Hardware & Semiconductors

Google's seven-year open-source hardware security project reaches production in Dell Chromebooks with post-quantum cryptography, and data center deployment planned for later this year.

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.

Samsung has disclosed the first technical details of its Android XR-powered smart glasses, which will ship with a Qualcomm AR1 chipset and integrate Google's Gemini AI assistant. The device enters a market where Meta's Ray-Ban partnership holds an estimated 82 percent share.

Charles H. Bennett of IBM Research and Gilles Brassard of the Université de Montréal have received the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award for founding quantum information science, including the BB84 quantum cryptography protocol and quantum teleportation.

Samsung Electronics is negotiating three-to-five-year memory supply agreements with Google and Microsoft that could include more than 10 billion dollars in prepayments, as hyperscalers move to secure chip capacity amid a structural AI-driven shortage.

OFC 2026 drew 18,000 attendees as ST entered high-volume silicon photonics production, Lumentum showed VCSEL co-packaged optics, Coherent demoed a 6.4T CPO engine, and startups began sampling 3.2T photonic chips.

Micron Technology posted record fiscal Q2 revenue of 23.9 billion dollars, nearly tripling year over year on surging AI memory demand, while guiding fiscal Q3 to 33.5 billion dollars -- a single quarter that would exceed its entire annual revenue through fiscal 2024.

Jim Keller's Tenstorrent unveils a $9,999 liquid-cooled workstation with four Blackhole ASICs, 480 Tensix cores, and a fully open-source software stack, shipping globally in Q2 2026.

Ecolab's $4.75 billion acquisition of CoolIT, Trane Technologies' purchase of LiquidStack, and NVIDIA's chiller-free Vera Rubin design mark a consolidation wave in data center cooling as AI power densities push the industry beyond the limits of air.

UCIe 3.0 wins its first interoperability demonstrations, TSMC targets 130,000 CoWoS wafers per month by year-end, and Rebellions ships the first quad-chiplet AI accelerator with UCIe interconnects — three signals that the chiplet era is moving from specification to silicon.

Sandia demonstrates that spiking neural networks can solve physics simulations on Intel Loihi 2, Intel ships the 4nm Loihi 3 with eight million neurons, and UT San Antonio opens the first public neuromorphic computing hub in the United States.

A prototype chip encodes neural network weights directly into nanoscale photonic structures, classifying biomedical images with up to 99 percent accuracy on a picosecond timescale while generating virtually no resistive heat.