The UK has exited the European Union, but semiconductor development is emerging as one of the areas where it hopes to partner for better economies of scale — and much-needed funding.
The UK itself said it would put up a more modest £35 million ($44 million) in funding for UK efforts over the next few years as part of that.
The Chips Joint Undertaking, for example, has an overall budget of about €11 billion from both public and private contributions.
In December 2023, Pragmatic Semiconductor, another Cambridge-based chip company, raised $231 million at a $500 million valuation.
“We are very happy to welcome the UK to the Chips Joint Undertaking as a participating state,” said Jari Kinaret, Chips JU Executive Director, in a statement.
Apple announced new MacBook Air models with 13-inch and 15-inch screen sizes with M3 Chip.
The 13-inch model starts at $1,099 and the 15-inch model starts at $1,200.
Both variants are available for pre-orders in the U.S. starting today with general availability slotted for March 8.
Apple unveiled the M2 Macbook Air in 2022 and added the 15-inch model to the portfolio last year.
Both Macbook Air models have 18 hours of claimed battery life, a 1080p webcam, Wi-Fi 6E connectivity, and support for two external displays.
Today, Groq announced that it’s forming a new division — Groq Systems — focused on greatly expanding its customer and developer ecosystem.
In forming the new unit, Groq has acquired Definitive Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based firm offering a range of business-oriented AI solutions including chatbots, data analytics tools and documentation builders.
Prior to launching Definitive Intelligence, Madra and Sherry co-launched Autonomic, a cloud-based platform for connecting mobility systems, that Ford acquired in 2018.
Prior to the acquisition, Definitive Intelligence had raised $25.5 million in venture capital.
Definitive Intelligence is Groq’s second acquisition after Maxeler Technologies, a high-performance compute and AI infrastructure solutions firm, in 2022.
Zuckerberg reportedly met Samsung’s executives, including Samsung executive chairman Jay Y. Lee, Wednesday night to discuss potential collaborations around AI chips, semiconductors, and extended reality.
Nvidia continues to dominate the global market for AI chips, leaving a big opportunity for countries that have traditionally been strong in processors or reignite their innovation instincts.
To that end, the social media giant has been ramping up its efforts to secure AI chips, and has been working on its own in-house AI chip, Artemis, for its data centers.
Big tech companies like Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, and Google have equally been scrambling for AI chips to support their AI ambitions.
Just yesterday, Zuckerberg met LG Electronics CEO William Cho in Seoul during his tour of Asia.
Nvidia currently dominates the AI chip market with its GPU chips.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman is reportedly also in talks with investors in the United Arab Emirates to raise an eye-watering $5 trillion to $7 trillion for a new AI chip project.
Altman has reportedly met with a number of potential investors, chip industry experts and others across the globe, including SoftBank’s Son, for the new AI chip initiative.
Shift focus (from Alibaba) to AIA new chip project would be line with the company’s new focus on AI.
Shares of SoftBank closed 2.8% higher on Monday after Son’s AI chip project news broke on Saturday.
The electric field approach minimizes the movement of electrons at the chip level, reducing energy usage — and heat.
TOPS/W is a bit of a vague metric, but the takeaway is that memcapacitors can lead to dramatic energy consumption reductions while training AI models.
Now, it’s early days for Semron, which Kirschen says is in the “pre-product” stage and has “negligible” revenue to show for it.
EnCharge, like Semron, is designing computer chips that use capacitors rather than transistors, but using a different substrate architecture.
Semron will be a key element in solving this problem by providing a revolutionary new chip that is inherently specialized on computing AI models.
Rebellions, a South Korean fabless AI chip startup, said today it has closed $124 million (165 billion KRW) in a Series B round of funding to develop its third AI chip, called Rebel.
Rebellions’ fundraise comes at a key moment in the chip industry, specifically around the development and use of AI chips.
Nvidia is the AI chip market leader, its name synonymous with the AI boom that is currently sweeping the technology world.
In May 2023, Rebellions’ strategic investor, KT, installed Atom, Rebellions’ data-center targeted AI chip, in its cloud-based neural processing units (NPU) infrastructure.
Rebellions CEO Sunghyun Park, a former quant developer at Morgan Stanley in New York, and four co-founders set up the AI chip startup in 2020.
Lai made impassioned comments about Taiwan’s chip industry after his victory on Saturday that seem to make it clear that his administration’s main tech focus will be on semiconductors.
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry strengthens the global standing of the country, a small island with a population of 23 million.
Another barrier is that even though the semiconductor industry is important to Taiwan’s economy, most people don’t work in it.
“Most people in the nation are not employed in the semiconductor industry, even though it’s the lifeblood of the economy,” says Patel.
Despite the challenges faced by Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, Triolo notes that its international recognition has grown significantly since Tsai came into power eight years ago.
Just ahead of CES, Qualcomm today announced the next generation of its Snapdragon XR platform, the aptly named XR2+ Gen 2.
These include the Snapdragon AR chips, which, for example, power the Meta/Ray-Ban smart glasses.
The line-up is a bit complicated, with the AR1 Gen 1 meant for smart glasses without a screen, the AR2 Gen 1 chips for AR-enabled smart glasses, as well as the XR1 and XR2 chips.
The XR2+ Gen 2 is the new flagship of the series, besting the previously-released non-plus XR2 Gen 2, which “only” provided a 3k resolution.
“Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 unlocks 4.3K resolution which will take XR productivity and entertainment to the next level by bringing spectacularly clear visuals to use cases such as room-scale screens, life-size overlays and virtual desktops,” said Hugo Swart, vice president and general manager of XR at Qualcomm.
Called Articul8 AI (an awkward abbreviation of “Articulate AI”), the new entity builds off a proof-of-concept from an Intel collaboration with Boston Consulting Group (BSG) early last May.
Reuters reports that Intel, using its hardware and a combination of open source and internally-sourced software, created a gen AI system that can read text and images — running inside BCG’s datacenters to address BSG’s security requirements.
“Articul8’s gen AI software product was built from the ground up to address the needs of enterprises and is optimized for speed of deployment, scalability, security and sustainability — including costs,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch via email.
“The Articul8 platform delivers AI capabilities that keep customer data, training and inference within the enterprise security perimeter.
“Intel and Articul8 will remain strategically aligned and Intel plans to leverage Articul8’s enterprise gen AI software for internal use cases as well as offer it to end customers as part of a joint go-to-market partnership,” the spokesperson said.
