Qualcomm, which has established itself as a leading supplier of AI chips for edge devices with its Snapdragon line, is now making a major push into the data center space to challenge industry leaders such as Nvidia and AMD. The AI200 and AI250 accelerator chips are aimed at rack-scale inference systems as the debut entries in what Qualcomm describes as a multi-generation roadmap of AI inference equipment that will be updated annually. At Monday’s market close, Qualcomm stock was up by 11 percent on the news as investors saw promise of the San Diego-based firm’s expansion beyond its core mobile market. Continue reading Qualcomm Articulates Its Expansion into AI Data Center Chips

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will be a launch partner for the first publicly available AI supercluster powered by AMD’s upcoming Instinct MI450 Series GPUs — with an initial order of 50,000 of the chips to be deployed starting in Q3 2026 and expanding in 2027. The resulting Oracle installations will feature Instinct MI450s configured with AMD-designed CPUs in AMD’s new Helios server rack systems, positioned to compete with Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL144 CPX racks when both platforms are mass-released next year. Oracle is challenged to rapidly scale its data center capacity due to massive compute commitments made this year to OpenAI. Continue reading Oracle Cloud Orders 50,000 New AMD Instinct MI450 AI GPUs

OpenAI has expanded its alliance with Broadcom, announcing a plan to create enough custom AI accelerator chips to consume 10 gigawatts of power. News of the custom chip collaboration leaked out last month. Now that it is ready to go public, OpenAI says designing its own chips and systems will allow the startup to leverage directly into the hardware what it has learned from developing frontier models. The racks, scaled entirely with Ethernet and other connectivity solutions from Broadcom, will be deployed across OpenAI’s facilities and partner data centers beginning in the second half of 2026. Continue reading OpenAI & Broadcom Developing Custom AI Accelerator Chips

OpenAI is said to be in talks with Broadcom about developing custom AI inference chips to run its models. On an earnings call last week, Broadcom disclosed that an AI developer had placed a $10 billion order for AI server racks using its chips. That new customer was reported to be OpenAI, which has relied primarily on hotly sought-after Nvidia GPUs for model training and deployment. Broadcom specializes in XPUs — accelerator chips designed for specific uses, like inference for ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly complained that a shortage of chips has impeded the company’s ability to get new models and products to market. Continue reading OpenAI Reportedly Turning to Broadcom for Custom AI Chips

Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia reported its sales were $46.7 billion for the most recent quarter, marking 56 percent growth over the same period last year and up 6 percent sequentially. Profit rose more than 59 percent to $26.42 billion. The results, which surpassed estimates, reassured global analysts and investors that AI infrastructure spending remains strong, easing — though not erasing — anxieties about an AI bubble. This summer, the chipmaker became the first company to exceed a market cap of $4 trillion, and it is considered a global barometer for the overall health of the artificial intelligence sector. Continue reading Nvidia Announces Continued Growth, $26 Billion in Q2 Profit

Insta360 has a new compact action camera, the GO Ultra, which shoots 4K at 60fps with an improved sensor for low light. The tiny hands-free unit weighs in at just 1.87 ounces — 3.8 ounces with the screen-equipped Action Pod. While that’s slightly heavier than the Insta360 GO 3S, it has a 1/1.28-inch image sensor — more than 2x larger than that of its predecessor — and is powered by a 5nm AI chip that “delivers imaging previously impossible in the GO series,” according to Insta360. The f/2.85 aperture has a 14.27mm focal length and captures photos at up to 50MP. Continue reading Insta360 GO Ultra Action Camera Records 4K Video at 60fps

Tesla has selected Samsung to manufacture its new A16 system-on-a-chip, developed by the carmaker for its next-generation artificial intelligence applications, including for autonomous driving, Optimus robots and AI data centers. The multiyear deal is reportedly worth $16.5 billion to Samsung and represents a major win for its foundry division. The South Korean company’s soon-to-open plant in Taylor, Texas will focus on making Tesla’s new AI6 chip, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Samsung began producing Tesla’s A14 chip in 2023, but the A15 contract went to TSMC, which is in the testing phase using its 3nm N3P process. Continue reading Samsung Inks $16.5 Billion Deal to Produce Tesla’s A16 Chip

