chip

Malaysia is leaning towards relying on Huawei Technologies' artificial intelligence chips to power its sovereign AI program. The Southeast Asian country is seriously evaluating the use of Huawei AI hardware as the backbone of a 2 billion ringgit (approximately 494 million USD) initiative aimed at giving the country greater control over national data.Insiders say it is currently unclear how many chips Malaysia will purchase, and these individuals requested anonymity due to unauthorized disclosure. This move faces strong opposition from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

On the 7th, Huawei released the Mate XT 2 foldable phone in Guangzhou, equipped with the latest Kirin 9050 Pro chip, which is the first high-performance chip to use logical folding technology.The Kirin 9050 Pro layers the logical units within a single chip, adding vertical interconnection channels internally, resulting in shorter signal transmission paths, lower latency, and better performance. This is also the first time Huawei has launched a new Kirin chip at a flagship launch event in six years since the global release of the Huawei Mate 40.

Samsung Electronics' wafer foundry division has recently surpassed 50% in the allocation of production capacity for the sixth-generation high bandwidth memory HBM4 substrate chips in the 4-nanometer process. The industry states that this division will invest more than half of its 4-nanometer wafers into HBM4 substrate chip manufacturing in the second half of this year to expand supply to companies like NVIDIA, Broadcom, and AMD.Samsung initiated mass production and shipment of HBM4 in February this year and plans to increase supply starting from the third quarter, significantly increasing the related wafer input since mid-year. This chip is based on Samsung's wafer foundry 4-nanometer (SF4) process. As of last month, over 50% of its total 4-nanometer capacity has been allocated to HBM4 substrate chips. According to insiders, Samsung's 4-nanometer process is currently at full capacity, with HBM4 substrate chips accounting for about 50% to 60%, and this high proportion will be maintained in the second half of the year.Samsung's wafer foundry production lines at Pyeongtaek Plant 2 and Plant 3 are mass-producing processes ranging from 4 to 7 nanometers, with a monthly capacity of about 30,000 wafers for the 4-nanometer process. Based on this, the wafer input related to HBM4 substrate chips is estimated to be about 15,000 wafers per month. During the second quarter earnings call, Samsung stated that it expects HBM4 revenue to increase more than threefold quarter-over-quarter in the third quarter, with HBM4 revenue in the second half expected to exceed 60% of the company's overall HBM revenue.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated that GPT-6 Astra was trained using over 100,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell NVLink72 chips. It took only 4 years from ChatGPT to o1, and then to Astra. AGI has arrived. Congratulations to the OpenAI team.

According to a report by Bloomberg on September 4, the artificial intelligence company DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 top accelerators from Huawei Technologies Co. in a large data center being built in Inner Mongolia, potentially forming one of the largest known clusters of Huawei AI chips and advancing China's efforts to replace Nvidia.DeepSeek intends to use Huawei's next-generation Ascend 950DT chips to run its models, with the installation timeline depending on Huawei's production capacity. Sources say that the company currently does not plan to use the 950DT chips for training, although Huawei has designed and marketed these processors for more demanding training functions. DeepSeek had previously attempted to train models using Huawei chips but has so far relied on Nvidia accelerators to complete this critical step.

According to South Korean media Greened.kr, Samsung Electronics and Arm have officially launched a joint research and development project for edge AI chips. Arm approved a one-time engineering fee at the end of August for the development of the next-generation edge AI SoC chip and officially started the project with Samsung Electronics.The project adopts a collaborative model where Arm provides core technology, and Samsung Electronics integrates and implements it, aiming to jointly develop customized chips for end customers.

The Bank of Korea stated that thanks to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix actively expanding domestic production facilities, South Korea's leading advantage in memory chip capacity is expected to further expand.The Bank of Korea expects that new chip factories to be put into production by 2028 will increase South Korea's monthly wafer capacity by approximately 600,000 wafers.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said on Wednesday that the Trump administration is considering a new round of import tariffs on semiconductors, which could further increase taxes on foreign chips to attract more semiconductor manufacturing to the United States.However, these tariffs may be implemented alongside tax relief measures for investments in domestic manufacturing companies, following the approach previously taken by the Trump administration in the pharmaceutical industry.Raimondo stated, "This is the principle that the semiconductor industry should follow: If you produce in the U.S., we will give you tariff relief; if you do not produce in the U.S., you will pay tariffs. This is a very wise approach and it works."Trump had previously imposed a 25% tariff on some advanced semiconductors and ordered additional import tariffs on these chips in January of this year after the U.S. Department of Commerce completed relevant trade investigations. However, the scope of the new round of tariffs may expand from semiconductors themselves to products containing chips, thereby affecting imports of data center servers and consumer electronics.

