Business, Financial & Legal - Page 26

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.

Can you believe AMD has just turned 55 years old? AMD was founded on May 1, 1969, starting as a microprocessor company, turning into an everything giant now with Ryzen, EPYC, Radeon, AI GPUs, and so much more.

AMD started out with its own Athlon CPUs back in the day, moving onto acquire ATi and bringing the Radeon brand in-house. From there, the company has had ups and downs with its Radeon GPUs, but the Ryzen and EPYC CPUs have been powerhouse successes for the company over the last 10 years.

Turning 55, the future is bright for AMD with the rise of AI PCs this year and its NPU inside of its APUs and CPUs with Ryzen AI. AMD is inside of the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S and Sony PlayStation 5 consoles, and countless gaming handhelds, desktop PCs, laptops, and more.

Elon Musk has just terminated multiple senior executives at Tesla, with hundreds of other Tesla staffers let go at the 'send' button of an email from Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The Information is reporting that Musk wrote in an email to Tesla staff that were being laid off: "Hopefully, these actions are making it clear that we need to be absolutely hardcore about headcount and cost reduction. While some on exec staff are taking this seriously, most are not yet doing so".

Rebecca Tinucci, senior director of Tesla's Supercharger business, and Daniel Ho, the head of new products, will both be leaving Tesla today. Tesla has a global workforce of around 140,000 with the electric vehicle giant ordering a culling of over 10% of its workforce, which results in 14,000+ layoffs. The hundreds of people let go today are just a new wave of layoffs, it seems. Two senior leaders, battery development chief Drew Baglino, and Patel have both announced that they're leaving Tesla.

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has been named 2024 Chief Executive of the Year by her peer CEOs, in an announcement from Chief Executive magazine today.

Dr. Lisa Su was selected by an independent committee of CEOs for her work in leading "one of the most spectacular turnarounds in the history of the technology sector". AMD has gone from second-best to class-leading with its Ryzen and EPYC processors, the company has semi-custom designs inside of Microsoft's Xbox Series X/S and Sony PlayStation 5 consoles, as well as countless handhelds, laptops, and more.

Ed Bastian, chief executive of Delta Air Lines and Chief Executive magazine's 2023 CEO of the Year, who served on this year's selection committee, said: "Lisa Su's leadership in transforming AMD into a global leader in innovation and technology is truly remarkable. Just as impressive is the fact that she never forgets the people behind the technology-her employees and customers are always front and center. Her values-led approach is exactly the type of leadership we need as we move into an exciting and unprecedented future driven by AI innovation and emerging technology".

The Italian government has plans to invest around $10 billion into the semiconductor industry this year, where it plans to become one of the biggest microelectronics products in Europe.

Industry Minister Adolfo Urso told reporters in Pescara, where the ruling party Fratelli d'Italia met over the weekend: "Italy is preparing to become one of the largest microelectronics producers in Europe". Urso added: "I believe that in the coming weeks we will be in a position to make other equally significant announcements".

Urso announced a $3.4 billion investment into Singaporean startup Silicon Box, back in March 2024, which would see a new chip factory build in the north of the country. This announcement was born out of the Italian government's failure to convince Intel to invest, reports BNN Bloomberg.

TSMC is one of the biggest benefactors of the unstoppable AI market, with TSMC's AI revenue expected to exceed $10 billion for the first time this year, setting a new high and cementing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) as one of the biggest players in the AI industry.

TSMC said during a press conference this month that the Taiwanese chip maker is optimistic about revenues contributed by AI processors to more than double this year, expected to account for a low-teens percentage of TSMC's total revenue for 2024. Within the next 5 years, however, server AI processors are expected to have a compound annual growth rate of 50%, making up over 20% of TSMC's revenue in 2028.

The company is highly optimistic about the future of AI, with TSMC president Wei Zhijia revising the AI order visibility and revenue ratio during a statement this month. Order visibility has been extended from its originally expected 2027 date to 2028, with the company emphasizing that almost all AI chip makers are working with TSMC to solve AI-related needs of the never-ending demand for energy-saving AI computing power.

The Senate officially passed new legislation that declares TikTok a national security threat, which forces the popular app's owner ByteDance to sell the software within 270 days.

If ByteDance doesn't find a US government-approved buyer within the designated timeframe TikTok will be removed from both app stores. The reasoning behind the new classification of a national security risk is the US government believes that TikTok could be used to scrape data on 170 million Americans for China while also being an avenue to spread misinformation.