The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) is the new name the Trump administration’s Department of Commerce has bestowed on the Biden-era’s AI Safety Institute. The change aims to “ensure Commerce uses its vast scientific and industrial expertise to evaluate and understand the capabilities of these rapidly developing systems and identify vulnerabilities and threats within systems developed in the U.S. and abroad,” the Department announced. As part of the update, CAISI becomes the industry’s primary federal government point of contact for testing and collaborative research related to commercial AI systems. Continue reading Safety Institute Is Now Center for AI Standards and Innovation

TSMC introduced its new logic process technology, A14, at the company’s North America Technology Symposium in California. Designed to drive AI forward with faster computing and greater power efficiency, the 1.4nm A14 process is expected to be a boon to smartphones, expanding their on-board capabilities. The company says A14 is an improvement over TSMC’s N2 2nm node, set to go into volume production later this year. TSMC plans to begin producing chips using the A14 process in 2028 for AI clients including Nvidia, the company told reporters and analysts on the eve of its conference. Continue reading TSMC Says New A14 Tech Will Make ‘Smartphones Smarter’

Google has debuted a new accelerator chip, Ironwood, a tensor processing unit designed specifically for inference — the ability of AI to predict things. Ironwood will power Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer, which runs the company’s Gemini models and is gearing up for the next generation of artificial intelligence workloads. Google’s TPUs are similar to the accelerator GPUs sold by Nvidia, but unlike the GPUs they’re designed for AI and geared toward speeding neural network tasks and mathematical operations. Google says when deployed at scale Ironwood is more than 24 times more powerful than the world’s fastest supercomputer. Continue reading Google Ironwood TPU is Made for Inference and ‘Thinking’ AI

China’s Ant Group is using local semiconductors to train AI at a cost that is 20 percent less than companies typically spend, according to reports. Ant used domestic chips — from companies including Alibaba, an investor in Ant, and Huawei — to launch a unique Mixture of Experts (MoE) training approach that produced results commensurate to training with Nvidia H800 chips. Ant is the latest Chinese company to focus on low cost training, joining a competition triggered by DeepSeek, which in January announced it could build AI comparable to the models released by U.S. companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google for billions less. Continue reading Ant Group Stacks Chips to Reduce Development Costs for AI

Meta Platforms has reportedly begun “a small deployment” of its first in-house chip designed for AI training. The accelerator chip is engineered around the open-standard RISC-V architecture. TSMC produced the working samples now being tested. The goal is to create purpose-specific chips that are more efficient than Nvidia’s general purpose GPUs, enjoying the cost-savings that would come with wide use and reducing reliance on outside chip suppliers in a tight market. If the tests go well, Meta plans to scale up production for expanded use by 2026. Details of the new chip’s specifications remain unknown at this time. Continue reading Meta Tests New AI Accelerator Chip Designed with Broadcom

Taiwan semiconductor firm TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker, has vowed to add another $100 billion to its existing $65 billion plan to expand its U.S. manufacturing base. The total allocation — $165 billion over the next four years — sees TSMC further building out its advanced semiconductor fabrication complex in Phoenix, Arizona, which has been producing at volume since late 2024. The expansion plays a key role in strengthening the U.S. computer ecosystem by increasing U.S. production of advanced semiconductors, TSMC says, adding that it will “complete the domestic AI supply chain” with advanced packaging investments. Continue reading TSMC Will Boost Its Factory Build-Out in U.S. by $100 Billion

Nvidia delivered stellar earnings again, with profit up 80 percent to $22.09 billion for fiscal Q4, the period that ended January 26, 2025. Record quarterly revenue hit $39.3 billion, a 12 percent uptick from Q3 and a 78 percent increase year-over-year, driven in part by sales of the company’s Blackwell AI chips. The results rebut predictions that the leading-edge chipmaker would suffer due to a recent wave of Chinese AI models created using fewer and largely older chips. That trend rocked Nvidia stock over the past quarter, but the Silicon Valley-based company managed to maintain momentum. Continue reading New Blackwell AI Chip Helps Boost Nvidia to Record Quarter

OpenAI is getting close to finalizing its first custom chip design, according to an exclusive report from Reuters that emphasizes the Microsoft-backed AI giant’s goal of reducing its dependency on Nvidia chips. The blueprint for the first-generation OpenAI chip could be finalized as soon as the next few months and sent to Taiwan’s TSMC for fabrication, which will take about six months — “unless OpenAI pays substantially more for expedited manufacturing” — according to the report. Even by usual standards, the training-focused chip is already on a fast track to deployment. Continue reading OpenAI In-House Chip Could Be Ready for Testing This Year