silicon powering the AI era.
Cerebras Debuts CS-4 System to Accelerate AI Inference
Cerebras Systems has unveiled the CS-4, a rack-scale computing system built to greatly speed up AI inference, as the chipmaker pushes to compete with NVIDIA and other providers of AI infrastructure. The CS-4 includes three of Cerebras’ new Wafer Scale Engine 3 Turbo, or WSE-3T, processors. These unusually large chips are designed to keep more […]
James Maguire · Aug 19, 2026 · 2 min
Qualcomm Targets $300 Laptop Market With New Snapdragon C Processor
Qualcomm is pushing into a new market segment with the Arm-based Snapdragon C, an entry-level processor designed for laptops priced from around $300 but offering longer battery life and modern computing capabilities at an entry-level price. The company first announced Snapdragon C in May, positioning it for students, families and small businesses that primarily need […]
Andy Patrizio · Aug 17, 2026 · 2 min
The Neoclouds’ Indispensability Trap
Jim Chanos has a point about CoreWeave. The famed short-seller recently argued that neocloud moats are “both dug and filled” by Nvidia. His reasoning is straightforward: Nvidia supplies the GPUs that neoclouds rent to customers, influences their allocation and pricing, and possesses the ability to weaken or bypass the intermediaries whenever it chooses. Chanos went […]
Alan Shimel · Aug 17, 2026 · 10 min
Intel’s $36 Billion Second Chance: The Technology Is Working. Will the Business Follow?
One year ago, the United States government made an extraordinary bet on Intel. On Aug. 22, 2025, Washington agreed to invest $8.9 billion in the company, converting previously awarded CHIPS Act and Secure Enclave funding into an equity stake. The goal was bigger than rescuing another struggling American corporation. It was to preserve something the […]
Alan Shimel · Aug 12, 2026 · 9 min
AI-Driven Chip Shortage Triggers Washington Lobbying War as Apple Seeks Chinese Supplier Relief
An explosion in artificial intelligence (AI) development has ignited a severe global memory chip crunch, igniting an aggressive lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill as non-AI sectors scramble to secure critical components and protect failing supply pipelines. Driven by data centers vacuuming up massive volumes of high-bandwidth memory and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to train advanced […]
Jon Swartz · Aug 10, 2026 · 2 min
Intel Unveils Starfire Space Processor to Bring AI Computing to Orbit
Intel has introduced the Starfire processor, a new system-on-chip (SoC) designed to deliver artificial intelligence and high-performance computing capabilities aboard satellites and spacecraft. The processor, developed for U.S. government and aerospace missions, combines an 18A-based CPU and neural processing unit (NPU) with an Intel 3-based Xe graphics processor in a Foveros 3D package. The design […]
Andy Patrizio · Aug 10, 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
Commerce Department Plans $874 Million for Seven Semiconductor R&D Projects
The US Department of Commerce plans to provide up to $874 million in CHIPS and Science Act incentives to seven semiconductor companies developing technologies for AI infrastructure, extending the government’s support for domestic semiconductor research and the US compute supply chain. The funding, announced through letters of intent, still requires additional review before final awards […]
James Maguire · Jul 31, 2026 · 3 min
GlobalFoundries Lands $300 Million in CHIPS Funding
GlobalFoundries has secured a planned $300 million award from the U.S. Department of Commerce to accelerate research and development of silicon photonics technology. The move is aimed at strengthening domestic semiconductor capabilities and addressing one of the biggest bottlenecks in next-generation artificial intelligence infrastructure, namely network throughput. The funding was announced Wednesday as a letter […]
Andy Patrizio · Jul 31, 2026 · 2 min
Samsung Lands $200 Billion Broadcom AI Chip Partnership in Major Foundry Win
Samsung Electronics and Broadcom have signed a memorandum of understanding to expand a strategic semiconductor partnership that the companies estimate will be worth more than $200 billion through 2030. The partnership is expected to support Broadcom’s growing portfolio of custom artificial intelligence processors and strengthen Samsung’s position in the rapidly expanding AI infrastructure market. The […]
Andy Patrizio · Jul 28, 2026 · 1 min
Intel to Restore Hyper-Threading in Future Xeon Chips
Intel is reversing course on one of its most significant recent processor design decisions, bringing back Hyper-Threading to future versions of the Xeon processor. Hyper-Threading is a technology that allows a processor core to execute two threads at once, sort of. While a Hyper-Threaded core appears as two logical processors to the system, they don’t […]
Andy Patrizio · Jul 27, 2026 · 2 min
Moore’s Law Didn’t End. It Changed Direction
IBM’s “0.7nm chip” is part marketing sleight of hand and part genuine semiconductor breakthrough. Ignore the decimal point. Nanostack—and the decision to build silicon upward—is the real story. Let’s get the marketing out of the way first. IBM says it has introduced the world’s first “sub-1 nanometer chip technology.” More specifically, the company calls this […]
Alan Shimel · Jul 24, 2026 · 9 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 Reportedly Developing AI Chip for Gemini
Google is reportedly developing a new custom AI chip designed specifically to run its Gemini family of artificial intelligence models more efficiently, marking the latest in a series of custom chips optimized for AI processing. The chip, internally codenamed “Frozen v2,” is being engineered to accelerate AI inference in a very unique manner. According to […]
Andy Patrizio · Jul 23, 2026 · 2 min
Agentic AI Shift Driving Data Center Chip Market Toward $1.2 Trillion by 2030: Futurum Report
The global data center semiconductor market is on track to expand more than fivefold, reaching $1.2 trillion by 2030 as artificial intelligence (AI) hardware demand shifts decisively from model training to agentic inference. According to a five-year forecast from tech research firm The Futurum Group, revenue in the sector hit $241 billion in 2025, a […]
Jon Swartz · Jul 23, 2026 · 2 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
AMD Signs AI Chip and Investment Deal with Anthropic Worth Tens of Billions
Advanced Micro Devices has secured one of its largest AI infrastructure agreements to date, signing a deal in which Anthropic will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD AI infrastructure while AMD commits to invest as much as $5 billion in the AI company. The agreement strengthens AMD’s challenge to NVIDIA in the market for […]
James Maguire · Jul 22, 2026 · 2 min
NVIDIA Vera CPU Tops AMD and Intel in Benchmarks
Cloud inference provider DeepInfra claims NVIDIA’s upcoming Vera CPU significantly outperformed competing processors from AMD and Intel in production-scale AI performance testing. Rather than using generic benchmarks, which don’t often reflect real-world usage, DeepInfra used its own production AI infrastructure for testing. It showed the Arm-based Vera CPU delivered up to 2.2 times faster agent […]
Andy Patrizio · Jul 21, 2026 · 2 min
AMD Challenges NVIDIA’s AI Monopoly as Microsoft Adopts New Helios System for Azure
AMD is taking the fight to NVIDIA Corp. to loosen its ironclad grip on the multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence (AI) hardware market. Culminating a decade-long corporate comeback, AMD said Monday that Microsoft Corp. will deploy its highly anticipated Helios rack-scale AI system. Microsoft will integrate Helios into its Azure cloud platform to power frontier model inference, […]
Jon Swartz · Jul 20, 2026 · 2 min
Arteris, Arm Partner for Secure Chip Development
Semiconductor IP company Arteris is expanding its longstanding partnership with Arm Holdings to provide advanced hardware security verification across a broader range of Arm’s CPU portfolio. With so many technologies, the development cycle is focused on getting it running, making it run faster and then securing it, in that order. Security has a tendency to […]
Andy Patrizio · Jul 16, 2026 · 2 min