Business, Financial & Legal - Page 29

TSMC is reportedly considering building advanced packaging capacity in Japan, which would fuel Japan's efforts to reboot its semiconductor industry.

In a new report from Reuters, "two sources familiar with the matter" report that the Taiwanese giant is in the early stages, with the sources "declining to be identified as the information was not public." According to one of the sources who was briefed on the matter, TSMC is considering building a chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging technology in Japan.

All of TSMC's new CoWoS capacity is located in Taiwan, so this would be a significant move for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. TSMC recently built a new fab in Japan in just two hours, with workers working 24-hour days around the clock, which has earned the site the nickname "Nightless Castle." I'm sure there will be many more sleepless nights if TSMC does indeed build new CoWoS packaging technology in Japan.

A new report has revealed Apple won't be able to get out of a class-action lawsuit that accuses the company of negligence over the potential dangers of AirTags.

Bloomberg reported last week that a San Francisco judge ruled that Apple must face a lawsuit accusing the company of negligence over the potential stalking risks created by its AirTags device. Notably, the majority of the three dozen claims were dismissed by the court, but US District Judge Vince Chhabria has denied Apple's push to have the court throw out the case entirely. The suit alleges that Apple was warned of the potential dangers of its tracking device being misused by individuals and would be held liable for damages under California law.

However, Apple disagrees, as after its AirTags were released, it rolled out new safety features designed to prevent them from being used by bad actors. One of these safety features was AirTags beginning to emit a loud noise when they were moved too far away from the connected device, as well as notifications being sent to devices. Despite Apple's push back, the lawsuit argues that AirTags have "become the weapon of choice of stalkers and abusers," per Bloomberg.

The CEO of NVIDIA, a chip manufacturing company valued at approximately $2 trillion, has sat down for an interview at Stanford University, where he gave some wise words to students regarding being a successful entrepreneur.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, was asked what advice he would give to students to improve their chances of success, to which he answered that one of his strengths is that he has very low expectations and that many Stanford students have very high expectations of themselves due to the school and peers around them.

Huang then explained that when you have high expectations, you have very low resilience, "and unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you". The NVIDIA CEO goes on to explain that he uses the terms "pain and suffering" within his company in a very "happy way" because you want to "refine the character of your company," and character comes from "people who suffered".

Intel has survived pressure from hundreds of millions of dollars of lost chip sales to Huawei, after Joe Biden put pressure on the company to revoke a license issued by the Trump administration that allows Intel to ship advanced CPUs to Huawei for use inside of their laptops.

In a new report from Reuters, the outlet says that Biden "has long been under pressure to revoke a license, issued by the Trump administration, that allows Intel to ship advanced central processors to Huawei for use in laptops". The push came from competitor AMD, which said it was unfair that the Ryzen CPU giant couldn't get a license to sell similar chips to Huawei.

Intel retaining its license is a huge deal, as it can continue to sell hundreds of millions of processors to the Chinese giant amid sanctions that stop GPU sales from NVIDIA and AMD. AMD can't sell its Ryzen CPUs to Huawei, but Intel can... I can understand why AMD wouldn't be happy with that, and rightfully so.

The House of Representatives has voted on a bill that could result in TikTok being banned across the United States, and now the app is requesting users contact their Senators to tell them "how important TikTok is to you".

The message from TikTok is the second to be pushed out to users requesting them to contact their representatives to tell them how much they like TikTok, as the first message asked users to call House representatives. However, the prompt for calling lawmakers may have backfired on the company as officials have now claimed TikTok is attempting to "interfere" with the legislative process, as offices were inundated with calls, many of which were from teenagers.

The latest prompt from TikTok stated, "The House of Representatives just voted to ban TikTok, which impacts 170 million Americans just like you." For those that don't know, the bill has been passed in the House of Representatives and is now headed to the Senate where if its passed will then go to President Joe Biden who said he would sign it into law. If completely passed TikTok will have six months to sell itself or be hit with a nation-wide ban.

