Hardware·
China built the world's fastest supercomputer without a single US chip
A Chinese system called LineShine debuted at No. 1 on the TOP500 at ISC'26, running entirely on domestic CPUs co-designed with Huawei. Here's what that means.
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Hardware·
South Korea's $576 billion bet on AI chips runs through Samsung and SK Hynix
South Korea announced a roughly $576 billion (W900 trillion) AI-chip push led by Samsung and SK Hynix, targeting HBM, DRAM fabs, and AI data centers.
Policy·
'Pax Silica': the EU just joined the US chip pact France called colonisation
The EU signed the US-led 'Pax Silica' pact to secure AI and chip supply chains. Here's what it commits members to, who's in, and how it ties to export controls.
Hardware·
IBM's 'sub-1nm' chip is a lab milestone, not a product you'll buy soon
IBM showed a 0.7nm 'nanostack' transistor with ~100 billion transistors on a fingernail. It's real research, but the name is marketing and shipping silicon is years out.
Hardware·
Qualcomm is chasing a $10 billion AI-chip deal. The target is Jim Keller's RISC-V startup.
Qualcomm is in talks to buy Tenstorrent for up to $10 billion, per Reuters and The Information. The bet: a RISC-V challenger to Nvidia, not just phones.
Hardware·
DRAM and storage chips quadrupled in a year. Now Apple says price hikes are unavoidable.
Tim Cook told the WSJ that Apple price rises are unavoidable as an AI-driven memory crunch quadruples DRAM and NAND costs across every consumer device.
Hardware·
Alibaba's new Zhenwu M890 chip is 3x faster and aimed straight at agent workloads
Alibaba showed the Zhenwu M890 at its Cloud Summit on May 19. 144 GB of memory, 800 GB/s interchip bandwidth, and Qwen3.7-Max riding on top.
Hardware·
SpaceX filed for a $55B Texas chip fab. Total Terafab spend could hit $119 billion.
SpaceX filed plans for a $55B Terafab semiconductor facility in Grimes County, Texas. Total spend could reach $119 billion across phases.
Hardware·
AMD's data center revenue jumped 57% to $5.8 billion in Q1. Its stock closed up 18%.
AMD reported Q1 revenue of $10.25B, up 38% YoY. Data center hit $5.8B (+57%) and Q2 guidance midpoint of $11.2B beat consensus by roughly $700M.
Apple·
Intel jumped 13% on a Bloomberg report that Apple is talking to its old chip supplier again
Bloomberg says Apple is in early-stage talks with Intel and Samsung Foundry to build base M-series chips in the US starting 2027. Intel closed at a record $543B market cap.
Hardware·
Samsung Q1 profit hit 57.2 trillion won. Memory chips for Nvidia drove 93% of it.
Samsung Electronics posted record Q1 2026 results on April 30: 133.9 trillion won revenue and 57.2 trillion won operating profit. Semiconductors did 93% of the work.
Hardware·
AMD Zen 7 'Florence' leak: 288 cores, a separate cache die, and a 25% IPC swing
Leaked slides describe Zen 7 EPYC scaling to 288 cores per socket, with all L3 moved off the CCD onto a stacked cache die. Tape-out is October 2026, launch late 2028.
Hardware·
Anker built its own AI chip. It runs neural nets inside flash memory cells.
Anker's Thus chip embeds compute inside NOR flash, claims 150x more on-device AI for noise cancellation, and ships in Soundcore earbuds on May 21. Here's why it matters.
AI·
An AI agent built a working RISC-V CPU from a 219-word prompt in 12 hours. Here's what it actually did.
Verkor's Design Conductor agent went from a 219-word spec to a tape-out-ready RISC-V core called VerCore in 12 hours. The catch: it's still a Celeron.
Hardware·
Cerebras files for an IPO again, this time with $510M in revenue and a $10B OpenAI deal in its pocket
Cerebras filed an S-1 on April 17 listing as 'CBRS,' targeting roughly $23B at the prior private mark. The OpenAI inference deal is the line item that changed the story.
Hardware·
Intel's foundry finally has a whale: Musk says Tesla's Terafab will run on 14A
Elon Musk said Tesla plans to manufacture at Terafab in Austin on Intel's 14A process. It's the first major external customer Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan needs to keep the foundry alive.
Policy·
Samsung workers are heading for a strike over SK Hynix's bonus checks
Samsung's union voted to walk out May 21 over a bonus gap that sees SK Hynix engineers pocket roughly 4x more. 200+ have already defected.