semiconductors

Intel's Heracles processor, developed under DARPA's DPRIVE program, performs computations on fully encrypted data without decryption, achieving speedups of 1,074 to 5,547 times over a 24-core Xeon.

Intel is in advanced talks with Google and Amazon for EMIB-based chip packaging services worth billions annually, positioning its foundry division as a credible alternative to TSMC's constrained CoWoS capacity.

One year after Liberation Day, the collision of Trump-era tariffs with hyperscaler memory hoarding has pushed PC prices up 15-20 percent, forced vendors to exit budget segments, and reshaped the consumer electronics supply chain.

The Semiconductor Industry Association reported February 2026 sales of $88.8 billion, a 61.8 percent year-over-year surge driven by AI infrastructure spending, as the chip market remains on pace to cross $1 trillion in annual revenue for the first time.

South Korean fabless chip designer Rebellions has closed a $400 million pre-IPO round led by Mirae Asset and the Korea National Growth Fund, bringing total funding to $850 million as the company launches rack-scale inference platforms and prepares for a public listing.

TSMC's US footprint could triple from $165 billion to $465 billion under a proposed tariff deal, with four Arizona fabs already fully booked before construction is complete.

Both x86 chipmakers have notified OEMs of 10-15% price increases effective March-April, as AI data center demand consumes manufacturing capacity and pushes delivery times from weeks to months.

Nvidia takes a $2 billion stake in Marvell Technology, integrating one of the semiconductor industry's top custom ASIC designers into its NVLink Fusion interconnect platform.

Alibaba's Damo Academy has announced the XuanTie C950, a 5nm RISC-V CPU core capable of natively running hundred-billion-parameter language models, marking RISC-V's first serious entry into high-end AI computing.

Apple expands its U.S. supply chain initiative with four new semiconductor and sensor partners, committing $400 million as part of a broader $600 billion domestic investment push.

Google Research unveils TurboQuant, a training-free compression algorithm that reduces LLM key-value cache memory by 6x and boosts inference throughput up to 8x, sending SK Hynix and Samsung shares down 5-6 percent.

AMD's Instinct MI400 family debuts three CDNA 5 accelerators on TSMC 2nm alongside the 72-GPU Helios rack, but a production timeline dispute clouds the second-half 2026 launch.