The Wire · Chips
The silicon beat — GPUs, custom accelerators, HBM, advanced packaging, and the foundries and supply chains that gate every AI buildout.
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, the largest open-weight model yet: a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts (16 of 896 experts active), 1M-token context, native vision, Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, in K3 Max and K3 Swarm variants. Moonshot's own benchmarks show K3 beating Anthropic's Opus 4.8, while independent Artificial Analysis scores it clearing Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 but losing to Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol; it lists at $3/$15 per million tokens, roughly half Opus's cost per task. Ask it who it is and it says "I am Claude" — the tell of the distillation Anthropic documented in February (3.4M exchanges from Moonshot, 16M across three Chinese labs via 24,000 fake accounts). Also: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines ships its first model, the 975B open-weight Inkling; an autonomous AI agent breaches Hugging Face and is caught with the open-weight GLM 5.2; and NotebookLM becomes Gemini Notebook with a sandboxed cloud computer in every notebook.
We have been seeing the AMD Instinct MI350P 144GB HBM3E PCIe accelerator everywhere over the past few weeks as this appears to be a popular GPU The post The AMD Instinct MI350P is a HBM PCIe AI Accelerator That Has Been All Over appeared first on ServeTheHome .
Read full story →ASML is reportedly considering increasing prices of its existing Low-NA EUV lithography tools. The potential price hikes have already upset TSMC, ASML's largest client, reports The Information . But can ASML rapidly raise the prices of the tools it sells to chipmakers? Price adjustments are not going to happen overnight, said Roger Dassen, CFO of ASML, said during the company's quarterly earnings call. But there is one thing to remember about ASML's price hikes: They are going to affect the entire semiconductor industry. "When it comes to Low-NA [EUV tools] pricing, of course, you know that we keep on increasing the productivity of the Low-NA tool, [which] gives us a pretty strong runway for potential price improvements going forward," said Roger Dassen, chief financial officer of ASML, during the company's quarterly earnings call. […] Given the long order lead times that we have, that does not translate into pricing effects tomorrow." ASML just reported record results for its second quarter of 2026, with total net sales of €9.326 billion ($10.67 billion) and net income of €2.918 billion ($3.338 billion). The company now expects net sales between €43 billion ($49.2 billion) and €45 billion ($51.5 billion) in 2026, a range that comfortably exceeds its own guidance and the expectations of industry analysts. More complex, more expensive ASML has generally increased the average selling price of EUV scanners over successive generations as they increase in complexity and productivity, so the idea of higher pricing of EUV tools is not particularly new. The company calls the concept of 'value-based pricing' and gradually increases its average selling price (ASP) based on the value that its tools provide to its operators. (Image credit: ASML) Early ASML Twinscan NXE systems were commonly discussed in the roughly €100 million–€120 million ($115 million-$137 million) range, while later production models such as the NXE:3400C and NXE:3600D moved toward roughly €140 million–€170
Read full story →TSMC's A14 (1.4nm-class) fabrication process has made rapid progress in the last three months and is well ahead of N2 at the same stage of development, according to the company's update provided at its earnings call this week. The technology also faces strong customer interest and engagement across both smartphone and AI/HPC applications. Go deeper with TH Premium: Chipmaking (Image credit: tsmc) A deeper look at the chipmaking supply chain TSMC's $165 billion U.S. investments examined China reportedly reverse-engineers EUV tool China bets on DUV, as EUV blockade reshapes chipmaking "A14 technology development is on track and progressing well. Internal product-like vehicle demonstrated close to 90% device performance and close to 90% 256Mb SRAM yield," said C.C. Wei, chief executive of TSMC, during the earnings call with analysts and investors. A14 — which is expected to enter mass production in 2H 2028 — is making rapid progress in terms of performance and yield improvements. This April, the company disclosed that the production node achieved >85% target transistor performance and >80% 256Mb SRAM yield. Roughly three months later, both figures are approaching 90%, which suggests a gain of around 5% in device performance and nearly 10% in SRAM yield. For comparison, TSMC's N2 demonstrated more than 80% of its target device performance and over 50% yield on a 256Mb SRAM test chip in April 2023. By April 2024, the process had advanced to more than 90% of its target device performance and over 80% SRAM yield. While development trajectories are not directly comparable, the figures suggest that A14 is maturing considerably faster than N2 did at a similar stage of development. The very rapid progress of A14 compared to the relatively slow maturation of N2 at similar stages of development can probably be attributed, at least in part, to TSMC's growing experience with gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet transistors. Back in 2023, the company barely had enough experience with th
