Business, Financial & Legal - Page 2

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.

Apple has posted its Q2 2025 financial results, with the company pulling in $95.4 billion in revenue -- down from the record-breaking $124.3 billion in revenue from the previous quarter -- with its "bread and butter" doing quite well, as always.

Apple broke industry estimates for its Q2 2025 revenue, and enjoyed some healthy business in all departments apart from one. Apple's "bread and butter" is the iPhone, which pulled in $46.84 billion in revenue, compared to $45.96 billion from the previous quarter: driven by the new iPhone 16e release.

The recent launches of the new 13-inch and 15-inch M4 MacBook Air laptops helped boost up Macrevenue, with $7.95 billion in earnings compared to $7.45 billion in Q1 2025.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has personally thanked President Trump and his focus on domestic (US) semiconductor manufacturing, pledging that his company would invest $500 billion in the US over the next 4 years.

Tim Cook has promised that Apple will invest $500 billion in the United States in the next 4 years, and that it has a long-standing relationship with domestic suppliers.

Cook said in his virtual presentation during President Donald Trump's celebration of his first 100 days in office: "I want to take a moment to recognize President Trump's focus on domestic semiconductor manufacturing, and we will continue to work with the administration as we invest in these areas".

Grand Theft Auto 6 has been officially delayed by Rockstar Games, with the developer saying it needs more time to complete development of the highly anticipated title.

The announcement of GTA 6 being delayed until May 26, 2025, has resulted in Take-Two Interactive's share price sliding by as much as 7% at the time of reporting, marking a deep decline for the publisher. Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has responded to the announcement of the delay with a recent statement, saying the publisher fully supports Rockstar's decision, and that "While we take the movement of our titles seriously and appreciate the vast and deep global anticipation for 'Grand Theft Auto 6,' we remain steadfast in our commitment to excellence."

Despite the announcement of the delay, Take-Two still anticipates delivering a multiyear period of growth for its business, which will include "enhanced value for our shareholders." More specifically, Take-Two reiterated that it expects it achieve sequential increases in net bookings in fiscal 2026 and 2027, saying it believes it will achieve record levels of bookings during both periods.

The Taiwanese government is planning to better control exports of its advanced semiconductor process technologies, as well as outbound semiconductor investments according to new reports.

In a new report from the Economic Daily, we're learning that Taiwanese government officials will enforce the "N-1" technology restriction, which will see TSMC banned from exporting its latest production nodes, and it'll also introduce a penalty for violating the N-1 restriction.

Taiwan Premier Cho Jung-tai has said that the new N-1 policy will apply to TSMC's planned production in the United States, with only one generation older allowed to be deployed overseas. However, TSMC's most advanced semiconductor process technology is its current N3P process node, but before the end of the year we'll see TSMC begin fabbing new chips on its N2 process node, which will then become the flagship process node.

TSMC is reportedly not using High-NA EUV lithography machines for its next-gen A14 (1.4nm) process node, and will instead continue to rely on its conventional 0.33-NA EUV machines.

The news was revealed at the North American Technology Symposium recently, with the move leading semiconductor competitors like Intel Foundry with a technological edge over TSMC (Intel spent billions buying ASML's bleeding-edge High-NA EUV lithography machines).

TSMC's SVP Kevin Zhang said during the recent North American Technology Symposium: "TSMC will not be using high-NA EUV lithography to pattern A14 chips, manufacturing of which is scheduled to start in 2028. From 2 nanometers to A14, we don't have to use high-NA, but we can continue to maintain similar complexity in terms of processing steps. Each generation of technology, we try to minimize the number of mask increases. This is very important to provide a cost-efficient solution".

TSMC currently has 24 semiconductor factories under construction across Taiwan, the United States, Germany, and Japan, but the company has a shortage of fab workers that could slow things down.

In a new report from DigiTimes, we're hearing that almost all of the teams that TSMC has in Taiwan that can be mobilized, have been, and that hiring locals in Taiwan has caused issues to get worse across its global supply chain. TSMC had 83,825 employees at the end of 2025, which is a huge increase from the 51,000 staffers it employed at the end of 2019.

However, turn over of TSMC employees has reportedly been high enough that it has pushed the company to increase salaries and bonuses, with overseas operations being a challenge to figure out local work culture. Japan is very similar to Taiwan, but there aren't many workers to fill positions, while the shortage of workers in the US has made it hard for TSMC to deal with America's "work-life balance" idea.

TSMC says that it remains on track to begin high-volume production of next-gen chips on its new N2 (2nm-class) process node, the first production tech that uses gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet transistors, in the second half of this year.

The news was unveiled during TSMC's recent North American Technology Symposium 2025 event, with its new N2 node to power multiple products this year from AMD, Apple, and most recently, Intel.

TSMC's next-gen A14 process node, when compared against the upcoming N2 process, will have 15% more performance using the same power, or up to 30% power reduction at the same speed, along with over 20% more logic density. TSMC will be evolving its NanoFlex standard cell architecture to NanoFlex Pro, enabling greater performance, power efficiency, and design flexibility.

AMD has just confirmed it will host its Computex 2025 press conference on May 21, and you can tune into the show right from your PC or smartphone.

AMD's upcoming Computex 2025 press conference will be hosted by Jack Huynh, the SVP and GM of the Computing and Graphics Group of the company, who recently hosted CES 2025, where he willl be announcing key products and technology advancements across gaming, AI, PC, and enterprise, showcasing whats' possible through AMD vision on AI-powered devices.

We should expect to see things like the Radeon RX 9060 XT mainstream RDNA 4 graphics card, I'm sure a ton about how successful and powerful the company's fresh new Strix Halo APU is, an earful about AI which I'm sure we'll all be sick of within minutes of hearing "AI, AI, AI, AI, AI" over and over again.