chips

Companies that made “boring” chips are riding the dollar

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In any sports team there are starters and substitutes. The headlines are usually the big stars, who capture all the attention. The substitutes are the ones who go out to do the job when it’s time, without making so much noise. That same universe of ‘Zidanes and Pavones‘is in the world of computer components and, if the chips of Intel, Nvidia, amd either TSMC They are the Zidanes, the Pavones are, indisputably, the chips of Texas Instruments. And the accounts are coming out. Texas Instruments. It is one of the most evident cases of how profitable it is to live outside the hype. Texas Instruments is the ‘Paco Bearings’ of technology, a company that has been manufacturing chips for decades that we have in a multitude of devices, but that do not make noise with specifications. Are very specific chips to carry out very specific tasks, and if in February we already said that They were dropping their wallets to acquire companies like Silicon Labs (an American company that also makes ‘boring chips’), now we have to echo the accounts. Revenue for the first quarter of the year they reached 4.8 billion dollars, 19% more year-on-year and exceeding expectations. And, precisely, what has increased the most year after year has been the number of chips for data centers. Boring chips in AI. Think about the chips in your washing machine, but also in the refrigerator, in a smart speaker or even in wireless headphones. It also makes other types of chips: those that control power, isolate signals and manage faults. And those are the ones who are making gold in the age of AI. GPUs and CPUs are the star chips of a data center, but others are needed to do the most basic work: power, control, interfaces and protection. Texas Instruments manufactures and sells these chips, and they are what allow a GPU or CPU to run stably in racks. Putting it down, if Nvidia or AMD put the ‘brains’ in the data centers, Texas Instruments provides the nervous system. And this is tremendously profitable since, in the breakdown by segments, although Texas Instruments’ industrial chip segment increased by 30% year-on-year, that of data centers grew 90%, representing approximately 11% of the company’s income. The ARM case. Another interesting case is what processors are experiencing. AI needs are shifting from GPU power for training to CPU efficiency for efficiency. In the era of Agentic AIit is estimated that more CPUs will be needed in data centers in what has already been dubbed the ‘CPU renaissance’. Intel is adapting to it and the market is rewarding a historic processor: Arm Holdings. On March 24, presented AGI CPU, ARM’s first proprietary processor for data centers. It is optimized to precisely run large inference workloads, such as the aforementioned agentic artificial intelligence. Manufactured in a 3-nanometer TSCM process, it has 136 cores per chip and a performance that promises to be double that of conventional x86 processors. AND co-developed with Meta, one of the most interested in stopping depending on Nvidia. Market confidence is at its highest and share prices have shot up to all-time highs. In fact, the graph of ARM and Texas Instruments is extremely similar over the last five years. Those of memory, to their ball. In parallel, there are other companies that do not create the processors to ‘move’ the AI, but rather the memory for the most powerful GPUs on the market. They are invisible chips, but unlike Texas Instruments, their presence in data centers is notable for a very simple reason: they are those same memory companies that have stopped making memory for consumers, focusing almost all of their production on data centers. SK Hynix record a 405% growth in its operating profit in the first quarter of the year, something driven by HBM memories and DRAM for AI. Samsung, more of the same, earning more in three months than during all of last year. The question is the same as in recent months: how long will this growth last and whether investment in data center equipment has a ceiling. And what will happen when that ceiling is reached. Images | Victorgrigas, Raimond Spekking In Xataka | NVIDIA has so much money that it is becoming something different: the largest startup incubator in the world

Europe desperately needs coltan for its chips. The solution is in a town in Ourense and depends on a single procedure