The Pentagon has just pulled out of a plan to spend up to $2.5 billion on a new chip grant through the CHIPS Act to Intel, but now those billions of dollars will come directly from the Commerce Department.

In a new report from Bloomberg, the usual "people familiar with the matter" told the outlet that the Pentagon had pulled out of the billions of dollars going to Intel, which now threatens the total amount that Intel was expecting to receive through federal funding, which can have ripple effects... even though the company has a market cap of $180 billion, that $3.5 billion grant seems to be important.

Intel has been seeking around $10 billion through the CHIPS and Science Act, with defense funding to be part of that spending package that Joe Biden signed into law over the weekend. This would've seen Intel receiving $3.5 billion in funding to create advanced defense and intelligence-related semiconductors.

It appears as though there are some major issues in the US with South Korean companies in Samsung, LG, and SK hynix concerned over US operations.

The Korea Times has a new report that said "concerned about their investments in the United States amid a spike in construction costs and lingering subsidy uncertainties ahead of the upcoming presidential election in the world's largest economy," according to officials and analysts on Tuesday.

Samsung Electronics invested a rather chunky $17 billion to construct a new chip factory based in Taylor, Texas, which will begin mass production of semiconductors usef for fifth-generation network systems or AI solutions in the second half of the year. But, because of soaring material and labor costs in the United States, Samsung is expected to pony up as much as $8 billion for the construction of the plant.

ASML is the biggest company in The Netherlands, so it makes sense that the Dutch government is kissing the ring to ensure they don't move countries... or expand overseas.

In a new report from Reuters, the outlet covers that the news of the Dutch government making its moves with ASML from newspaper De Telegraaf, citing -- as usual -- "anonymous sources" that said the Dutch ministries involved have called this project "Operation Beethoven".

Economic Affairs Minister Micky Adriaansens said that she wouldn't address every aspect of the paper's report, but during an interview with Reuters, she confirmed a meeting with ASML CEO Peter Wennick in The Hague on Wednesday. Adriaansens added: "I don't know if they would leave," the Netherlands, as "They want to grow. And they want to grow in such an amount, it puts a pressure on our infrastructure."

Three authors have sued chipmaker NVIDIA, claiming the company used their books without their permission to train its AI platform, NeMo.

The proposed class action lawsuit was filed last Friday in San Francisco federal court and claimed that NVIDIA had used the author's books without their permission in the dataset used to train the NeMo AI platform, which is designed to simulate ordinary written language.

The lawsuit didn't specify the damages the authors are seeking, but according to the lawsuit, the following books were used to train the AI model: Keene's 2008 novel "Ghost Walk," Nazemian's 2019 novel "Like a Love Story," and O'Nan's 2007 novella "Last Night at the Lobster."

The Biden administration signed the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, with $39 billion in grants and loans provided to semiconductor manufacturing companies to make chips on US soil... well, it's not going so well.

We've seen multiple setbacks over the last couple of years in US semiconductor manufacturing, with TSMC building multiple new fabs in the USA, as well as Intel pushing virtually all-in on domestic manufacturing. TSMC has pumped billions of dollars into getting chip-making fabs up and running in Arizona, but back in late 2022 that TSMC's engineers in the United States were "babies" for leaving Taiwan after experiencing culture shock in the country.

But now, DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion) rules in the US are strangling any hopes of domestic semiconductor manufacturing. In a new report, The Hill writes that DEI is killing the CHIPS Act, reporting that commentators noted the CHIPS and Science Act money has been "sluggish." Why? Because they haven't noticed that the CHIPS Act is "so loaded with DEI pork that it can't move."

The National Science Council in Taiwan has announced the latest results of the National Quantum Team. The IRTI team used a microwave IC design and TSMC's older 28nm process node to create new low-temperature control chip modules that control qubits inside a quantum computer.

