Business, Financial & Legal

Texas Instruments plans to spend over $60 billion on semiconductor manufacturing plants in the United States, including two new factories in Sherman, Texas.

In a new report from Bloomberg, we're hearing that the US-based chipmaker is promoting its domestic semiconductor manufacturing ambitions after President Trump urged US investments, and threatened to cause waves through tariffs. Texas Instruments is reportedly keeping to its long-term capital spending plans, with the $60B+ put towards its new plants that are being constructed, and getting them ready towards full production.

The company will also begin construction of two new chip-making factories at its site in Sherman, Texas, as demand is strong. Texas Instruments beefed-up its in-house production plans, which counters the industry trend of shipping production off overseas, and this was before the US government offered subsidies through the CHIPS Act under the Biden administration.

Intel has reportedly told its employees that the company plans to lay off between 15% and 20% of its employees from its chip manufacturing division, with more job cuts planned down the line.

The Oregonian wrote earlier this week that general manager of the Intel Foundry Technology and Manufacturing organization, Naga Chandrasekaran, told its factory workers of the news in an email sent over the weekend. Chandrasekaran said: "These are difficult actions but essential to meet our affordability challenges and current financial position of the company. It drives pain to every individual".

An Intel spokesperson told CRN that the company is "taking steps to become a leaner, faster and more efficient company" that it had previously announced (in the stories below).

TSMC Arizona has reportedly finished its first run of chips made in the USA for Apple, AMD, and NVIDIA, marking a major milestone for the semiconductor giant, and the USA.

In a new report from Ctee picked up by insider Dan Nystedt on X, TSMC reportedly pushed out its first run of chips for the three US-based companies, with NVIDIA's new Blackwell AI GPUs made in Arizona being sent back to Taiwan for advanced packaging.

Apple's new A20 series processors for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max smartphones will be made on TSMC's 2nm process with WMCM (Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module) advanced packaging at its AP7 plant in Chiayi, Taiwan. WMCM capacity at the AP7 plant is expected to reach 50,000 wafers per month by the end of 2026.

Micron has been hit with a lawsuit that alleges the company engaged in a scheme to intentionally seek and destroy the reputation of a rival memory maker.

Chinese company, Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) has filed a complaint in the US District Court that claims Micron participated in a scheme to destroy the company's reputation and business through "spreading xenophobic lies that YMTC's market-leading flash memory chips are capable of being used to spy on millions of Americans who use the devices in which the chips are embedded, at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party or its People's Liberation Army."

The lawsuit states YMTC's chips are completely safe and these accusations from Micron are "false and unlawful" - even going as far as to say Micron knows they aren't legitimate claims.

Micron and the Trump administration have announced that Micron plans to expand its US investments to around $150 billion in domestic semiconductor manufacturing, with $50 billion directed into US-based R&D, which will create an estimated 90,000 direct and indirect jobs.

Micron's approximately $200 billion broader US expansion vision includes two leading-edge, high-volume fabs based in Idaho, up to four leading-edge, high-volume fabs in New York, and the expansion and modernization of its existing manufacturing fab in Virginia. These moves will see advanced HBM packaging capabilities and R&D to drive American innovation and technology leadership.

The US-based memory giant is also announcing a $50 billion domestic R&D investment, which reaffirms its long-term position as the global memory technology leader, with Micron's investment including its ongoing plans for a megafab facility in New York. These investments are designed to allow Micron to meet expected market demand, maintain share and support Micron's goal of producing 40% of its DRAM in the United States. The co-location of these two Idaho fabs, with Micron's Idaho R&D operations will "drive economics of scale and faster time to market for leading-edge products, including HBM".

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, one of the world's leading AI companies, over allegedly scraping the social media platform's data without its permission.