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Galicia hides beneath its soil an indispensable technological treasure for the 21st century, and the machinery to unearth it has already been put into operation. We are talking about the Penouta mine, located in the Ourense town of Viana do Bolo, which is the only coltan mine on the way to being active again throughout Western Europe. This is not a new deposit, since the original operations of this mine They ceased in 1985 and the area was abandoned. Although there was a recent attempt at reactivation by the company Strategic Mineralsthe project ended in bankruptcy. Today, however, this highly strategic asset awakens from its slumber and its long-awaited reopening already depends on one last bureaucratic push that could be resolved before this summer. The penultimate notice. To understand where this mining resurgence is, you have to look at the offices. According to the Vigo Lighthousethe Council of Ministers has just given the green light to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). This step was vital for the Australian group Energy Transition Minerals (ETM), through its Spanish subsidiary, definitively acquires the deposit. A purchase that has been forged after a public auction in which the firm presented an offer of 5.2 million euros. With the blessing of the central government and the financial muscle secured, the ball is now in the court of the Xunta de Galicia. As pointed out The Voice of Galiciathe operation depends solely on the General Directorate of Energy and Mines approving the transfer of the licenses from the former promoter to ETM. The Ministry of Economy and Industry assures that the process is “very advanced.” Regarding deadlines, the company hopes to be able to sign the deeds in the month of May, or in any case, complete the process throughout the second quarter of the year, inevitably before the month of July. A lifeline for Europe’s technological sovereignty. The Galician exploitation of Penouta is rich in tin and tantalum (popularly known as “black gold” or coltan), critical minerals for the manufacture of electronic components at a time when Europe seeks to depend less on third countries. According to statements by Daniel Mamadou, general director of ETM, collected by The Economistthe company has committed to ensuring that all production “remains available for the development of associated industries within the European Union”, and have already initiated contacts with potential local partners. Added to this is its value as a circular economy model. An EU report a few years ago dedicated an entire chapter to Penoutahighlighting it as a reference in the recovery of critical raw materials from mining waste (slag heaps) from the old exploitation of the 80s, an activity that, in addition, “can help restore the environment.” The open fronts. The reactivation plan will be progressive, where ETM plans to start first with “section B” (the waste dumps), which will allow a gradual incorporation of workers. In parallel, the company will prepare the documentation to request a new license for “section C” (the exploitation of the mine itself) with the aim of starting to extract coltan in 2027. To shorten these bureaucratic deadlines, the company plans to request the declaration of a Strategic Industrial Project (PIE). This care when requesting new licenses is not coincidental, since the judicial front has marked the recent history of Penouta. On the one hand, there is good news for the project: the Provincial Court of Ourense firmly filed a case for alleged polluting discharges in February when it found no evidence of criminality. However, the main exploitation permit of the previous owner was annulled in 2024 by the Superior Court of Xustiza of Galicia (TSXG), considering the environmental impact study on the Natura 2000 Network “insufficient”, a decision that is currently pending appeals before the Supreme Court. The firm that will change everything. The closure of the previous stage of the Penouta mine left 55 families on the streets after the bankruptcy. Today, the scenario is radically different. With Australian financing guaranteed, authorization from Madrid in the pocket and a judicial horizon that is beginning to clear, Galician “black gold” has ceased to be a frustrated project and has become the country’s great mining hope. Now, the entire sector holds its breath waiting for that single signature from the Xunta de Galicia that will put Ourense back on the map of the European energy transition. Image | Strategic Minerals Europe Xataka | Madrid has the key mineral underground so that Europe does not depend on China. The problem is that there is a gap above

DeepSeek has just released a model that competes with Opus 4.6. It costs seven times less and runs on Chinese chips