Due to ByteDance being a Chinese company the US government believes there's a good chance that TikTok is sharing its data on US citizens with the Chinese government, hence ByteDance being forced to sell the US version of the app to a US government-approved entity. However, The Guardian has reported that ByteDance would rather shut down the US app if it has exhausted all other legal options to fight the legislation that would remove it from US app stores.

TSMC has said that its new chip manufacturing technology -- A16 -- will enter production in the second half of 2026, where it will be in a semiconductor battle with Intel for the world's fastest chips.

During a news conference in Santa Clara, California, on Wednesday, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) executives said that AI chip makers will be the first adopters of its new A16 process technology rather than smartphone makers like Apple.

Intel came out banging its chest in February this year, saying that with its new High-NA EUV lithography machines from ASML, the company would make the world's fastest chips in the coming years with its new Intel 14A process node. TSMC's senior vice president of business development, Kevin Zhang, told reporters that TSMC has developed its new A16 process node quicker than expected, thanks to the insatiable demand from AI chip companies like NVIDIA.

ASML is considering a rather large expansion of its operations in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, signing a letter of intent to look into an expansion that would house 20,000 new employees in an underdeveloped area north of Eindhoven, near the city's airport.

We've been reporting that the Dutch government is very keen on keeping its largest company in the Netherlands -- ASML, obviously -- from expanding out of the country and instead keeping it home in the Netherlands. The Dutch government kicked off "Operation Beethoven" to do just that.

The Dutch government announced $2.7 billion in planned infrastructure upgrades in the Eindhoven region to prevent ASML from moving some of its operations overseas. ASML CFO Roger Dassen said in a recent statement: "As we have said before, ASML prefers to keep its core activities in the Netherlands as close as possible to the existing locations" in the neighboring town of Veldhoven, where ASML is headquartered.

A cloud server discovered by NK Internet blog author Nick Roy in 2023 has led to a potential subcontracting digital paper trail to the BBC, Amazon, and HBO Max.

According to recent reports, think tank Stimson Center dived through the seemingly inactive cloud server, discovering many instructions for animation work and logs by artists on what was completed on any given day. These files were uploaded by individuals, which Stimson Center's Martin Williams wrote was evidence of a "go-between" server used for relaying information "between the production companies and the animators."

Mandiant, a cyber security firm owned by Google, searched through the activity logs and found that many of the IP addresses from the individuals accessing the server were masked by a VPN, but instructions for content were frequently written in Chinese and translated to Korean. Content discovered on the server was from season 3 of Amazon's "Invincible", Cartoon Network and HBO Max's "Iyanu, Child of Wonder", and files from the BBC's Octonauts.

Samsung is forcing all of the executives from its Samsung Group units to work 6-day weeks from as early as this week, in a shift to "emergency mode" reports the Korea Economic Daily.

The emergency mode shift is happening because of the South Korea won and its sharp depreciation, rising oil prices, and high borrowing costs are amplifying uncertainies in business, after some of Samsung's businesses delivered poorer-than-expected results last year.

A Samsung Group company executive said: "Considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome it".

SK hynix has just announced it signed a memorandum of understanding with TSMC for collaboration to make next-generation HBM memory and enhance logic and HBM integration through advanced packaging technology.

The South Korean giant is working on HBM4 right now, the sixth generation in the HBM family, and is expected for mass production in 2026 with the help of TSMC. SK hynix said that working with TSMC, combining the global leader in the AI memory space with the top global logic factory in the world, will lead to "more innovations" in HBM technology.

The collaboration is expected to enable breakthroughs in memory performance through a trilateral collaboration in product design, foundry, and memory provider with the combined powers of SK hynix and TSMC. The two companies will first focus on improving the performance of the base die that is mounted at the very bottom of the HBM package.

Elon Musk has been at war against bots on X since he bought the company and his latest strategy to curb the spread of bots is to charge new users a fee to enable posting.

X began testing its "Not-A-Bot" program in New Zealand and the Phillipines in October last year, which involved charging users in those regions $1 to access the platform. Users that paid the $1 received features such as posting, replying, liking and bookmarking X posts.

It remains unclear how successful the test program was, but it appears it was at least somewhat successful as it will be expanded upon as Musk moves to combat "Current AI (and troll farms)" as they "can pass"are you a bot"with ease," wrote Musk on X.