The research institution Sigmaintell has released a storage price indicator showing that in the third quarter of 2026, the overall supply and demand in the global storage market remains tight. Prices for all categories of DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) and NAND Flash (flash memory) continue to rise month-on-month, but the rate of increase has significantly slowed compared to the second quarter, with the month-on-month increase for some storage chips narrowing to within 10%.

Qualcomm announced a double-digit increase in chip prices starting September 1, applicable to chips shipped after that date. Qualcomm informed customers in July that it could no longer absorb rising supplier costs. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon stated in an interview with Reuters that they are simply passing on the significant cost increases they are facing.Apple continues to procure modem chips from Qualcomm for the iPhone 17 models while transitioning to self-developed modems. Qualcomm expects revenue from Apple to decline faster than previously anticipated, dropping about 50% from the September quarter to the December quarter, as supply constraints will reduce Qualcomm's component share in the iPhone 18 series. Qualcomm also provides mobile chips for manufacturers like Samsung, with price increases covering its product line and negotiating separately with customers.

According to Bloomberg, investment firm Dragoneer Investment Group is raising approximately $1 billion for a new continuation fund using equity from its star assets such as OpenAI, SpaceX, Databricks, and wealth management firm Creative Planning as "chips." However, sources indicate that Dragoneer's initial fundraising target was $2 billion, and it is currently unclear what specific assets are included in the final $1 billion fund raised.It is reported that Dragoneer hopes to enhance the fund's appeal to investors by establishing a continuation fund that allows for the continued holding of some existing assets for a longer period. This fundraising also reflects that, as the valuations of popular private tech companies like OpenAI and SpaceX continue to attract market attention, holding early or private equity in these companies is becoming an important chip for asset management firms in fundraising and asset restructuring.

NVIDIA (NVDA.O) will invest $3.5 billion in MediaTek, further deepening the cooperation between the two parties. Currently, NVIDIA is working to persuade more companies to develop chips that can connect to its dominant data center ecosystem. The two companies stated in a joint announcement that NVIDIA will purchase bonds that can be converted into MediaTek stock. This investment will expand the collaboration between the two chip designers.According to the cooperation arrangement, MediaTek will adopt NVLink Fusion and the newly announced NVHBM technology, which are part of NVIDIA's technology suite aimed at facilitating smoother communication among various components in data centers. MediaTek is trying to challenge the market positions of Broadcom (AVGO.O) and Marvell Technology (MRVL.O) by helping data center operators create customized components.Previously, Amazon (AMZN.O) also announced a similar cooperation agreement, agreeing to deploy an additional 2 million NVIDIA components. More importantly, Amazon also committed to using NVIDIA's connectivity technology in its self-developed chips.

LG Electronics will entrust Samsung Electronics to manufacture AI home appliance chips to reduce reliance on TSMC. CoAsia SEMI will develop two IoT chips for LG, with a total project cost of 31 billion Korean won (approximately 1.51 billion RMB), lasting from July 2026 to December 2030.This project is part of the South Korean government's "K-On-Device AI Semiconductor Technology Development" program, which has a total budget of approximately 800 billion Korean won.

According to Citrini analyst Jukan, SK Hynix is working on diversifying the foundry suppliers for the substrate chips used in high bandwidth memory (HBM), which are constructed by vertically stacking multiple memory chips. It is reported that the company is considering outsourcing part of the substrate chip production for the seventh generation HBM, namely HBM4E, to Intel's foundry. So far, SK Hynix has relied entirely on TSMC for outsourcing substrate chip production.This move is seen as an effort to establish a multi-supplier foundry strategy to reduce the concentration of the supply chain on TSMC while enhancing SK Hynix's bargaining power in pricing. According to industry insiders on August 31, SK Hynix is advancing a plan where the substrate chips for HBM4E may be jointly manufactured by TSMC and Intel, potentially starting from the HBM4E generation.As the market expects the cost burden of substrate chips for HBM4E to further increase. Since HBM products are mainly covered by long-term supply agreements (LTA), SK Hynix also finds it difficult to immediately pass on the higher foundry costs to customers by raising product prices. Therefore, industry observers believe that if Intel ultimately joins SK Hynix's substrate chip supply chain, the company will gain more options in terms of cost competitiveness and supply stability.