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They have passed 484 days since that “DeepSeek moment“, but the wait It seems to have been worth it, because we have the new DeepSeek V4 with us. We are facing an absolutely gigantic open weights model that once again promises to crack the foundations of the proprietary foundational models of Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. This is moving, gentlemen. Gigantic and open. DeepSeek v4 is an Open Source model and comes in two versions. The first is the Pro, with 1.6 trillion parameters (1.6T), of which it has 49,000 million active. The second is Flash, with 248,000 million parameters (248B, huge for a “Flash” model) of which 13,000 are active. More efficient than ever. Both versions they make use of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which means that only a fraction of the parameters are activated in each inference. This allows the computational cost to be reduced significantly. Both versions support a context window of one million tokens—to include novels and novels at once as input—when in v3 it was 128,000 tokens. Furthermore, this model is much more efficient than its predecessor in computing per token: it requires only 27% of the operations per token and 10% of the KV cache compared to DeepSeek v3.2. Benchmarks promise. DeepSeek’s internal testing reveals that v4 Pro-Max (the best model with the highest reasoning ability) outperforms or is on par with Claude Opus 4.6 Max, GPT-5.4 xHigh, Gemini 3.1 Pro High, Kimi K2.6 and GLM 5.1. The results, however, are not independently verified, which means we should take them with caution. The numbers are still striking: in LiveCodeBench, a programming test, DeepSeek v4-Pro-Max achieves a 93.5% score compared to 88.8 for Opus 4.6 and 91.7% for Gemini 3.1 Pro. In other tests there is more variability, but at least on paper DeepSeek v4 Pro seems as good as Opus 4.7, which until now was the absolute benchmark. Much cheaper. But as happened with its previous version, the difference in price with those models from US companies is astonishing. As point the analyst Simon Willinson, the official prices of DeepSeek v4 Pro are 1.74 dollars per million input tokens and 3.48 dollars per million output tokens, up to almost seven times less than those of Opus 4.7 and up to almost 9 times less than those of the new GPT-5.5. With DeepSeek v4 Flash the cost is 0.14/0.28 dollars per million input/output tokens, when GPT-5.4 Mini costs up to 16 times more. The conclusion is obvious: if it really does what it says it does, the price is an absolute bargain. That is precisely the challenge: that real experience confirms what the benchmarks say. The hardware mystery. DeepSeek has not revealed what hardware has been used to train this version of its founding model. In the past they did admit that they had used NVIDIA’s H800s. Which yes it is known The thing is that the model has been developed to run on both NVIDIA and Huawei Ascend chips. This last has confirmed Baidu that its Ascend Supernode clusters based on the Ascend 950 will fully support DeepSeek v4 versions. Huawei support is “horrible” news for the US. In The Information they already commented that one of the reasons for the “delay” in the appearance of this model was to adapt it so that it worked without problems with Huawei chips. That support is according to Jensen Huang “horrible” news for the US, because it means that dependence on NVIDIA chips no longer exists or at least is reduced to a minimum. But. The launch comes at a difficult time for the company. Guo Daya, one of the people responsible for the v1 and v3 models, has signed for ByteDance to work on AI agents. Luo Fuli, who led the development of v2, joined Xiaomi last year. This launch also coincides with DeepSeek seeking external funding for the first time. They are expected to raise about $300 million and obtain a valuation of about $20 billion. according to The Wall Street Journal. From the surprise effect to the continuity effect. The launch of DeepSeek R1 in January 2025 was surprising because it demonstrated that China could train competitive models at a fraction of the cost of Western models. With DeepSeek v4 that surprise effect disappears to give way to the continuity effect. This model seems to maintain precisely what made the previous model famous: extraordinary power at a very low cost. Bad news for Anthropic. Such low prices are terrible news for Anthropic, which in recent weeks has been forced to execute a kind of “reduflation” of their new modelswhich are not more expensive but consume many more tokens. We’ll have to see if DeepSeek v4 Pro is as good as the company promises, but if it is, we’ll have another “DeepSeek moment” before us. Maybe not as notable as last year’s, but equally relevant. In Xataka | DeepSeek promised them happiness as the great Chinese AI. I didn’t count on a small detail: Kimi

