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Chips & Hardware

Samsung to build Nvidia's NVHBM base dies on TSMC 3nm

The Arena

Samsung to build Nvidia's NVHBM base dies on TSMC 3nm

Nvidia's custom memory program is reportedly moving onto TSMC's process lines — with Samsung coming along for the first time. And in Philadelphia, the jobs-vs-delivery-robots argument has produced its first arrest. Nvidia wants all three of its memory suppliers building its custom NVHBM base dies on one TSMC process — and Samsung has reportedly agreed. The Seoul Economic Daily reported Sunday that Nvidia asked Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron to manufacture the base dies for its custom NVHBM…

Taiwan makes AI chip smuggling to China a criminal offense

The Guardrails

Taiwan makes AI chip smuggling to China a criminal offense

Taipei is turning the black market in advanced AI hardware into a crime it can actually prosecute — and a researcher says the field has spent a decade misreading how its own models work. Taiwan's government plans to add AI servers and cutting-edge semiconductors to its list of controlled exports, and once the measures take effect, shipping restricted AI hardware to China becomes a criminal offense under the Foreign Trade Act, Minister of Economic Affairs Kung Ming-hsin told Bloomberg News.

Houmo moves compute inside memory — and A20 enters production

The Stack

Houmo moves compute inside memory — and A20 enters production

Beijing chipmaker Houmo used its partner conference this week to lay out two compute-in-memory routes at once — and to say the first chip built on the newer one is already in production. Houmo's A20, its first chip built on a 3D compute-in-memory architecture, has entered production. The part supports up to 16 chips fully interconnected, claims a 50% improvement in compute utilization over the previous generation, and covers models from 3B to 30B parameters, according to co-founder and…

Brain organoids classified Braille at 83% — in a trio, not alone

The Frontier

Brain organoids classified Braille at 83% — in a trio, not alone

Two stories today: human brain tissue on a chip decoded a tactile signal, and the data-centre company behind some of the largest AI contracts in Europe turns out to be six months behind on its flagship site. Human forebrain organoids grown on a microelectrode array classified Braille letters with 61 percent accuracy on their own and 83 percent when the responses of three organoids were combined, in a peer-reviewed study from the University of Bristol.

Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3 Klein runs on an 8 GB consumer GPU

The Frontier

Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3 Klein runs on an 8 GB consumer GPU

Black Forest Labs shipped the open-weights half of its FLUX 3 family, and Nvidia put a 120-billion-parameter agent model in the open. In research, a Goodfire essay argues the field misread its own evidence about what lives inside a network. Black Forest Labs has released FLUX 3 Image Klein, a 5.6-billion-parameter image model that runs on consumer hardware — an INT8 build fits in 8 GB of VRAM and produces an image in under nine seconds on an RTX 4070.

Deep Dive — TSMC's record quarter and the repriced order book

The Arena

Deep Dive — TSMC's record quarter and the repriced order book

TSMC posted the best quarter in its history on Thursday and guided the next one higher, and its American depositary receipts fell anyway. Third-quarter revenue came in at $46.72 billion, up 41.2% year over year and above the top of the company's own guidance range. Net profit rose 68.7% to NT$763.06 billion. The fourth-quarter guide of $52.3 billion to $54.3 billion implies roughly 58% growth at the midpoint against a year earlier.

TSMC's sixth straight record quarter — 58.7% margin, 68% from HPC

The Arena

TSMC's sixth straight record quarter — 58.7% margin, 68% from HPC

The chip cycle's upstream end and its downstream end told two different stories on the same morning: TSMC booked a sixth consecutive record, while the lab that buys its wafers told investors its growth rate is falling fast. TSMC's third-quarter net profit rose 68.7% to NT$763.1 billion (about $23.9 billion), a sixth consecutive record, on revenue of NT$1.494 trillion — up 50.9% year over year and roughly $46.7 billion.

Huawei ships its first logic-folded chip — and bonding is the gate

The Stack

Huawei ships its first logic-folded chip — and bonding is the gate

Huawei has started mass production on a phone chip that engineers its way around the lithography wall instead of through it, and in doing so it has quietly moved the competitive bottleneck from transistor density to how tightly two silicon wafers can be glued together. Huawei's Kirin 9050 Pro is the first mass-produced logic-folding chip, stacking multiple dies and wiring them with more than 50 million hybrid bonds.

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