Semiconductors

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 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

There’s a factory rising in the snow-covered plains of Hokkaido, Japan, and the government just bet another $4 billion that it can change the future of AI. On April 11, 2026, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) approved ¥631.5 billion ($4 billion) in fresh subsidies for Rapidus — a semiconductor startup that most of the industry has politely called “ambitious” and privately called “impossible.” The new infusion brings total government backing to a staggering ¥2.6 trillion ($16.3 billion), making Rapidus one of the most heavily state-funded chip ventures in history. ...

Nvidia’s deepest moat was never the silicon. It was CUDA — the software ecosystem that made every AI developer on Earth, including China’s, completely dependent on Nvidia’s way of doing things. You could build a faster chip, but if developers had to rewrite their entire codebase to use it? Dead on arrival. Huawei just found the side door. The Ascend 950PR, paired with Huawei’s overhauled CANN Next software stack, has reportedly won over ByteDance and Alibaba — two of China’s largest AI consumers. After years of Beijing practically begging its tech giants to go domestic, Huawei may have finally built a chip they actually want to use. ...

Everyone’s fighting over GPUs. Alibaba just changed the question. On Tuesday, Alibaba’s DAMO Academy unveiled the XuanTie C950 — a 5-nanometer server processor built on open-source RISC-V architecture. It’s the highest-performing RISC-V CPU ever made. But the interesting part isn’t the benchmarks. It’s the thesis behind the chip: that AI agents need fundamentally different silicon than AI chatbots. While Nvidia, AMD, and Intel wage war over who can build the biggest parallel processor for training models, Alibaba is making a deliberate bet on what comes after training. And the logic is harder to dismiss than you’d think. ...

After 35 years as the Switzerland of semiconductors — licensing chip designs to anyone with a checkbook — Arm Holdings just crossed the Rubicon. It built its own chip. Not a demo. Not a reference design you’ll never see in production. A 136-core data center processor called the AGI CPU, fabricated on TSMC’s 3nm process, with Meta signed on as the debut customer. This isn’t incremental. This is tectonic. The Hardware: 136 Cores of Pure Intent The specs read like Arm had something to prove. ...

The lights shooting into the Austin sky on Saturday night weren’t aliens. They were Elon Musk doing what Elon Musk does best — staging an event so audacious that you can’t look away, even if you’re not sure you believe a word of it. Inside the defunct Seaholm Power Plant in downtown Austin on March 21, Musk officially launched Terafab — a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI to build what he calls “the most epic chip-building exercise in history by far.” The price tag: an estimated $20–25 billion. The goal: producing one terawatt of computing power per year, with 80% of it destined for space. ...