We finally know when their 1.2 and 1.3 nm chips will arrive

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TSMC has revealed which photolithography will be ready for large-scale chip manufacturing over the next three years. The largest producer of semiconductors of the planet has made its itinerary official just a few hours ago during its North American Technology Symposium, which was held yesterday in Santa Clara (USA). And the technologies it has presented put an unappealable reality on the table: this Taiwanese company is determined to continue leading the integrated circuit manufacturing industry. To achieve this in 2029, it will have the A12 and A13 integration technologies ready for large-scale production, which are nothing more than derivatives of its A14 photolithography. From a commercial point of view these will be TSMC’s first 1.2 and 1.3 nm technologies, although it is important that users do not overlook that nanometers no longer faithfully reflect the length of the logic gates or another physical parameter, such as the distance between the transistors. Each chip manufacturer handles them very freely, which prevents users from directly comparing the lithographs they try to “sell” us. The disconnection between the nomenclature and the physical reality of integrated circuits is now almost absolute, but nanometers are still useful to identify the degree of development of each photolithography within the portfolio of each semiconductor manufacturer. Having said this, it is worth investigating what TSMC is preparing. A technical feat: A12 and A13 without using ASML’s High-NA machines Kevin Zhang, TSMC’s deputy chief operating officer, has clarified something very important: “I am amazed by our R&D team. They continue to find ways to drive technological development without using ASML UVE High-NA equipment. Someday we may have to use them, but right now we can continue to reap the benefits of current EUV technology without moving to High-NA which, as we all know, is extremely expensive.” That’s impressive. TSMC is going to continue developing very competitive lithography over the next three years without resorting to High-NA machines. The A13 lithography will be the result of the refinement of the A14 In the slide that we publish below these lines we can see that in 2028 TSMC’s most advanced lithographic node for the consumer market will be the A14, which will use GAA transistors (Gate-All-Around) second generation. Mass production of consumer chips with A13 lithography will start in 2029 and will take A14 integration technology as its base platform. This simply means that the A13 lithography will be the result of the refinement of the A14. According to TSMC, the A13 integration technology is an optical optimization of the A14, which in practice will allow it to achieve a 6% higher transistor density while maintaining compatibility between the two. On the other hand, N2U lithography will arrive in 2028, which is also aimed at the consumer market. It will be an extension of the N2 platform (2 nm) and will deliver performance, again according to TSMC forecasts, between 3% and 4% higher than N2P, as well as consumption between 8% and 10% lower. Finally, A12 lithography will arrive in 2029 with the A13, although it will be mainly intended for chips for data centers. It will use, like A13, second generation GAA transistors and NanoFlex Pro technology. The latter will allow IC designers to use fast cells for the critical parts of the GPU that need speed, and dense or efficient cells for the rest, thus optimizing the chip area down to the last millimeter. NanoFlex Pro is one of the innovations with which TSMC seeks to protect its technological leadership with the purpose that its chip customers for artificial intelligence (AI), such as Nvidia, AMD or Cerebras, continue to turn to it and not to Samsung or Intel. Image | TSMC More information | TSMC | Tom’s Hardware In Xataka | Japan wants to end the Netherlands’ leadership in lithography equipment. This is your plan to get it

