Chips

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.

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.

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.

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.

Apple's MacBook Pro refreshed with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips offers up to 128GB unified memory, Thunderbolt 5, Wi-Fi 7, and claimed 4x AI gains over the previous generation, shipping March 11.

Apple announces the MacBook Neo at $599, the first Mac powered by an iPhone A18 Pro chip, targeting the budget laptop market dominated by Chromebooks and low-cost Windows machines.

Apple begins staggered press-release launches on March 2, culminating in a hands-on media experience on March 4, delivering its most comprehensive hardware refresh in years.

Barcelona Zettascale Lab's Cinco Ranch TC1, a three-core RISC-V chip fabricated on Intel's 3nm process, has passed validation testing, marking a milestone in Europe's push for semiconductor sovereignty.

Reno-based Positron AI has raised $230 million at a $1B+ valuation, claiming its Atlas chip matches Nvidia's H100 inference performance at one-third the power while its next-gen Asimov silicon promises six times the memory of Nvidia's Rubin.