Chips

Grimes County, Texas, awarded the company a property tax exemption for its planned $55 billion Terafab semiconductor plant. Local residents seem to feel the same way about the project as many do about data centers, and this tax break won’t help. As local landowner Rhonda Nesloney put it in court:

As Bloomberg reports, SK Hynix chairman Chey Tae-won says the company will do “whatever it requires” to expand chip production, but that will take years. So, unfortunately for anyone trying to buy a Steam Deck or build a gaming PC right now, the RAM shortage probably isn’t ending anytime soon.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, SK Hynix and Micron both passed the milestone this week. The spike in value for the world’s three largest DRAM manufacturers follows a months-long global memory shortage, driven by demand from AI data centers, that’s causing prices to skyrocket on everything from phones to game consoles.

It was reported last week that Intel and Apple struck a deal for unknown chips. Now supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports Intel is manufacturing “low-end/legacy” chips for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, the majority for the phones. The scale is small though, with TSMC set to retain 90 percent of Apple’s chip supply.

MediaTek shared in a blog post that it will have chips in Google’s upcoming Googlebooks, joining Intel and Qualcomm. Interestingly, it mentions bringing Dimensity smartphone chips, not the Kompanio chips it already had in Chromebooks (and were quite good).

The company’s stock shot up over 15 percent today following record earnings and reports of a potential chipmaking deal with Apple. It’s only the second Asian company to break the milestone, along with rival chipmaker TSMC, both riding high on AI demand.

Toto’s high-precision ceramics business is set to account for more than half of the company’s operating profit for the first time in the financial year that ended in March. Advanced ceramics, it turns out, are well suited for producing components for semiconductor manufacturing equipment — and demand is booming.

Nvidia is launching a 12GB version of its RTX 5070 laptop GPU, to go along with the existing 8GB configuration. Nvidia’s blog post explains how this will actually help supply during the RAM shortage:

Yesterday we found out the price of the new AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, the real name of a real product that I guess buyers are expected to learn.

Thought RAMageddon was bad? Wait until Silicon Valley loses access to 90 percent of the world’s chip supply. The New York Times reminds us that’s a possibility, with production concentrated in Taiwan, ever at risk of a Chinese blockade. The industry is now investing in US production, but has been putting this off for years.

Here’s yet another manufacturing pressure we have the AI chip boom to thank for: glass cloth. It’s a key component in the chip substrates for printed circuit boards, and the industry is mostly reliant on a single manufacturer in Japan, which can no longer keep up with demand.

After a string of exec departures from Apple, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported a few days ago that Srouji, who oversees the chips that have helped iPhones, Macs, and other devices lead their categories, had discussed leaving for another company.

Qualcomm’s new chip brings its 4nm process to the lowest end of its 6 series chips. It packs four Cortex-A78 performance cores at up to 2.4 GHz and four Cortex-A55 efficiency cores clocked at 1.8 GHz, a nice bump from the 2-and-6 arrangement of the 6s Gen 3. You won’t find too many phones out there running the 6s, but maybe a future version of the Moto G Stylus can benefit.

It’s claiming a “complete victory” in the companies’ legal battle over licensing, after a judge dismissed Arm’s attempt to have December’s jury trial either thrown out, or held all over again. Of course, Arm plans to appeal, leaving the chip industry’s biggest frenemies stuck in court a little longer.

If you care about who makes the processors that MediaTek, Samsung, and more use in their smartphone chips, you’ll want to know that Arm has released new CPUs and GPUs named Lumex. It marks the end of its “Cortex” cores, which now get boring names like “C1-Ultra” and “C1-Pro.”

AMD just reported its Q2 2025 earnings, and it’s attributing a new quarterly revenue record of $7.7 billion to one particular thing: “record server and PC processor sales.” And while AMD doesn’t mention its flagging competitor Intel, it seems many are turning to Team Red: AMD just crossed 40 percent market share for the first time on the Steam Hardware Survey of PC gamers, and it may have 40 percent server market share soon too.

Five to 20 percent, to be a little inexact. That’s according to AMD CEO Lisa Su, who told Bloomberg that components from TSMC’s Arizona facilities will cost more than similar parts made in Taiwan, but says it’s worth it for diversifying supply chains.