that of quantum chips

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Manufacture a qubit, the physical device that implements the minimum unit of information in the quantum computersit is not at all a piece of cake. There are several types: superconductors, ion traps, neutral atoms or ions implanted in macromolecules, among other variants. Not all of them are equally complex, but until just two years ago it was not possible to manufacture any of these qubits in an industrialized way that opened the door to large-scale production. This scenario changed in March 2024. Intel and QuTech, the research institute specialized in quantum computing that belongs to the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands, they managed to manufacture for the first time a qubit in an industrial way, and, what is even more important, using the same processes and the same technology that is currently used to manufacture semiconductors. It was a very important milestone for a crucial reason: this innovation opened the door to the massive scaling of qubits that can be integrated into a quantum computer. Now GlobalFoundries has decided to follow in Intel’s footsteps. Semiconductors open the door to universal quantum computers The qubit that Intel and QuTech researchers managed to manufacture using industrial procedures is, as we can guess, a semiconductor qubit. The most obvious advantage of this type of qubit is that it benefits from the development that integrated circuit production technology has undergone for decades, so it is presumably easier to produce a semiconductor qubit than one that uses an ion trap or a neutral atom. Furthermore, it is evident that Intel is well versed in the processes involved in chip manufacturing. Quantum Motion has recently opened an office in San Sebastián “It’s kind of like we started writing with calligraphy and suddenly switched to using a printer.” This statement belongs to Anne-Marije Zwerver, the QuTech researcher who led this project, and emphasizes the possibility of using this technology to manufacture semiconductor qubits on a large scale. Furthermore, according to Intel, the performance they have achieved using this manufacturing process is 98%. This simply means that 98 out of every 100 semiconductor qubits produced with this technology work correctly. GlobalFoundries has embarked in a project very similar to that of Intel, although it has not done it alone; It has done so with Quantum Motion, an emerging company specialized in the development of semiconductor quantum bits. An interesting note: this last company has recently opened an office in San Sebastián (Spain). Their plan is to demonstrate that it is possible to manufacture qubits using CMOS technology, which is commonly used in the integrated circuit industry. However, GlobalFoundries’ strategy goes further: it wants to adapt its 12 and 22 nm nodes to the manufacturing of quantum chips without having to reorganize its plants from scratch. An interesting note: the materials used by Intel to manufacture its semiconductor qubits are similar to those currently used to produce transistors, such as silicon oxide. However, everything is not done yet. Intel and QuTech have demonstrated that it is possible to manufacture semiconductor qubits using industrial processes, but now need to refine and improve the quality of its multi-qubit spin control system. Whatever they have achieved, it is very important and invites us to look once again towards the future of quantum computers with optimism. Image | Intel More information | GlobalFoundries In Xataka | They are called giant super atoms and they are going to be crucial for something: the future of universal quantum computers

The world will run out of memory for AI chips until 2027. And cell phones and cars are already paying the price

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The big bottleneck in the artificial intelligence industry has nothing to do with AI models, GPUs, or data centers. It has to do with memory, and for months we are immersed in a crisis of which now the manufacturers give us more information. Three companies—Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron—control 90% of global production, but current estimates indicate that between the three They can only cover about 60% of expected demand through 2027. That’s terrible news not only for AI, but also for everything non-AI. The era of memory scarcity. These three manufacturers have prioritized HBM production for AI accelerators because these memories leave better margins. The direct consequence is the shortage of DRAM memories, which are used in PCs and mobile phones, and since October 2025 we have seen how this market has skyrocketed in price. Betting everything on one segment has left the other dangerously neglected. Samsung will have new factories. According to indicate In Nikkei, Samsung plans to launch its fourth memory manufacturing plant in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, in 2026, although mass production will not begin until 2027 or later. Furthermore, not only memories will be manufactured in that plant. There is a fifth plant under construction on that same technology campus, but it will be dedicated to HBM chips and will not begin operating until at least 2028. The South Korean giant has another ace up its sleeve: the United States. HBM to power. SK Hynix is ​​the only one of the three that has a concrete supply improvement for 2026, because it has already started manufacturing HBM chips at its Cheongju plant in February. It is also accelerating construction of a plant in Yongin, near Seoul, with the goal of completing it by February 2027. Micron also asks for patience. Meanwhile, Micron, the American company, has the goal of starting production of HBM chips in Idaho and Singapore in 2027, and will build a factory in Hiroshima that will theoretically come into operation in 2028. It has also just purchased a plant in Taiwan from Powechip, but the chips that come out of it will not be available before the second half of 2027. This is not enough. The consulting firm Counterpoint Reserach estimates that in order to resolve the current DRAM crisis, an industry-wide production increase of 12% annually until 2027 would be required. However, current plans add up to a growth of 7.5%, which makes it clear that these expansions by these three manufacturers are not enough. For Counterpoint analysts, the consequence is clear: the balance between supply and demand will not be normalized until 2028. SK Hynix is ​​already talking about supply limitations for AI chips could last until 2030, and the truth is that all the forecasts only confirm that this problem will still last for years. We consumers pay the price. Memory is an absolutely transversal product that is everywhere. 80-90% of current memory chips go to computers, mobile phones and servers, and the rest to cars and industrial equipment. The most direct impact is already in the mobile market entry-level: memory already represented 20% of the manufacturing bill for one of these smartphones, but that figure is expected to reach 40% by mid-2026. That gives manufacturers few (or no) options, which will impact that cost on the price of these devices. And so with everything. IDC esteem that mobile sales will fall by 13% in 2026 due to this circumstance. The danger of cycles. The memory industry has a history of cycles in which the rise and fall of memory prices is traditional. In 2023 there was a collapse in prices after post-pandemic demand for PCs faded. Several manufacturers recorded historic losses, and learned the lesson of overproducing to meet demand. Now that we need more production, manufacturers are being much more cautious when it comes to increasing their production or investing in new factories. For them, by the way, the crisis is going great: Samsung has earned in three months of 2026 what it earned in all of 2025. China to the rescue. Although South Korea and the United States dominate global memory production, there are several Chinese manufacturers that are gradually gaining relevance. YMTC and CXMT They have been growing significantly in production for some time and that is making now have a golden opportunity to gain market share over competitors that they seemed unattainable. Image | Liam Briese In Xataka | The situation with RAM prices is so desperate that there are already those who build their own memory at home

