Semiconductors

Hydra Host has raised $100m to build the plumbing of the AI boom, and one of its new backers is the company whose chips it is trying to turn into a commodity: Nvidia. The Series A was led by Kindred Ventures, with Nvidia joining alongside ARK Invest, Comcast Ventures, Magnetar, PEAK6 and others. The Information, […]

Qualcomm’s chief executive thinks the app as you know it is on the way out, and that the phone in your pocket is about to lose its place at the centre of your digital life. ‘Agents are going to be the new app,’ Cristiano Amon told CNBC’s The Tech Download podcast. Apps are ‘not dead,’ […]

The Kazakhstan AI deal is signed. Kazakhstan has agreed a set of accords with Firebird, a US startup backed by Nvidia, to build artificial-intelligence data centres that could draw as much as $10bn in investment, as the oil-and-gas producer tries to reinvent itself as a computing hub for the region. The centrepiece is Data Center […]

The Enflame IPO is on. Shanghai Enflame Technology, an AI-chip startup backed by Tencent, has won listing-committee approval to raise about 6 billion yuan ($888m) on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR board, according to Bloomberg. It is the last of China’s “four little dragons,” the cohort of homegrown AI chipmakers Beijing is counting on to […]

Nvidia has started pitching its Vera CPU to Chinese customers. Orders can begin now, and deliveries could start as soon as August, Reuters reported on Friday, citing three people familiar with the talks. It is a workaround dressed as a product launch. Nvidia’s China business has collapsed under US export controls. Jensen Huang said in […]

China’s AI chip industry is no longer trying to build an Nvidia clone. Under sustained US export controls that block access to the most powerful general-purpose GPUs, the country’s largest technology companies are pivoting toward application-specific integrated circuits, custom chips designed to do one thing extremely well rather than handle any workload. The shift is […]