ASML has just shipped its second-ever High-NA EUV lithography machine to a mystery new customer, with the first chip-making tool -- worth $370 million, by the way -- received by Intel not too long ago now.

The Dutch company shipped its newest High-NA EUV lithography machine to Intel earlier this year, but it wouldn't announce who its second customer was. It's expected to be a company like TSMC, NVIDIA, Apple, or even Samsung.

Intel will use ASML's new Twinscan EXE:500 High-NA EUV lithography machine in early production sometime between 2026 and 2027, to make its next-gen Intel 14A-based processors. ASML is the largest company in the Netherlands, with the Dutch government recently enacting "Operation Beethoven" to keep ASML from branching out overseas, and keeping its most valuable asset in the Netherlands by improving infrastructure, schooling, housing, and more around the Eindhoven region where ASML is based.

The US government has been splashing cash and grants from its CHIPS Act, with US-based Micron Technology receiving $6.1 billion to produce advanced memory chips in New York and Idaho.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer personally courted Micron to build four new chip factories near Syracuse in the town of Clay, where he said: "It will be the biggest memory chip plant in America, for the Syracuse area, this is the best thing that's happened probably since the Erie Canal".

The mention of the Erie Canal dates back to the 1825 infrastructure project that connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, with Schumer underlining how big of an economic impact -- and national security -- these new deals are creating with Micron.

Taipower made an important call to TSMC on Monday to help generate electricity to avoid blackouts, while Taoyuen had a two-hour power outage on Tuesday.

After the earthquake in Taiwan a couple of weeks ago and with recent temperature rises as the country heads into summer, annual maintenance and the failure of air conditioners across Taiwan saw Taipower's power supply pressure immediately increase. On Monday night, Taipower called TSMC to help them generate enough electricity, which saw them close to power outages.

Taipower spokesperson Cai Zhimeng said on Tuesday that the power supply was very tight on Monday night, and that TSMC helped out greatly by turning on its own diesel generators and providing 200,000 kilowatts of electricity. Taipower quickly pointed out that TSMC was helping increase its power supply and not cause a reduction in electricity consumption or have any negative effects on TSMC's operations.

The US government is awarding Samsung up to $6.4 billion in grants to expand its chip production facilities in Texas, USA, to boost US-based semiconductor chipmaking.

The new $6.4 billion in funding is being fed through the 2002 CHIPS and Science Act, which will assist in the first two chip production facilities, an advanced packaging facility, and a research and development center planned by Samsung. These new facilities will be located in Taylor, Texas, USA.

These new funds will also help Samsung expand its semiconductor facility in Austin, Texas while boosting chip output for aerospace, defense, and auto industries while bolstering national security, administration officials told reporters and reported by Reuters.

Samsung Electronics co-CEO Qing Guixian reportedly visited Taiwan recently in a "low-key manner," according to a new report from UDN.

It was reported that his first priority was to promise Samsung's HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), which is used in AI GPUs; the faster and more, the better. Samsung has been focusing on pushing high-end DRAM technologies, including HBM (HBM3, HBM3E, and next-gen HBM4) and DDR5, where it needs help from Taiwanese ODM manufacturers, expanding outsourcing of mature and niche products.

Samsung met with both TSMC and Quanta Group subsidiary Werder, reports UDN. According to the sources, the Samsung co-CEO had 'two major tasks during this trip': promoting Samsung's HBM and possible AI cooperation with Taiwanese manufacturers.

Japanese video game developer Koei Tecmo officially filed a lawsuit against Youzu (Singapore) (Yoozoo Games) in Tokyo court on April 8.

The iconic Japanese video game developer has alleged that Youzu (Singapore) has been using content such as music, images, and trademarks from two of its titles, "Nobunaga's Ambition" and "Taiko Risshiden". The suit alleges Youzu (Singapore) has been continuously using Koei Tecmo's intellectual property in web advertisements for 成り上がり～華と武の戦国, which roughly translates to "The Uprising: The Warring States of Flowers and War," Infinity Kingdom, and Dynasty Origins, all of which are published by Youzu (Singapore).

The suit states that Koei Tecmo has warned Youzu (Singapore) multiple times via letters but alleges the company has continued to infringe on its intellectual property. Koei Tecmo is seeking an injunction as well as compensation for damages, but it's not immediately clear if Youzu (Singapore) will lose the case as Japan isn't a part of the Reciprocal Enforcement of Foreign Judgements Regime Act, meaning before any enforcement takes place, the claims will have to be first filed in Singapore.