Samsung faces a very serious problem to surpass TSMC with its 2nm chips: the 60% curse

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When semiconductor manufacturers produce a chip wafer, some of those cores do not function properly. It’s normal. When they start a new lithographic node your performance per wafer usually has a wide room for improvementbut little by little, as engineers refine their integration processes, this parameter improves. A mature lithography can deliver very high performance to IC manufacturers, but a nascent technology can move in the orbit of 50% performance. Importantly, chipmakers need the per-wafer yield to be at least 60% to ensure node profitability and attract more customers. However, this figure is the minimum admissible. And in reality it must be much higher to optimize the competitiveness of photolithography from a commercial point of view. Currently TSMC and Samsung are manufacturing 2nm chipsbut according to the leaks the performance per wafer of its nodes is very different. And the South Korean company needs its 2nm node to be a success. The 1 and 2 nm nodes are crucial in the itinerary that Samsung has planned This reflection that Han Jong-hee, co-CEO of Samsung, made in mid-2025 express clearly At what point were you then? the largest company in South Korea: “First of all, I sincerely apologize that our stock performance has not met your expectations. Over the past year, our company has not responded appropriately to the rapidly evolving AI semiconductor market.” These words were addressed to his investors. Samsung needs to make its current best chip manufacturing technology a success A very important idea emerges from Jong-hee’s words: the competitiveness of your subsidiary specialized in the manufacturing of integrated circuits is essential for Samsung. Even so, problems were arising from several fronts. “Our technological advantage has been compromised in all of our businesses. It is difficult to see that efforts are being made to drive great innovations or take on new challenges. There are only attempts to maintain the status quo instead of generating disruptive changes,” said an internal statement written by Jay Y. Lee, the company’s president. In this scenario, Samsung needs its current best chip manufacturing technology, 2nm lithography, to be a success. And it’s in it. Integrated circuit producers do not typically make the per-wafer yield of their cutting-edge lithographs public, especially if it is relatively low. However, according to DigiTimes Asia Currently the performance of its 2nm nodes oscillates around 55%, so it is below the 60% threshold that we talked about a few lines above. For this company, it is essential to increase the yield per wafer of its 2nm lithography because with a yield of 55% the percentage of usable chips after advanced packaging probably ranges around 40%. To curl the curl, again according to DigiTimes Asiathe per-wafer performance of TSMC’s 2nm nodes ranges between 60 and 70%which places this Taiwanese company, which is Samsung’s biggest competitor and the leader of the chip manufacturing industryin a very favorable position when it comes to attracting new clients. If Samsung manages to raise the performance of its 2nm nodes above 60% during the coming months, it will put up a fight against TSMC. Otherwise you will suffer. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | DigiTimes Asia In Xataka | We already know what the chips that will arrive until 2039 will be like. The machine that will allow them to be manufactured is close

