Qualcomm has released two new chips within the Snapdragon X Series portfolio. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme and Snapdragon X2 Elite are “the fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs,” according to the company. The 3nm chips boast up to 43 percent less power consumption than the prior generation. They were unveiled at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui, where Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon talked about the 6G future, which he described as a “dynamic, adaptive network of intelligence” that will be contextually sensitive, feeding across an ecosystem of personal devices from phones and laptops to smart glasses and connected cars. Continue reading Qualcomm Debuts Chips, Explores 6G at Snapdragon Summit

Nvidia is investing up to $100 billion in a partnership with OpenAI that will result in what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts will be “the biggest AI infrastructure deployment in history.” The project will use about 10 gigawatts worth of Nvidia systems — including the upcoming Vera Rubin platform — power equivalent to 4 million to 5 million GPUs. “This partnership is about building an AI infrastructure that enables AI to go from the labs into the world,” Huang said on CNBC’s “Halftime Report,” explaining the $100 billion will be invested in stages as each gigawatt is deployed. The investment will be all-cash with Nvidia receiving an undisclosed amount of OpenAI equity. Continue reading Nvidia Investing $100 Billion in OpenAI Data Center Build-Out

Nvidia is investing $5 billion in Intel via a common stock purchase at $23.28 per share, which translates to about a 4 percent stake. The companies plan to collaborate across multiple projects, developing custom data center and PC products to accelerate applications and workloads across the hyperscale, enterprise and consumer markets. Nvidia’s NVLink will be used to connect the architectures, integrating Nvidia’s GPUs with Intel’s CPU technologies. For data centers, Intel will customize x86 CPUs that Nvidia can integrate into its AI platforms. Intel also plans to build x86 SOCs that integrate Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets for PCs. Continue reading Nvidia Invests $5 Billion in Intel with Plans for AI Infrastructure

The U.S. government is taking a 10 percent stake in Intel in exchange for $5.7 billion in grants previously awarded, but not yet paid, to Intel under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act and $3.2 billion awarded to the company as part of the Secure Enclave program. Intel had already received $2.2 billion from those funds, bringing the U.S. investment to $11.1 billion. However, the company’s mounting losses — $2.9 billion in Q2, a 57 percent increase over Q2 2024’s $1.61 billion loss — made it questionable as to whether the company could continue to fulfill terms for the funding without intervention. The Intel agreement marks the largest U.S. government equity deal for an individual tech firm. Continue reading U.S. Is Taking 10 Percent Intel Stake in Equity for Grants Deal

Sky-based entertainment powered by drones is a nascent entertainment medium that just got a boost from Jeffrey Katzenberg. WndrCo, the investment firm led by Katzenberg and partner Sujay Jaswa, has joined a $50 million funding round for Nova Sky Stories, the drone light show company co-founded by Kimbal Musk. The younger brother of billionaire Elon Musk acquired the technology from Intel in 2022 and says it’s in the early stages of what’s possible. Katzenberg has joined Nova’s board of directors and will serve as a strategic advisor, helping to grow the company’s studio of animators and storytellers. Continue reading Katzenberg’s WndrCo Invests in Nova Sky Stories Drone Firm

Japan’s SoftBank has committed to investing $2 billion in U.S. chipmaker Intel as the company struggles to gain traction in the exploding artificial intelligence space and catch up in the mobile market. SoftBank has agreed to purchase roughly 87 million Intel shares at $23 per share to become the company’s fifth or sixth-largest shareholder. The move comes as the Trump administration deliberates converting the U.S. government’s CHIPS Act grants into a 10 percent equity stake in the company as part of its effort to revive American semiconductor manufacturing. Such a deal would make the government Intel’s largest stakeholder. Continue reading SoftBank Invests $2 Billion in Intel as Government Mulls Stake

The U.S. Department of Energy has commissioned Dell to deliver its next supercomputer, expected to come online in 2026. Referred to as Doudna, in honor of the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna, it is also known as NERSC-10 for its home at the DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Powered by Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin platform, Doudna will be optimized for AI workloads and aims to deliver a greater than tenfold speed boost over NERSC’s current flagship machine, Perlmutter, while using only 2-3x the power. Continue reading Dell Is Building Next DOE Supercomputer, Powered by Nvidia