Taiwan's National Science Council joined forces with the Academia Sinica and the Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2021 to integrate industry, government, academia, and research and kick off a national quantum team. Today, they held a press conference to announce the technological progress of quantum computing.

IRTI is the team responsible for developing the required hardware for the quantum computer subsystem, within the quantum national team. Project host and leader of the Institute of Electronics and Optoelectronics Systems of ITRI, Xu Shixuan, explained at the meeting that quantum computers needed to feature freezers and countless instruments.

OpenAI has decided to air out some of its dirty laundry in a new blog post that fires back at Elon Musk's recent lawsuit that accused OpenAI of turning against its morals as a company.

OpenAI has since taken to its blog to post a lengthy article authored by several of the company's top officials, such as Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Within the blog post, OpenAI has leaked email chains with Elon Musk that reveal a plethora of details regarding Elon Musk's intentions and involvement with the company during its infancy. In one message sent in 2018, Musk suggested that OpenAI merge with Tesla and use the electric car company as its "cash cow", even going as far as to say, "Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google."

Elon Musk departed from OpenAI in 2018 when he attempted to gain control of the company and was denied, severing a large portion of the revenue that he was supplying. Since OpenAI's rise in popularity through its creation of ChatGPT, Musk has been accusing the company of betraying its founding principles of staying open-source, hence the name, and being a non-profit company. OpenAI has seemingly reverted on both of those principles, signing a more than $10 billion deal with Microsoft, which spawned Windows Copilot, an AI-powered chatbot powered by OpenAI's underlying GPT technology.

Spotify is preparing to take full advantage of the European Commission's (EC) recent ruling against Apple that claims the company is "abusing its dominant position" in the music streaming app distribution business.

The ruling by the EC featured a massive fine of €1.84 billion (about $2 billion) for Apple and claimed the iOS developer has anti-steering rules within its App Store that prevent developers from informing users about alternative and cheaper subscription services outside of the app. According to European Commission's competition head Margrethe Vestager, Apple's guidelines are a violation of EU law, and the practice is "illegal".

In a nutshell, the EC claims Apple's guidelines to developers prevent services such as Spotify from informing its users about cheaper or even alternative pricing for subscriptions from outside of the iOS app, which is a tactic to get users to checkout through the App Store where Apple takes a 30% cut of all purchases. The EC has ordered Apple to lift its strict rules for developers and "allow music streaming developers to communicate freely with their own users," which would look like app developers providing pricing information to users within apps.

Samsung Foundry is reportedly rebranding its 2nd generation 3nm-class fabrication technology -- aka SF3 -- to SF2, its 2nm-class manufacturing process... a move requiring a rewritten contract.

A source told ZDNet: "We were informed by Samsung Electronics that the 2nd generation 3nm [name] is being changed to 2nm. We had contracted Samsung Foundry for the 2nd generation 3nm production last year, but we recently revised the contract to change the name to 2nm."

The site reports that renaming its SF2 process node will see Samsung better competing against Intel Foundry, as it has its Intel 20A production node, also a 2nm-class technology, arriving later this year. Samsung unveiled its process technology roadmap through to 2027 back in 2022, listing many nodes along the way: SF3E, SF4P, SF3, SF4X, SF4, SF3P, SF2P, and SF1.4.

Ethisphere's annual World's Most Ethical Companies list aims to highlight global businesses that are "committed to doing business with ethics and integrity" through a detailed assessment process. In 2024, 136 organizations spanning 20 countries and 44 industries were recognized by Ethisphere for their "unwavering commitment to business integrity."

Of the 136 organizations, only five are from the 'Technology' industry - Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP, Inc., Juniper Networks, and Western Digital. IBM, which also makes the list, is listed under Information Technology Services. According to Ethisphere, making the list involved a rigorous review process of a company's practices, documentation relating to ethics, and overall conduct.