TSMC and SK Hynix are suffocating Samsung. To defend itself, it is already preparing a brutal weapon: 1 nm chips

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Samsung Electronics has two major competitors in the semiconductor industry: TSMC and SK Hynix. The Taiwanese company TSMC leads the market for manufacturing integrated circuits for third parties with a share close to 70%, according to the consulting firm. TrendForce. Samsung is the second largest chip producer for third parties, although with a market share of 7.2% It is positioned very far from the leader of this industry. And the Chinese company SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp) is hot on his heels in third position with a share of 5.32%. Samsung’s other big business is memory chips. In this market it competes with the American company Micron Technology, but its biggest rival is the also South Korean company SK Hynix. In recent years, Samsung has led the DRAM memory integrated circuit manufacturing market with an approximate 40% share, while SK Hynix defended a very worthy 29%. Behind both was Micron Technology, with 26% approximately. However, during the first quarter of 2025 a very important setback occurred. SK Hynix controls none other than 70% of the market of HBM memory ICs (High Bandwidth Memory), so its leadership in this sector is overwhelming. If we look at the DRAM memory chips the figures are much more even, although SK Hynix also leads. TSMC and SK Hynix. SK Hynix and TSMC. These two competitors are two big headaches for Samsung, but the latter company seems unwilling to throw in the towel. Samsung plans to have its 1nm photolithography ready in 2030 In February 2025 the Taiwan Economic Daily published a report in which he assured that TSMC plans to develop a cutting-edge semiconductor plant that will be expressly designed to produce 1nm chips. It will be housed in the Taiwanese town of Tainan, and will be called ‘Fab 25’. It will work with 12-inch wafers, have six production lines and will begin large-scale manufacturing in 2030. It may seem like there is still a lot of time, but that is not the case. In fact, according to the newspaper Korea Economic DailySamsung is making efforts to step on the heels of TSMC. And, incidentally, surpass SK Hynix. Samsung’s future 1nm production lines will benefit from the refinements that the company is going to introduce to its 2nm nodes And Samsung engineers have already been working on their 1 nm photolithography for many months with the aim of concluding the research and development phase in 2030 to be able to start mass manufacturing in 2031. There is a lot at stakebut the development of this technology is by no means a piece of cake. In fact, this company is currently trying to optimize the performance of its 2nm nodes because its Exynos 2600 processor in smartphones Galaxy S26 and S26+ suffers when we compare its performance and energy efficiency with those of comparable chips manufactured by TSMC in its 3nm nodes. Be that as it may, Samsung’s future 1nm semiconductor production lines will benefit from the refinements that this company is going to introduce in its 2nm nodes. And, above all, they will take advantage of Fork Sheet technology with which its engineers seek to leave behind the limitations of Gate-All-Around technology (GAA). Fork Sheet It will allow them, roughly speaking, to dramatically optimize the space on 1nm chips by adding a non-conductive element between the transistors with one purpose: to eliminate empty spaces and pack a higher density of transistors on the same surface. It sounds really good. We will tell you more as soon as we have detailed information about this innovation. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | Korea Economic Daily In Xataka | We already know what the chips that will arrive until 2039 will be like. The machine that will allow them to be manufactured is close

