semiconductor
10 briefs
The Chip Lab on National Television
Beijing showed Huawei's secret semiconductor research lab on prime-time TV three days before Trump lands. This was a message, not a documentary.
Samsung Faces Its First Strike in 88 Years. Google, Apple, and Qualcomm Are Worried.
A 18-day planned walkout over performance bonuses could squeeze the memory supply chain at the worst possible moment for global AI hardware demand.
Samsung's Semiconductor Boom Is Tearing Its Union Apart
More than 2,500 non-chip workers quit Samsung's majority union in 10 days. The union is planning a strike over chip-division bonuses. Workers who don't make chips say they're being sacrificed for someone else's AI windfall.
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.
Congress Wants to Force US Allies to Choose: Sell Chip Equipment to China, or Sell to America
The MATCH Act passed committee and gives the Netherlands and Japan 150 days to align their export restrictions with US rules or face their own restrictions. The allies have not agreed. The global semiconductor supply chain has not been consulted.
Samsung's Workers Want Their Cut of the AI Boom
Thirty thousand chip workers are threatening an 18-day strike over profit-sharing. Samsung's Q1 operating profit rose 755%. The math is not complicated. The power dynamic is.
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 Export Control Bottleneck
Staffing losses and tighter oversight inside the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security have turned AI chip export licenses into months-long waits. The US is blocking its own allies.
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.