Business, Financial & Legal News - Page 3

The US government has just unlocked a further $11.6 billion in funding to TSMC for its leading-edge chip-making fabs on United States soil.

The Biden administration announced it's signed a preliminary memorandum of terms with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) that will include $6.6 billion in funding for new chip manufacturing plants. The US Department of Commerce has proposed $5 billion in loans to help set up the plants with TSMC.

TSMC will now setup three new leading-edge chip-making fabs in the US, with two of them known about -- but the third new chip plant will be dedicated to making chips with 2nm or more advanced technologies. TSMC has had its US-based fab plants under construction for years now, with the company teasing it will enter high-volume production in the first half of 2025 at its first plant in Arizona.

Artificial intelligence-powered systems are truly impressive, but what datasets are they trained on? OpenAI has kept the answer to the question behind closed doors, and now YouTube has issued a warning to the company ahead of its release of Sora, its AI-powered text-to-video generation tool.

Creators of AI models use large amounts of data to successfully train their tools into whatever they are designed for. However, there is a major problem with simply grabbing data off the internet and using it to train an AI model that will potentially be used to generate money - copyrighted IP. This problem isn't new, as The New York Times and Getty Images have already filed lawsuits against AI creators for the theft of copyrighted data used to train models that are then used to generate profit.

The copyright debate regarding AI models heated up again in March when OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told The Wall Street Journal that she wasn't sure if Sora's training included data from YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook. Now, in an interview with Bloomberg Originals, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan reminded OpenAI that any kind of data taken from the platform and used to train AI models is strictly against the platform's terms of service.

The US government is demanding that ASML stop servicing some of the equipment it sells to Chinese customers.

In a new report from Reuters, the Biden administration wants Netherlands-based ASML -- who makes the top-of-the-line EUV lithography machines, with Intel recently buying one for $380 million to be installed in the United States -- to stop servicing equipment sold to Chinese companies "are a diplomatic and business headache for the Dutch government, but signs are it will continue to align with Washington on export restrictions," reports Reuters.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte's government doesn't want to make a blanket decision, but it seems that the country will now be slower in approving equipment servicing for Chinese customers, and quicker to deny them. The machines that ASML makes can't be made anywhere else, is virtually impossible to replace, and will eventually break down and need maintenance over time... something that will be much harder moving forward for Chinese companies.

Intel has just kicked off a new round of layoffs this week, which will see a culling from its Sales and Marketing Group.

The news comes from CRN, which reports that an Intel spokesperson confirmed that the company had made job cuts as part of its reorganization but "did not provide any further details." Christoph Schell leads the Sales and Marketing Group and is the chief commercial officer of Intel.

An Intel spokesperson provided a comment to CRN: "With the objective of continuing to deliver on company strategy and drive outcomes for its customers, Intel's [Sales and Marketing Group] announced changes to its organizational structure. We are confident in Intel's future and are committed to supporting all employees through this process, including treating impacted employees with dignity and respect".

South Korea's industry minister announced on Friday that the country has chosen 6 overseas partner institutions to create global technology cooperation centers, which will be aimed at advancing research projects that are focused on core technologies.

South Korea will build the new centers in partnership with US universities, including MIT, Yale University, Purdue University, Johns Hopkins University, and Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, while in Germany, South Korea chose Fraunhofer.

South Korea's Industry Minister, Ahn Duk-geun, said: "The six cooperation centers will provide all necessary support for global joint R&D projects. We plan to come up with a global open innovation support strategy to promote M&As, technology transfers, licensing and the recruitment of competitive experts".

The large 7.5-magnitude that struck close to Taiwan yesterday has had no supply chain effects for NVIDIA in the country.

NVIDIA said in a statement: "After consulting with our manufacturing partners, we don't expect any impact on our supply from the Taiwan earthquake". We also recently heard from Wen-Yee Lee, a Taiwan-based semiconductor reporter, who posted on X, providing some updates from TSMC. The company said that "due to safety concerns, TSMC has decided to suspend work at fab construction sites across Taiwan today. Construction will resume after the inspection".

But the latest update from TSMC was extremely positive, with he post explaining: "Based on TSMC's rich experience and capability in earthquake response and disaster prevention, and regular safety drills to ensure full preparedness. Within just 10 hours after the earthquake on April 3rd, the recovery rate of wafer fab equipment has exceeded 70%, and the recovery rate of newly built fabs (such as Fab 18) has exceeded 80%. Although a few pieces of equipment in some areas were damaged, affecting production lines, major machines including all Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment remained undamaged".

Taiwan was rocked by a huge 7.5-magnitude earthquake yesterday, seeing TSMC evacuate its facilities, but the Taiwanese semiconductor giant was back to nearly 70% operations within 10 hours.

Wen-Yee Lee, a Taiwan-based semiconductor reporter, posted on X, providing some updates from TSMC. The company said that "due to safety concerns, TSMC has decided to suspend work at fab construction sites across Taiwan today. Construction will resume after the inspection".

SK hynix is officially building a new advanced packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA with an investment of around $3.87 billion. The South Korean memory giant will build next-gen HBM memory for future-gen AI GPUs, and would be the first advanced packaging for AI products on American soil.

The new $3.87 billion facility will see Indiana with a new advanced packaging fabrication and R&D facility for AI products, the first of its kind in the United States, with expectations that it will drive innovation in the nation's supply chain for AI products, as well as create over 1000 new jobs in the region.

PCI-SIG initially announced the next-generation PCIe 7.0 standard back in 2022, but now the organization behind the PCIe standards -- PCI-SIG, duh -- has announced version 0.5 of PCIe 7.0, now available for member review.

PCIe 7.0 is gearing up for a full release in 2025, but don't think you'll see workstations or gaming motherboards with PCIe 7.0 connectivity when we don't have PCIe 6.0 in the consumer space just yet, and PCIe 5.0 is only penetrating that market now. We will be living with PCIe 5.0 for a while on the desktop and laptop before we see PCIe 6.0, let alone PCIe 7.0.

For now, the full specification of PCIe 7.0 were released by PCI-SIG, which include:

Amazon has decided to remove its "Just Walk Out" technology from its Fresh grocery stories across the United States, following the self-checkout system being plagued with numerous problems.

According to a report from The Information, Amazon has decided to axe its "Just Walk Out" technology from its Fresh grocery stores across the US, which includes a multitude of cameras, sensors, and 1,000 human eyeballs to function. For those who don't know, the Just Walk Out system was touted as an automated future way of shopping as consumers could simply walk into the store, grab what they need, pay for it at a counter without a cashier, and then leave.

During this process a consumer is constantly scanned by sensors and cameras positioned around the store. However, Just Walk Out doesn't involve zero humans, as reports indicate there are more than 1,000 real people in India scanning the camera feeds to detect that all patrons are accurately checking out. Additionally, these stores required high ceilings to achieve the appropriate camera angles for maximum monitoring.