Semiconductor giant Intel has reached a tentative agreement with Taiwan’s TSMC and some U.S. firms to create a joint venture that would assume operating responsibility for Intel’s chip fabrication plants here. TSMC will reportedly hold a 20 percent stake in the JV, while Intel and the other investors would control the remaining 80 percent. This specific JV is limited to Intel’s foundry unit, which posted a 2024 operating loss of $13.4 billion in 2024 and is not expected to break even until 2027. New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said at last week’s Intel Vision conference that he will spin off all non-core units. Continue reading TSMC Reportedly Ready for Joint Venture with Intel Foundries

Japanese tech investment firm Softbank has agreed to acquire Silicon Valley chip startup Ampere for $6.5 billion, indicating that technology originating in smartphones will eventually become integral to global data centers and the future of artificial intelligence. The eight-year-old Ampere sells chips based on Arm technology, the processor type used in virtually all mobile phones. SoftBank purchased Arm in 2016 and has since been working to ensure the technology becomes used more broadly. Softbank says it will allow Ampere to retain its own name, operating it as a wholly-owned subsidiary. Continue reading Softbank Agrees to Acquire Chipmaker Ampere for $6.5 Billion

The new Asus Zenbook A14 laptop leads the company’s Copilot+ line expansion. Powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor, Asus says its battery will last up to 32 hours. And at just 2.18 pounds, the “featherweight” device is drawing comparisons to Apple’s MacBook Air — but at a more affordable price. The Zenbook A14 will start at $1,099.99 when it hits the market later this month in gray with a base 8-core processor featuring 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD. The model sports a 14-inch OLED display with 1920×1200 resolution reaching 600 nits of peak brightness at 60Hz. Continue reading CES: Lightweight Asus Zenbook Laptop Takes on MacBook Air

Disney+ is the latest major streaming service to deploy HDR10+, which adds dynamic metadata to any video source to optimize picture quality on a frame-by-frame basis. In doing so, it joins other big streamers: Apple TV+, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+, and Google’s YouTube. The HDR10+ standard, which replaces SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) provides improved brightness and contrast as well as the benefits of standardization and global certification. HDR, originally debuted in 2017 by Samsung and Panasonic, now has over 160 adopters and more than 13,000 compatible products. CES featured a collection of additional HDR10+ announcements. Continue reading CES: Disney+ to Support HDR10+ High Dynamic Range Video

Lenovo’s new laptops include the Yoga Slim 9i, on display this week at CES 2025. Its 14-inch PureSight Pro OLED screen is essentially bezel-free, with 98 percent screen-to-body ratio made possible by the world’s first camera-under-display technology in a laptop. “Hiding the camera under the display panel until it is needed means a pure, uninterrupted screen with no camera notch,” Lenovo claims. When the 32-megapixel camera is activated, the laptop deactivates the pixels where the camera lens is positioned behind the screen. To correct image distortion and lowlight issues, Lenovo is tapping technology provided by Israel-based Visionary.ai. Continue reading CES: Lenovo Yoga Laptops Include One with Invisible Camera

Twelve Labs has raised $30 million in funding for its efforts to train video-analyzing models. The San Francisco-based company has received strategic investments from notable enterprise infrastructure providers Databricks and SK Telecom as well as Snowflake Ventures and HubSpot Ventures. Twelve Labs targets customers using video across a variety of fields including media and entertainment, professional sports leagues, content creators and business users. The funding coincides with the release of Twelve Labs’ new video foundation model, Marengo 2.7, which applies a multi-vector approach to video understanding. Continue reading Twelve Labs Creating AI That Can Search and Analyze Video

Ayar Labs, which develops optical interconnect chips for large-scale AI workloads, has secured $155 million in financing, including from competing processor companies Nvidia, Intel and AMD. Founded in 2017, the Silicon Valley-based company is pursuing a different processing path — combining photonic elements with electronic circuits on each chip for what it says provides faster, more efficient processing for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. “This brings the company’s total funding to $370 million and raises the company’s valuation to above $1 billion,” Ayar notes, adding that the new funding allows the company to scale its optical I/O tech. Continue reading Nvidia, Intel and AMD Invest in AI Chiplet Developer Ayar Labs

Yahoo News has signed up to use San Jose-based cybersecurity company McAfee’s deepfake image detection technology. The scalable McAfee system can “quickly identify images that may have been produced or modified using AI, including deepfake images,” flagging them for the Yahoo News editorial standards team for human review. The standards team then “determines whether the flagged images meet the platform’s editorial guidelines.” The partnership provides news aggregator Yahoo with an extra layer of protection as it deals with a large network of global publishers in addition to policing its original content. Continue reading Yahoo Using McAfee’s Modified Image Detector to Flag Fakes