A China state-controlled news site – the Global Times – has threatened ASML with long-term exclusion from the Chinese market if it complies with US restrictions on selling spares and maintaining machines already sold to Chinese chip companies. “If the Netherlands follows this strategy, it will exacerbate the widening rift in China-US and China-Netherlands relations “ said the Global Times ...

Sakana AI, a one year-old Tokyo startup founded by ex-Google researchers, has raised $137 million in a funding round led by Nvidia. Other investors are Khosla Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Lux Capital. In January, Sakana raised $31 million from NTT, Sony,  Khosla and others. “The team at Sakana is helping spur the democratisation of AI in Japan by developing ...

After 25 years of operation IBM is to close its R&D units in China. The units, called the  China Development Lab (CDL) and China Systems Lab (CSL), were set up in 1999. Closing them will involve the loss of 1,000 jobs. IBM’s sales in China fell 19.3% last year. The China government has been implementing a policy called ‘Delete America’ ...

I’m not quite sure what a black hole means to a politician but the £22 billion black hole which the government is banging on about doesn’t really seem very significant. After all it is about the same amount as the price of a leading-edge fab, or two thirds of TSMC’s 2024 capex budget. If a private company can afford that, ...

Three technologies will transform sales over the next decade, says Gartner: Emotion AI, machine sellers and digitally twinning  customers. “The common theme of these three technologies are their ability to predict, interpret and serve buyers’ needs and behaviours and to streamline and automate sales fulfilment, releasing sellers to focus on developing high value client relationships,” says Gartner’s  Guy Wood. Emotion ...

Only time will tell whether or not Nvidia’s current valuation is justified but one thing is certain: Its market capitalisation of roughly $3 trillion is based on expectations for future growth more than it is on current results. While Nvidia saw its revenue and profit grow at an extraordinary pace over the past year, it is still far from the ...

Intel’s 18A has been found wanting by Broadcom after it ran test wafers on the process, reports Reuters. According to the report, Broadcom got the wafers back from Intel last month and decided that the process was not yet viable for high volume production. “Intel 18A is powered on, healthy and yielding well, and we remain fully on track to ...

China’s leading foundry, SMIC, has been cutting capex and R&D despite soaring imports of chip manufacturing equipment into China. SMIC  cut its H1 capex from $12 billion in H1 2023 to $8 billion in H1 2024 despite  China spending $25 billion on semiconductor manufacturing equipment this year which is more than Korea, Taiwan and the US combined. SMIC’s H1 spending ...

For the first time in over five years, chip sales in America have overtaken chip sales in China with US July sales of $15.4 billion and China July sales of $15.2 billion. Globally, July chip sales of $51.3 billion were up 18.7% on the July 2003 sales figure of $43.2 billion and up 2.7% on the June 2024 total of ...

Researchers at Adelaide University have developed an ultra-wideband integrated terahertz polarisation (de)multiplexer implemented on a substrateless silicon base which they have tested in the sub-terahertz J-band (220-330 GHz) for 6G communications and beyond. The University of Adelaide’s Professor Withawat Withayachumnankul from the School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering led the team which also includes former PhD student at the University ...