that of capturing talent in artificial intelligence and chips

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For Taiwan, its semiconductor industry is strategic for three fundamental reasons: it represents among 13% and 15% of the gross domestic product of the country; is the engine of its exports with a value close to 40% of the total; and, finally, the production of cutting-edge chips gives the country enormous relevance from a geostrategic point of view. For this reason, it is crucial for this Asian country that TSMC, UMC, Foxconn, MediaTek and its other large technology companies have the workforce they need. TSMC, the largest chip manufacturer on the planethunts for new talent year after year to satisfy its needs. During 2023 recruited 6,000 engineers for its facilities in Taiwan, and presumably this trend also continued in 2024 and 2025. And between 2026 and 2028 it will launch several semiconductor manufacturing plants in the US, Germany, Taiwan and Japan. Be that as it may, neither this company nor any other Taiwanese company linked to the development of integrated circuits and artificial intelligence (AI) can afford to lose human capital. And they are losing it. Taiwan investigates 100 cases in its “silent technology war” against China The Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice of Taiwan is investigating 11 Chinese companies due to their possible involvement in recruiting talent in semiconductors, AI and other sectors linked to high-tech development, according to SCMP. Since 2020, the Government of Taiwan is dealing with 100 cases of possible talent theft in the field of engineering, and it is no coincidence. China has launched a huge talent search campaign in semiconductors and AI against the backdrop of its deep technological rivalry with the US. The 11 Chinese companies under investigation have been accused of illegally recruiting engineers The 11 Chinese companies that are being investigated by the Taiwanese Administration have been accused of illegally recruiting engineers by hiding their continental origin, creating front companies and establishing commercial operations in Taiwan without government approvalaccording to the Investigation Bureau of Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice. Abishur Prakash, a geopolitics expert at the Canadian consultancy ‘The Geopolitical Business’, maintains that: “This is a silent technological war compared to the noisy fight between the US and China (…) While the US focus usually lies on export controls or attracting foreign capital, the Chinese focus is on those critical pieces, such as talent, that will drive the next innovations in AI. Taiwan is fully aware of this.” One of the Chinese companies that are in Taiwan’s sights due to their possible involvement in talent theft is SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp), the largest Chinese semiconductor manufacturer with a global market share of about 5%. This company is the best asset that Xi Jinping’s Government currently has to sustain China’s technological development. Hua Hong Semiconductor and SMES (Semiconductor Manufacturing Electronics Shaoxing) are also two very important chip manufacturers, but the real spearhead of this gigantic Asian country in this industry is SMIC. This company is partially public and has, as expected, the support of the Chinese Government. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | SCMP In Xataka | We already know what the chips that will arrive until 2039 will be like. The machine that will allow them to be manufactured is close

China says it has built its largest data center. And confirms that your problem is precisely in the chips

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China has just turned on its new technological pride in Shenzhen: an AI cluster with 14,000 petaflops built entirely with Huawei Ascend 910C chips. the city has presented it as the first scale computing center with 10,000 cards with completely national technology. It is an undeniable milestone, but if we give it context, an alarm signal and a dose of reality. Why is it important. The Shenzhen cluster, with all its rhetoric of technological sovereignty, represents about 1% of the capacity of the largest US data center in operation today. In other words: China has built, with great institutional effort, what OpenAI already had available to train GPT-4 in 2022. The gap is not a question of ambition (China has it) or capital (it also has it) or energy (of course, he also has it). It’s a chip issue. What are they capable of manufacturing and in what volume today. Between the lines. The Shenzhen government statement highlights energy efficiency metrics and occupancy rates of 92%. It’s really good data. But the selection of indicators (the cherry picking) says a lot so it is omitted: there are no direct comparisons with the clusters of NVIDIA H100 that colonize the data centers of Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Posting only what you have is also a way of not publishing what you lack. The context. At this point no one doubts that China does not lack electricity, not even engineersnor money to build large-scale AI infrastructure. What is still missing, despite the advances, are the chips. Export restrictions imposed by Trump They have cut off access to advanced semiconductors from NVIDIA and TSMCand that has forced China to accelerate its own ecosystem. Huawei has responded with the Ascend 910Ca capable chip but that still has performance limitations and, above all, volume production. If wafers were not in short supply, this data center would be a hundred times larger. Yes, but. Can China close that four-year gap before it gets even bigger? The answer depends almost entirely on how much its domestic semiconductor industry manages to scale, and whether or not Western sanctions manage to stifle that process. At the moment, in Shenzhen they are celebrating an achievement as undeniable as it turns out that in the eyes of Silicon Valley they are still in 2022. Featured image | Huawei In Xataka | Memory prices have started to fall in some markets. There is still a long way to go to close the AI ​​crisis

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