The lawsuit, filed in the San Francisco Superior Court on Wednesday, claims that Anthropic used scraper bots to harvest Reddit data, violating the platform's User Agreement. The complaint states that Anthropic "bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry. It's anything but". The complaint adds that Anthropic pushes the message that it as a company "prioritizes honesty" and is "guided by unusually high trust". Reddit dismisses these affirmations, saying, "These claims are empty marketing gimmicks."

The complaint goes on to allege that Anthropic intentionally trained its AI models on Reddit data without first getting consent from the company. Additionally, Reddit claims that Anthropic's claim in 2024 that it stopped using content harvesting bots after it received complaints from the platform is false, with repair community website iFixit stating that Anthropic web crawlers landed on its website more than a million times in a single day in July 2024.

President Trump's new export guidelines went into effect in April, and NVIDIA, the GPU powerhouse that is powering the massive push into AI through providing the necessary hardware to fuel data centers, is expected to feel the hit from the new trade restrictions.

According to reports, NVIDIA is set to be effectively cut off from the Chinese datacenter market, but it will still manage to realize approximately $4.6 billion of the ordered $7.1 billion worth of H20 GPUs in Q1. Moreover, NVIDIA lost $2.5 billion in H20 sales in Q1 and will have to reduce expected revenue by another $8 billion in Q2. The bleeding doesn't stop there, as NVIDIA will be unable to fulfill purchase commitments in Q1 for H20 iunventory that equates to $4.5 billion.

Despite the loss in revenue, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang praised the Trump administration's decision to unwhind the Biden Administration's AI Diffusion plan, as it would have cost NVIDIA even more money, as previous administrations plan was to implement a cap on AI chips to the rest of world, essentially setting a fixed number for NVIDIA's sales. Despite the trade restrictions, NVIDIA isn't going to give up on the market entirely, with Huang saying the company is currently exploring ways to still compete.

Apple has violated the European Union's Digital Markets Act, regulators find, and must pay a €500 million fine by July.

The EU recently released its 70-page determination on Apple's ongoing conduct. Last month, European Commission enforcers found that Apple has violated the Digital Markets Act of 2024, and now the agency has published their findings on the matter.

According to the Commission, Apple broke the Digital Markets Act's Article 5(4), which is related to anti-steering provisions (Apple must allow developers to freely communicate with consumers, including offers available outside of the App Store). Apple must pay a sizable 500 million euro fine, the Commission has decided.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang hosted a dinner for its supply chain partners last night, with the biggest and best in Taiwan's technology industry.

Jensen personally saw off TSMC chairman C.C. Wei, with the NVIDIA CEO saying that the TSMC boss will be "very busy" in the future between making next-gen AI GPUs and GeForce RTX series GPUs. The two executives shook hands and said goodbye to each other "tacitly" reports Taiwan media outlet UDN.

Jensen told the media that in the future NVIDIA will build AI supercomputers all over the world, including Taiwan, and that Taiwan will be very busy. Jensen is expected to announce NVIDIA's new global HQ in Taiwan at Computex 2025 tomorrow, and that the Chinese market will see the company creating the best products for China, all while complying with US export restrictions.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is expected to unveil its new global HQ in Taipei, Taiwan this week with Computex 2025 starting in just a couple of days time, but now we're hearing news that NVIDIA is preparing to build a new R&D facility in Chinahai that would help the company stay competitive with AI GPUs in China.

In a new report from the Financial Times, we're hearing that NVIDIA is reportedly looking to build a new research and development center in Shanghai, China, which would help the company stay competitive in China. NVIDIA has been hit with a sales dive over continuously tightened US export restrictions, so NVIDIA is working around that with this proposed new R&D facility in Shanghai.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang reportedly talked about his plans with Shanghai mayor Gong Zheng when the two met in the city last month, with the usual "according to two people with knowledge of the matter". NVIDIA is leasing a new office space in Shanghai that will house all of its existing employees, as well as room for expansion.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will reportedly announce NVIDIA's new global HQ in Taiwan, with the announcement taking place as Computex 2025 kicks off in Taipei, Taiwan.