To become eligible, companies must complete an extensive questionnaire and provide "over 240 different proof points on their culture of ethics," covering social, environmental, governance, diversity, inclusion, and other practices.

TSMC has just kicked off its 2024 campus recruitment drive, where there's 6000 new jobs up for offer in Taiwan, with the semiconductor giant incentiving the positions, especially for engineers and technicians.

In a new report by Chinese media outlet Ctee, TSMC went to the National Taiwan University, and for TSMC to leap into the future, the company needs to bolster its workforce. This is where the 6000 new jobs are open for Taiwan citizens, with new staff required across all of its factories, joining TSMC to create miracles and become a world-class company (more so than it already is).

TSMC highlighted the average overall salary for new engineers with master's degrees is NT$2 million, which works out to around $63,000, which is double the average wage in Taiwan.

Intel is reportedly trying to poach South Korean chip design firms that are building processors with Samsung, as Intel Foundry wants to become the world's biggest and best semiconductor firm on the planet.

TSMC is the leader right now, but Intel Foundry is set on becoming the second-biggest semiconductor manufacturer behind TSMC soon while overtaking the Taiwanese giant in 2026 with its next-generation Intel 14A process node. Samsung has multiple big partners and customers in South Korea, but a new report from Digitimes suggests Intel Foundry is trying to woo these firms to build their chips with Intel.

Intel's recent win with Microsoft's new chip being the first customer for its new Intel 18A process node has South Korean firms rattled because if a big tech company like Microsoft is building on Intel fabs, then that could be a loss to Samsung. That could lead to a domino effect, especially as Intel proves itself with future nodes over the years.

The European Commission announced on Monday that Apple has been hit with an antitrust fine amounting to 1.8 billion euros, or $1.95 billion.

According to reports from CNBC, one of the world's biggest tech companies has been hit with an antitrust fine amounting to nearly $2 billion for abusing its dominant position on the market for the distribution of music streaming apps. The publication states the Commission discovered Apple had put in place restrictions on app developers that stopped Apple product users from being informed about cheaper music-streaming apps, with the Commission going as far as to allege that Apple had prohibited developers of music-streaming apps from providing users with any instructions on how to sign up to these cheaper alternatives.

The resulting fine from the EU can be traced back to a complaint Spotify made in 2019, which resulted in an investigation being opened up by the European Commission. The investigation boiled down to the Commission diving through Apple's contractual agreements it forces on developers and how those agreements prevent developers from informing iOS users about cheaper, alternative music streaming services outside of the App Store, which would circumvent Apple's 30% fee for apps and in-app purchases.

Intel has reportedly been pitching its new Intel 18A process node to South Korean fabless chip companies, where it wants to secure contracts to manufacture chips for these companies.

TheElec reports: "Intel was increasing its sales activity against South Korean fabless chip companies. The US chip giant was heavily pitching its 18A process node to South Korean chip startups and is promising various incentives". TheElec's sources said: "Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger last year met with senior executives of these companies and updated them on its chip foundry plan".

Microsoft recently announced it has chosen a chip design based on the new Intel 18A process node, but now we're hearing that Intel is pushing its new 18A node into the wild in South Korea (and I'm sure other countries and companies worldwide).

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) first announced a new chip fabrication facility in Japan back in 2022, where it planned to have production up and running in 2024... and now it's operational.

The two years flew past, and now the facility is ready to begin mass production later this year, with TSMC tapping Sony's assistance to get the plant operational in Japan. The new Kumamoto fab plant has been dubbed "Nightless Castle" as there were workers there on 24-hour shifts, which is how the new TSMC plant was built in just two years, with plants regularly taking three or more years to get up and running.

Sony is an investor and a customer for TSMC's new plant in Japan; with the new fab plant getting up and running so quickly in Japan, that wouldn't necessarily be done in other countries. Why? TSMC had efficient government support, strict construction timetables, and a low-cost workforce that was flooding the site and then working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.