Read full story →It may be the peak of summer right now, but it's never too early to start thinking about the new school year or setting off for college. Grab your essentials now before the rush, and don't risk losing out on the best back-to-school deals. This time of year is great for finding deals on laptops, monitors, power banks, and more. Also, if you are already registered with a student ID, you can often grab the best deals at retailers that offer student discounts. Companies like Dell and Samsung often have some amazing student offers to take advantage of. $400 off MacBooks at Best Buy $599 Dell XPS 13 Laptop for students Back to School tech deals at Amazon Apple's 2025 MacBook Pro with M5 includes a 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU. This configuration has 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. View Deal Sign up for a student discount on the latest Dell XPS 13 laptop. Inside is a Series 3 Intel Core 5 320 processor and 8GB of RAM, with a small 512GB SSD for storage. View Deal This very powerful gaming laptop sports an ample 32GB of RAM plus an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti laptop graphics processor. You will be able to play the latest games and run hardware-intensive software applications. View Deal This Alienware laptop contains Intel's Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU with a 36MB cache, 24 cores, and speeds of 2.1 to 5.4 GHz on the P-Cores. Graphics are powered by an RTX 5070 with 8GB of GDDR7 VRAM. Save 10% with your student discount. View Deal A powerful and portable battery pack that you can use to charge or power your phone or laptop. With a 145W output, it can easily power most laptops, even gaming laptops. View Deal Featuring the Hero sensor with a 12,000 DPI, this lightweight mouse with 6 programmable buttons is perfect for a budget gaming and productivity mouse for school or college. The G305 sports a large 250-hour battery, and onboard memory for saving your profiles. View Deal This model of the Omen 16 features an AMD CPU with the Ryzen AI 7 350 processor taking center stage. Accompanying the
This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. There’s a lot of hype around perimenopause. Don’t buy it. Perimenopause used to be considered taboo, but not anymore. Thanks at least in part to TV doctors and social media influencers, conversations about the sometimes years-long period before menopause are now more open than ever. But the conversation is increasingly shaped by misinformation. Despite what some marketers will claim, there is no test for perimenopause. That doesn’t mean women should have to put up with symptoms, but treatment suggestions often lack scientific evidence. And not all the symptoms women experience in midlife can be blamed on hormones. Read the full story on the hype and misinformation surrounding perimenopause . —Jessica Hamzelou This article is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 China’s AI gap with the US may have just narrowed A Chinese startup has released the world’s largest open AI model. ( Reuters $) + It competes with some Anthropic and OpenAI models. ( Gizmodo ) + The model’s launch sent AI and semiconductor stocks sliding. ( Bloomberg $) + Chinese Nvidia alternatives are also gaining traction. ( SCMP ) + Xi Jinping pitched China as an AI partner to the developing world. ( CNBC ) + The country is betting big on open-source. ( MIT Technology Review ) 2 Trump Media is selling instant access to “market-moving’ social posts It’s developed a new way to monetize the president’s posts. ( Quartz ) + And Trump could profit directly from selling access to his statements. ( BBC ) + Kalshi says it caught Trump’s teleprompter operator insider trading . ( Verge ) 3 Astronomers have found an atmosphere on a nearby Earth-like planet It’s the first potent
A $400 million chip-backed loan points to the next wave of AI infrastructure deals.
Two up-and-coming Chinese memory vendors, YMTC and CXMT, could offer customers relief from shortages and skyrocketing prices, but not if US Representatives John Moolenaar (R-MI) and George Whitesides (D-CA) have anything to say about it. In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made public on Thursday, the lawmakers urged the Trump administration to tighten restrictions on Chinese memory manufacturers, arguing that purchases of their chips by US companies would undermine Western memory makers and subsidize the People's Liberation Army. Founded in 2016, the companies are relative newcomers to memory manufacturing. CXMT produces dynamic random access memory (DRAM) used in everything from desktops and laptops to smartphones and servers, while YMTC produces NAND flash for storage applications. Historically, CXMT and YMTC’s chips have trailed those from American and South Korean memory vendors like Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung. But amid surging memory prices, several large PC manufacturers, including Apple, Dell, and HP, have reportedly begun qualifying the two companies’ memory for use in their products. “US reliance on Chinese memory producers will expose Western manufacturers to a deluge of state-subsidized Chinese memory, putting our memory manufacturing base and supply chains at risk,” they argued. Unlike logic chips such as CPUs and GPUs, memory is a commodity manufactured to a common spec. While different chipmakers may make it to market with new products faster than others, ultimately they’re all building the same thing. This makes it relatively easy to switch from one supplier to another based on whoever is offering the best price. Moolenaar and Whitesides contend that China could subsidize memory exports in order to drive down average selling prices to the point that it’s no longer profitable for US and allied memory makers. “Given these risks, we urge you to oppose efforts to facilitate the sales of Chinese memory chips abroad and further expand exist
Talk is cheap and TSMC’s plan to bolster its US expansion by another $100 billion is just that — talk. Riding high on yet another quarter of AI-fueled sales, which topped $40 billion, Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC announced plans this week to increase its US fab footprint to 12 facilities, totaling $265 billion of investment. But making good on that promise is easier said than done, and if history tells us anything, it’s that plans change. As you may recall, Intel invested $30 billion to build a pair of new fabs in Arizona, and also planned to spend €30 billion on a megafab in Magdeburg, Germany; $25 billion on a fab in Israel; and $20 billion on a manufacturing plant in Ohio. So far, only one of the Arizona plants has materialized. The German facility has been cancelled, the Israel site delayed indefinitely, and the Ohio foundry expansion pushed until at least 2030. All of that is to say, TSMC’s leaders can make any plan they like, but it doesn’t mean the cash the will actually be invested or the facilities built. And even if TSMC does pack the Arizona desert with the dozen wafer fabs and advanced packaging facilities it’s promised, it could be decades before we see them come online. These are some of the most complex facilities in the world. The site selection, permitting, and support buildings required to supply power and water, and to condition the air for the clean rooms, takes years and billions of dollars to bring online before the first lithography machines from ASML can be deployed and tested. To put things in perspective, since announcing its first leading-edge fab in the US during Trump’s last administration, TSMC has managed to build just two fab sites and break ground on a third, all at a cost of $65 billion. The first of these came online in late 2024 with Apple and Nvidia announced as flagship customers early last year. The second fab, which is slated to produce chips based on the foundry giant’s 3 nm process tech, isn’t slated to come online until the