In new reports from UDN and on X by insider Dan Nystedt, we can expect the big announcement from Jensen as he and his family just landed in Taipei ahead of Computex 2025 in a private jet that flew into Hong Kong according to local media. It's expected that theme of Computex 2025 is "AI Next" with 4800 of the booths at the show, a reported 60% of them will be AI-related.

Local media reports that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang flew from California into Taipei, but Jensen was just shaking hands with President Trump and Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia in the last 24 hours. I suspect he would've either flown from Saudi Arabia to California, and then Taipei, but the NVIDIA CEO has been quite the busy man lately between all of these uber-important meetings.

Bill Gates has said that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is responsible for "killing the world's poorest children" through his cuts to US development assistance.

In a new interview with the Financial Times, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has come out against Elon Musk for the decision made by the group the Tesla CEO formed, called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is tasked with cutting over-spending throughout the US government. According to reports, DOGE shut down the US Agency for International Development in February, which Gates says has left life-saving food and medicines expiring in warehouses, resulting in the resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV, and polio.

Apple is expected to order up to $60 billion worth of chips from TSMC in 2025 alone according to analysts, which will push the Taiwanese semiconductor leader to over NT $1 trillion of revenue this year.

The analysis is based on how much of TSMC's share in Apple's products is growing, with TSMC's new Arizona, USA-based semiconductor fabs to play a key role in Apple's continued releases of iProducts. Apple CEO Tim Cook has been adamant that his company is TSMC Arizona's largest customer, with its bleeding-edge 2nm process node being a key part of increasing the value of Apple's orders with TSMC.

In a new report from Taiwan's Economic Daily, we're hearing that analysts think that new 2nm orders from Apple should reach around NT $1 trillion (around $33 billion USD or so) in 2025, and that's just for new 2nm orders. TSMC earned around $90 billion of revenue in 2024, with revenue growth expected for TSMC coming from an increase in pricing across Apple's entire product stack since TSMC Is the sole semiconductor provider.

TSMC has reportedly increased its wafer costs at its US-based semiconductor plants, with NVIDIA GPU prices expected to "rise across the board" with both gaming and AI GPU price rises on the way.

In a new post by insider @Jukanlosreve on X, DigiTimes supply chain sources have said NVIDIA is "facing multiple crises" with a reported $5.5 billion write-down on its Q1 2025 earnings thanks to the ban on its H20 AI GPUs entering China seeing CEO Jensen Huang running between the US and China to cull the impact and help pursuading the Trump administration to chill on its AI chip restrictions.

In order to maintain stable profitability, NVIDIA has reportedly raised official prices for almost "all of its products" allowing its partners to increase prices accordingly. NVIDIA launched its high-end GeForce RTX 5090 earlier this year, with custom ASUS variants launching for around NT $90,000 but surging past NT $100,000 through distribution channels, an increase of over 10%. Meanwhile, Hopper H200 and Blackwell B200 AI GPU modules and server prices have also increased.

Intel is reportedly deep in discussions with NVIDIA, Google, and Microsoft to use its Intel 18A process node (classified as 2nm) for their upcoming chips, which would move some large orders away from TSMC.

In a post shared on X by insider @Jukanlosreve and reported by Korean media outlet Chosun, we're hearing that Intel Foundry's fresh new Intel 18A process node will enter stable mass production in the second half of the year, with Intel officially announcing in early April that 18A had entered risk production.

Intel Foundry being in discussions with the likes of NVIDIA, Google, and Microsoft could be a masterstroke move against TSMC in a world now controlled through tariffs under the Trump administration. Intel is a US-based company, and TSMC is a Taiwan-based company... if Intel is using its Intel Foundry semiconductor manufacturing arm on US soil, making and providing chips to US companies... then there are no tariffs.

Microsoft's purchase of Activision in 2023 was the most expensive video game acquisition of all time, and with that title comes a lot of regulatory scrutiny to ensure the deal didn't violate any antitrust laws that made the market unfair for competition.

