AI chips
10 briefs
Trump Flies to Beijing Saying He Does Not Need Xi's Help -- Which Is How You Ask for Help
The US needs China to pressure Iran. China knows this. Markets put a 16% chance China actually joins Iran negotiations -- and an 88% chance it buys Boeing planes instead.
Thailand's National AI Strategy Was a Chip Laundering Operation
US prosecutors believe OBON Corp, the centerpiece of Thailand's AI national strategy, moved $2.5 billion in Nvidia-equipped servers to China for Alibaba. The export controls were not beaten by spies; they were beaten by a trade show partner.
DeepSeek Just Built a Frontier AI on Chinese Chips. That Was the Whole Point of the Export Ban.
V4 ran on Huawei Ascend hardware. Jensen Huang called this outcome 'horrible for our nation.' He is right, and US policy made it happen.
The Workers Who Could Break the AI Boom
Samsung's largest-ever labor action threatens to disrupt HBM memory production at the exact moment AI chip demand has outpaced every forecast.
DeepSeek Builds the World's Best Open-Source AI on Chinese Chips. The US Just Made It Official.
Washington cleared Nvidia H200 exports to China four months ago. China blocked its own companies from buying them. DeepSeek then launched V4 on Huawei hardware and undercut every American model on price. The US chip strategy is now accelerating the thing it was designed to prevent.
Jensen Huang Said There Was No Evidence. There Were Six Indictments.
Federal prosecutors have charged six men in three weeks with smuggling billions in Nvidia chips to China. The CEO who denied it is now selling chips to the US government instead.
Samsung's Record Quarter Is Funding Its Own Undoing
The union is demanding $30 billion in bonuses. The company says that wipes out its R&D budget. An 18-day strike in May could hand Micron and China the memory market.
The Chip Factory That Has To Be Real
Musk's Terafab now has Intel as a partner, a $20-25B price tag, and a goal of 1 terawatt of computing per year. TSMC just had its best quarter ever. Whether TeraFab can actually close the gap is a question nobody in the announcement has answered.
The Bureaucracy That's Losing the Chip War
Trump's plan to sell AI chips to allies is collapsing inside the Commerce Department, where staff have fled and license approvals now take months.
The Company That Beat OpenAI Is Now Afraid of Nvidia
Anthropic just surpassed OpenAI in revenue and valuation. Its next problem is that both companies depend on a chip supply they do not control.