According to GMGN data, the market capitalization of Base Meme coin BLUECHIP once surpassed 12 million USD, rising over 50% from its intraday low, currently reported at 10 million USD.In terms of narrative, BLUECHIP originates from the early trading experiences of Cobie, the head of trading products at Coinbase. In June 2014, Cobie posted multiple times discussing a token called BlueChip, including its price hitting new highs, changes in orders, and holding it. Recently, related historical posts have been rediscovered by the community, forming the narrative of "2014 old meme revival."According to market news, the prices of Meme coins are highly volatile, and investors should be aware of the risks.

According to The Information, the Trump administration is studying a new regulatory rule for artificial intelligence chips aimed at limiting the remote acquisition of computing resources for advanced AI chips in the United States.The report states that after Trump begins his second term in 2025, the White House announced the withdrawal of the AI Diffusion Rule introduced during the Biden administration. Currently, a small team within the U.S. Department of Commerce is working on a smaller, more targeted alternative plan to restrict geopolitical competitors from accessing advanced AI chips through remote methods such as cloud computing.The rule is still in the drafting stage, and specific restrictions have not yet been clarified, but it indicates that the U.S. government may re-strengthen regulations on the cross-border acquisition of advanced AI computing power, focusing on the possibility of circumventing physical chip export restrictions through remote computing services.

According to Nikkei Asia, SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung stated that the global shortage of memory chips is expected to last until the end of 2030, with a low risk of oversupply. He pointed out that in the AI era, memory chips are no longer just "commodities," and there are currently no signs of oversupply or industry downturn; demand from AI customers remains strong.SK Hynix is a major supplier to NVIDIA. The report stated that the company remains open to further expanding its investments in the U.S. after launching its first HBM chip packaging plant in Indiana.

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. government is investigating Apex Logistics, headquartered in Singapore, for allegedly playing a role in smuggling NVIDIA AI chips to China. Sources say this could become the first action against a transportation company involved in illegal semiconductor trade.Authorities are verifying whether Apex (a unit of shipping giant Kuehne+Nagel) violated U.S. export restrictions by transporting AI systems assembled by Super Micro Computer. NVIDIA chips are regarded as the industry standard for training and running AI models, and companies like Super Micro Computer assemble them into data center servers.

Zhipu released the lightweight flagship model GLM-5.3 Flash, aimed at competing with DeepSeek V4 Flash, and utilizes over 100,000 domestic chip clusters to provide inference services. The model has a parameter scale of approximately 300B, about 40% of GLM-5.3, and is roughly on par with DeepSeek V4 Flash; it adopts the MoE architecture, with actual activated parameters around 18B, possesses native multimodal capabilities, supports image and video input, and is the first new model with multimodal capabilities following Zhipu's focus on coding strategy.The comprehensive evaluation score exceeds that of the previous flagship GLM-5.2, is on par with Claude Opus 4.8, and is higher than the relevant scores of DeepSeek V4 Pro official version. The pricing is 0.8 yuan per million tokens for input, 2.8 yuan for output, and 0.23 yuan for cache hits, approximately one-tenth of GLM-5.3, with a half-price discount offered for the first two weeks after launch. The model is fully compatible with domestic computing power, online traffic is handled by domestic chips, and Zhipu claims that the cluster hardware efficiency and unit token cost have reached levels comparable to mainstream NVIDIA GPUs; this model was previously tested anonymously on overseas platforms under the code name Ox Alpha.

Amazon and NVIDIA announced that Amazon will deploy approximately 2 million high-end NVIDIA chips in 2027 and 2028 for training and running artificial intelligence models. Additionally, Amazon stated in March this year that it would install 1 million NVIDIA chips in AWS data centers. The chips involved in this transaction include Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, and Rubin Ultra graphics cards.