AI Chips

The company you associate with phone processors just struck a deal to power one of the world’s largest AI operations. And it tells us everything about where the chip market is actually heading. The Phone Chip Company That Showed Up to the AI Wars Qualcomm has signed a deal with ByteDance to supply millions of custom AI chips for data centers. Not GPUs. Not general-purpose hardware. Application-specific integrated circuits — ASICs — tuned for the one thing that actually matters in production AI: inference. ...

The AI boom runs on memory chips. And the people who make those chips are about to walk off the job. On May 21, nearly 45,000 Samsung Electronics workers plan to begin an 18-day strike — the largest walkout in semiconductor history. Their target: the fabrication plants that produce the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips without which every Nvidia GPU, every AI data center, and every large language model is functionally dead weight. ...

The AI chip wars just got their first real plot twist in years. On Wednesday, Cerebras Systems — the company that builds processors the size of dinner plates — didn’t just go public. It detonated onto the Nasdaq. Shares priced at $185, opened at $350, peaked near $386, and settled at $311. That’s a 68% first-day pop, a $95 billion valuation, and the biggest U.S. tech IPO since Uber went public in 2019. ...

The biggest AI IPO of 2026 prices tomorrow — and it’s not OpenAI or Anthropic. It’s a company that builds chips the size of dinner plates. Cerebras Systems debuts on Nasdaq May 14 under ticker CBRS, targeting $150–$160 per share, $4.8 billion in gross proceeds, and a fully diluted valuation approaching $48.8 billion. The book is reportedly 20x oversubscribed. For a company with fewer than 800 employees valued at $8 billion just seven months ago, this isn’t a listing. It’s a coronation. ...

The AI chip market just got a lot more interesting. Cerebras Systems — the company that builds AI chips the size of dinner plates — filed updated paperwork raising its IPO price range to $150–$160 per share. That’s up from an already ambitious $115–$125 range set just last week, putting the company on track to raise up to $4.8 billion in what’s shaping up to be the biggest IPO of 2026. ...

The same Nvidia server rack costs $550,000 in the United States and nearly $1 million in China. That price gap tells you everything about where the AI industry stands in May 2026. Chinese tech companies are paying almost double for Nvidia’s B300 servers — when they can get them at all. The cause: a collision of exploding AI demand, tightening U.S. export controls, and a smuggling crackdown that just blew the doors off one of tech’s worst-kept secrets. ...

A single Nvidia B300 server now costs roughly $1 million on China’s grey market. That’s nearly double the US retail price and almost double what it sold for in China just months ago. The cause is a collision of forces: exploding AI demand, a US crackdown on chip smuggling that’s strangling supply, and the growing desperation of Chinese tech companies racing to stay competitive. This isn’t a pricing anomaly. It’s the US-China tech cold war rewriting the economics of artificial intelligence in real time. ...

Nvidia has owned the AI chip conversation for three years straight. That era might be ending — not with a bang, but with a procurement spreadsheet. Over the past 48 hours, Google quietly revealed the most aggressive custom silicon strategy in the industry: a four-company chip design alliance spanning Broadcom, MediaTek, Marvell, and Intel. Each partner handles a different piece of the puzzle. Together, they represent something Nvidia should lose sleep over. ...

AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems just filed to go public on Nasdaq under ticker “CBRS.” The headline numbers look incredible: $510 million in revenue, a swing from a $485 million net loss to $87.9 million in net income, and $24.6 billion in remaining performance obligations. But buried in the S-1 is a financial arrangement so tangled it deserves far more scrutiny than it’s getting. OpenAI isn’t just Cerebras’s biggest customer. It’s also an investor, a lender, and the single reason this IPO is happening at all. ...

If you’ve been waiting for the AI hardware story to stop being “Nvidia, Nvidia, and also Nvidia,” circle April 14, 2026. That’s when Meta and Broadcom went public with an expanded partnership to co-design multiple generations of Meta’s MTIA accelerators through 2029, anchored by a 1-gigawatt initial deployment and a path to multiple gigawatts after that. The headline spec: the first AI silicon built on TSMC’s 2nm process. This isn’t a routine vendor press release. It’s the loudest signal yet that the era of hyperscalers handing blank checks to Jensen is ending. ...