Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 1

The Australian government eSafety Commissioner entered into a legal battle against Elon Musk X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter, over its refusal to remove a terrorist attack video from its platform.

Australia demanded that all social media platforms respect its laws that state its illegal to host any content that depicts a terrorist attack. All social platforms responded to Australia's call to remove the video depicting what the Australian governments eSafety Commissioner deemed a terrorist attack, which was content of an Australian man attacking bishop Mari Emmanuel in Sydney, Australia. X responded to the call and blocked Australia-based users from accessing the content.

However, the eSafety Commissioner argued this decision doesn't represent the removal of the posts, and then proceeded to demand X remove access to the content on a global scale. Musk vowed to challenge the requirement by the Australian government, and on Monday, X won a reprieve from a federal court judge who declined the eSafety Commissioner's bid to extend its injunction to remove the content from X.

TSMC hasn't been shy about saying it doesn't need ASML's bleeding-edge High-NA EUV lithography machines to make its next-generation A16 manufacturing process.

TSMC Senior VP Kevin Zhang spoke at a conference in Amsterdam this week, where he said TSMC's new A16 plants could be designed to accommodate the technology, but it's not certain... remember, TSMC is the world's biggest contract chipmaker, and the largest customer and user of ASML's regular EUV machines.

The future-generation A16 manufacturing process is under development right now, but TSMC wants to hit the market with A16 in the second half of 2026... and the company might not use ASML's new High-NA EUV lithography machines to do it. Zhang said: "I like the technology but I don't like the sticker price. When actually High NA EUV will come in play, I think it depends on where's the optimum economic and the technical balancing we can achieve".

TSMC is urgently expanding its orders for CoWoS packaging equipment, with Taiwanese factories welcoming huge orders for equipment machines.

The unstoppable wave of AI is coming in many forms, with the AI GPUs and AI processors being made mostly at TSMC. TSMC estimates that the server AI processor revenue would more than double in 2024, accounting for around 11-13% of total revenue in 2024. However, server AI processors will account for 50% of annual revenue by 2029.

The server AI processor that TSMC mentions refers to the GPU, AI accelerator, and CPU that perform training and inference functions, but it does NOT include network, edge, or terminal device AI. TSMC emphasized at the North American Technology Forum that its 2.5D advanced packaging CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) is a key driving technology for the AI revolution, which allows for more processor cores and HBM on a single interposer layer.

Synopsys and Samsung have announced its hit first production tapeout of its next-generation flagship mobile CPU on Samsung Foundry's GAA process.

The companies announced that they have achieved successful production tapeout for its high-performance mobile SoC design, including flagship CPUs and GPUs, with 300MHz higher performance using Synopsys.ai full stack AI-driven EDA suite and a broad portfolio of Synopsys IP on Samsung Foundry's latest Gate-All-Around (GAA) process technologies.

Kijoon Hong, vice president of SLSI at Samsung Electronics, said: "Our longstanding collaboration has delivered leading-edge SoC designs. This is a remarkable milestone to successfully achieve the highest performance, power and area on the most advanced mobile CPU cores and SoC designs in collaboration with Synopsys. Not only have we demonstrated that AI-driven solutions can help us achieve PPA targets for even the most advanced GAA process technologies, but through our partnership we have established an ultra-high-productivity design system that is consistently delivering impressive results".

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Wednesday that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan to seize control of TSMC would be "absolutely devastating" to the US economy.

Raimondo was asked at a US House hearing about the impact of an invasion of Taiwan by China to control TSMC, where she said "it would be absolutely devastating. Right now, the United States buys 92% of its leading edge chips from TSMC in Taiwan".

It was only back in March of this year that a top US admiral testified that China is building its military and nuclear arsenal on a scale not seen since World War II, preparing to invade Taiwan by 2027. Admiral John Aquilino, the leader of the Indo-Pacific Command, told the US House Armed Services Committee in a prepared testimony on Tuesday that Beijing's defense budget has ballooned by 16% over the last few years to over $223 billion. In the three years since he's taken command, he said that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had added another 400 fighter jets and 20 new major warships to its arsenal. Admiral Aquilino said China has doubled its ballistic and cruise missile inventory since 2020.

China has imported more than $1 billion in goods from the Netherlands in April 2024 alone, a rather hefty 32% increase even in the world of US export restrictions and the selling of semiconductor machines to China.

China's imports from the Netherlands increased 32% last month from a year ago, to $1.4 billion, according to data released this week. The data doesn't show the breakdown of trade, which will come later this month, but we all know it's coming from Dutch company ASML, which makes semiconductor machines.

In the months leading up to April 2024, over 50% of the value of all Chinese imports from the Netherlands were just ASML's lithography machines, according to Bloomberg's analysis of the official data. The US has been restricting China's access to the latest chip-making tools, pressuring countries like the Netherlands to stop exporting equipment to China, and even stop repairing the equipment that China has already purchased.

Reports indicate that Tesla is being investigated by US prosecutors for any possible evidence of committing securities and wire fraud.

The examination of the company by US prosecutors is to find evidence of Tesla committing securities and wire fraud by misleading consumers and investors with Tesla's self driving capabilities found within its electric car line-up.

The two technologies, Tesla's Full Self-Driving system, and the Autopilot system, have been a point of conjecture for quite some time, as some regulatory bodies have argued the naming of the technologies is misleading due to the features not providing full autonomy, as Tesla still requires drivers to periodically place their hands on the wheel and be ready to take back over when necessary.

Intel has plans to partner with 14 different Japanese companies to develop technology to automate "back-end" chipmaking processes, like advanced packaging.

In a new report from Nikkei, the US and Japan are looking to cut geopolitical risks to their semiconductor supply chains. The deal would involve electronics maker Omron, Yamaha Motor, and materials supplier Resonac and Shin-Etsu Polymer, will be led by the head of Intel's Japanese business: Kunimasa Suzuki.

This new group will invest tens of billions of yen (with 10 million yen = $65 million USD or so) that will develop the technologies in a working state by 2028. Nikkei reports that with the advances in front-end operations including circuit formation start to approach their physical limits, competition is brewing in back-end steps like stacking chips to improve performance.

The U.S. government is on a quest to reduce the strain on the microchip fabrication industry, which has progressively become more important with the rise of artificial intelligence-powered systems.

The Biden Administration is committed to bringing chip manufacturing back to the United States, and under the multi-billion CHIPS Act, applications have been opened for $285 million in funding to develop "digital twins". Digital twins are advanced software models of hardware that can be used by engineers to identify key problems in the design of a piece of hardware. In this case, to receive funding an institute would have to create a digital twin of microchips.

The result of having a digital twin for hardware means engineers can make changes to the design of a chip before its even manufactured, speeding up the overall time it takes to design new silicone-based hardware. These virtual clones of pieces of hardware have been used in the past by the auto industry and the Space Force for satellite simulations.

Google and the US government are presenting their closing arguments to Judge Amit Mehta regarding the antitrust lawsuit that may result in Google being penalized for its dominance in the search engine market.

The US government has accused Google of violating anticompetitive laws with its Google Search engine, which is easily the most popular search engine in the world. The lawsuit alleges Google paid electronics vendors and developers billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine on the device, which created a monopoly within the market where other search engines are unable to compete.

Google revealed last year that it spent $26.3 billion in 2021 on deals for its search engine to be default on various internet browsers. Apple received between $18 billion and $20 billion to keep Google the default search engine on Safari. As you can probably imagine, Google doesn't believe it has a monopoly on the market, or broken any anti-compete laws and that its dominance on the market is a result of its product simply being the best.