The $69 billion deal attracted considerable attention at the time and has certainly given Microsoft and its gaming brand, Xbox, a massive boost in the market. However, with a deal of this proportion, regulators such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wanted to get involved to ensure everything was done legally. An investigation was launched into the deal. The investigation results have now been published, and Microsoft has been found completely clean of any wrongdoing.

Bloomberg's legal team delved into the details of the document posted by the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which stated in quite heavy language that Microsoft hasn't violated any antitrust laws with its acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, and most notably, the conclusion of the investigation will "reshape how the Federal Trade Commission reviews deals involving rapidly evolving technology."

AMD has posted its first quarter 2025 financial results, and with $7.4 billion in revenue and a gross margin of 50%, it's good news. The company's impressive revenue was once again driven by growth in the Data Center segment, which saw a first-quarter revenue increase of 36% year over year.

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su cites the company's expanding 'data center and AI momentum' as playing a key role in its continued success (this is the fourth consecutive quarter of growth). However, AMD's Client and Gaming segment seems to be doing well, too, with revenue up 28% year over year.

This covers AMD Ryzen products for desktop and mobile devices, Radeon GPUs, and hardware for consoles like the PlayStation and Xbox Series X|S. However, AMD's Ryzen processors grew revenue here, with Client revenue growing by a massive 64% year over year. AMD's Gaming business, on the other hand, fell by 30%, even with the recent launch of the Radeon RX 9070 Series.

AMD has reportedly abandoned the use of Samsung Foundry's SF4X process node, after reports suggested the company would be mass-producing its I/O dies for EPYC server CPUs on Samsung 4nm.

In a new post on X by insider @Jukanlosreve, we're hearing that AMD has "decided not to use Samsung Foundry's SF4X process" after reports back in February 2025 that it would be using the process node for its I/O die on EPYC processors. We should expect AMD to shift those orders over to TSMC and its new Arizona plant in the US for these 4nm chips.

AMD was reportedly exclusively collaborating with Samsung on its new SF4X process node, with the new SF4X node used on its EPYC server CPUs, Radeon APUs, and even Radeon GPUs, with AMD using a dual-sourcing strategy between TSMC and Samsung Foundry, which would've been a big deal (mostly for Samsung here).

After years of it being a possibility, Elon Musk's Starbase facility in Texas is now an official city after residents of the area approved the decision.

The Starbase facility is located on the southern tip of Texas and is where Elon Musk's space-faring company, SpaceX, operates its rocket launches/development. The ruling to turn Starbase into an official city came after residents voted to incorporate a patch of land as a new municipality in an election held on Saturday. Out of the 283 eligible voters, the majority are SpaceX employees, with 212 votes in favor of the decision and six opposing it.

As for the size of the new city, Starbase's jurisdiction will be about 1.6 square miles, have its own local government, a mayor, two commissioners, taxation, and other local infrastructure. The first mayor of the city will be Bobby Peden, a SpaceX vice president.

TSMC's next-gen 2nm process node (N2) is progressing smoothly, with defect density (D0) matching its 5nm process, and surpassing its 3nm and 7nm nodes at similar stages of development.

We can expect mass production of TSMC's new 2nm process node in Q4 2025 according to the latest reports from Taiwanese media outlet Ctee, with AMD's new EPYC "Venice" CPU being the first to complete tape-out on 2nm, and Apple's next-gen iPhone 18 expected to use 2nm chips. Intel is also reportedly using TSMC's new 2nm process node for the compute tiles on its next-gen Nova Lake CPUs.

TSMC's list of 2nm clients includes Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, MediaTek, and Broadcom. NVIDIA's next-gen Rubin AI GPU family will arrive on 3nm at first in 2026, with a refresh possibly hitting 2nm in the future. TSMC chairman C.C. Wei recently emphasized that demand for 2nm is "unprecedented" and far exceeds the demand of 3nm.