#semiconductor-manufacturing

#semiconductor-manufacturing

The company has developed 16 gigabit LPDDR6 chips that will be used in smartphones and tablets with on-device AI. Bandwidth-hungry AI tasks will see a 33% speed-up in data processing compared to LPDDR5X. The new RAM has a base operating speed of 10.7Gbps.

Our custom accelerator business is progressing very well across five customers. Anthropic will soon implement one gigawatt of Broadcom-baked TPUs, and we expect the AI company plans a three-gigawatt deployment in 2027. Meta will install multiple gigawatts of Broadcom's XPU accelerators in 2027 and beyond. OpenAI will deploy over one gigawatt of compute capacity based on custom XPUs in 2027.

MatX, a chip startup founded by two former Google hardware engineers, has raised a $500 million Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner. The company's goal is to make its processors 10 times better at training LLMs and delivering results than Nvidia's GPUs.

US President Donald Trump announced a 32 percent reciprocal tariff on Taiwanese exports in April, before lowering the rate to 20 percent in August pending further negotiations. Countries have made pledges to boost investments in the US in exchange for tariff relief since Trump launched his trade war last year. Japan and South Korea last year agreed to invest $550bn and $350bn, respectively, to see their tariff rates cut from 25 to 15 percent.

The United States has granted Samsung and SK Hynix permission to continue shipping chip manufacturing equipment to their factories in China in 2026. This gives the two South Korean chipmakers temporary breathing space in an increasingly complex geopolitical playing field, where export restrictions and technological rivalry set the tone. According to SiliconANGLE, the approval comes in the form of an annual license. This is a clear break with the previous policy, which granted certain large chip companies long-term exemptions.

TSMC is the other. TSMC is using its 3nm process, reportedly, while Samsung will do a 2nm as a litmus test for the process. The different versions are due to the fact that 'they translate designs to physical form differently,' CEO Elon Musk said recently. The goal is for the two to operate identically, obviously, which is a challenge. Some might remember Apple's A9 'Chipgate' saga, which found that the chips differed in performance because of different manufacturers.

The Trump administration has agreed to inject up to $150 million into xLight, a semiconductor startup developing advanced chip-making technology, marking the second time the U.S. government has taken an equity position in a private startup and further expanding a controversial strategy that has put Washington on the cap tables of American companies. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Commerce Department will provide the funding to xLight

Automation, digitalization and geographic shifts are redefining our workforce needs and skill requirements.