The Tesla driver who fatally struck a woman after crashing into her home "manually overrode" the vehicle's Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology by pressing the gas pedal to 100 percent, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) confirmed in a preliminary report on Wednesday. After examining the car's electronic data, investigators found that the Tesla Model 3 […]
On Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released preliminary findings verifying Elon Musk’s and Tesla’s claims that a driver involved in a fatal Texas crash that killed a grandmother overrode Full Self Driving in the moments ahead of impact. Last month, 44-year-old Michael Butler told police that the autopilot feature was engaged at the time of the crash. On X, Musk disputed the claim, writing that Butler must have overridden the feature because “FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets, and this was a high-speed crash!” Moving to back Musk’s claim, Tesla’s vice president of AI software, Ashok Elluswamy, said that internal data showed “the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100 percent of the accel pedal in this residential area.” NTSB’s preliminary report, which does not yet determine what caused the crash, confirmed Tesla’s claims. Its probe found that FSD was engaged at the time of the crash, but electronic data showed “the driver manually overrode FSD (Supervised) by pressing the accelerator pedal to 100 percent.” Read full article Comments
Climate tech venture capital had its strongest first half since 2022 as investors poured billions into low-carbon datacenters and projects needed to feed AI's seemingly endless appetite for compute. According to investment tracker Currence, climate tech startups pulled in $26.1 billion in venture funding during the first six months of 2026, up 55 percent year-over-year. However, that headline growth came with a catch: investors weren't backing the climate sector broadly so much as pouring money into the infrastructure underpinning the AI boom. Low-carbon datacenter developers alone accounted for 34 percent of all climate venture funding, up from just 3 percent a year earlier, with DayOne's $4.5 billion and Nscale's $2 billion Series C rounds making up roughly a quarter of all investment between them. As a result, the "built environment" category grew by more than eight times, overtaking "energy" as climate tech's largest investment vertical. That shift is so dramatic that Currence has effectively rewritten the boundaries of climate tech itself. The firm says climate tech is "a bigger space than it was six years ago," pointing to datacenters as drivers for long-duration energy storage, advanced nuclear, geothermal power, robotics, and even space-based solar. It now counts datacenter developers that rely primarily on clean power or make sustainability central to their business, while excluding conventional facilities and chipmakers. "Datacenter development is a crowded space, but in the speed-to-power race, clean firm generation can be a distinct advantage," the report notes, arguing that developers are increasingly judged on their "route to power" as much as their racks and real estate. The ripple effects stretch well beyond datacenters, according to Currence. Investors are writing large early stage checks to nuclear startups years before they're expected to generate electricity, betting AI's long-term appetite for power will eventually justify today's valuations, wh
In the eastern Indian Ocean, south of Java in the vast sea stretching toward Australia, a fishing vessel slightly alters its course while operating near the boundary of its authorized fishing ground. Nothing appears unusual on deck. Nets remain in the water. Engines maintain a steady speed. To the crew, it is an ordinary day at sea. Yet hundreds of kilometers above, satellites continuously record the vessel’s position. At Indonesia’s Marine and Fisheries Resources Surveillance Station in Cilacap, where I work, a monitoring platform receives the signal and automatically compares it against fishing permits, designated fishing grounds, vessel characteristics, and historical movement patterns. Within minutes, the system identifies a potential violation. Before any patrol vessel leaves port, before any inspector boards a vessel, and before any warning is issued, we have begun enforcement. This transformation reflects a profound shift in maritime governance. The ocean has historically been opaque to regulators. States could only enforce laws where patrol vessels happened to be present. Today, however, integrated systems combining data from Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS), satellite remote sensing , geospatial analytics, and increasingly sophisticated data-processing tools are making marine activity visible at an unprecedented scale . Global Fishing Watch alone tracks hundreds of thousands of vessels worldwide, generating a near real-time picture of fishing activity across the world’s oceans. Indonesia has emerged as one of the most ambitious examples of this transition. As the world’s largest archipelagic state, managing more than six million square kilometers of maritime space, Indonesia faces a challenge familiar to many coastal nations: there are never enough patrol vessels. Digital surveillance is a practical necessity that makes my job possible, even as it creates new challenges. The Law of the Sea Meets Digital Reality The international legal framework governing the
227 points, 74 comments on HN
<p data-block-key="2uzqv">Company’s CEO says strength of sales has led ASML to look into increasing EUV capacity over next two years</p>
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