ASIC

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. ...

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. ...

What if instead of running an AI model on a chip, you turned the model into the chip? That’s the bet Taalas just went public with — and the numbers are making the entire semiconductor industry sit up straight. This 25-person startup out of Toronto emerged from stealth with $169 million in funding and a working product called the HC1: a chip that hard-wires a large language model directly into silicon transistors. No software stack. No HBM memory. No liquid cooling. Just raw, physics-level inference. ...