chips

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.

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 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.

Apple (AAPL.O) has launched a new Mac mini, equipped with M6 and M5 Pro chips, significantly enhancing its artificial intelligence performance and further strengthening the capabilities of this leading desktop computer in continuous intelligent computing.

Lei Jun announced that Xiaomi's new generation of the Xuanjie family of chips, Xuanjie O3, Xuanjie O100, and Xuanjie D100, have all completed back-plate verification. Xuanjie O3 is an AI flagship SoC aimed at the highest-end products and will debut on the Xiaomi 18 Fold; Xuanjie O100 is a 1.22TB/s high-bandwidth AI acceleration chip, and Xuanjie D100 is the first domestic 3nm intelligent driving high-performance AI chip, with the latter two set to officially launch next year. The three chips cover the AI computing power needs of Xiaomi's entire ecosystem of people, vehicles, and homes.Xuanjie O3 uses a 3nm process, has an area of 133mm², and a transistor count of 24 billion, which is a 26% increase over the previous generation, with an AnTuTu extreme score reaching 5.22 million. The CPU features a ten-core all-large-core design, with a maximum frequency of 4.35GHz, Geekbench single-core score of 3945, and multi-core score exceeding 15000; the GPU has 16 cores and supports ray tracing, with significant improvements in multiple graphics performance metrics and a 64% reduction in power consumption compared to the previous generation. This chip is the industry's first to support LPDDR6, with an NPU tensor computing power of 200TOPS, and is specifically optimized for large language model inference.Xuanjie O100 is the world's first 6nm 3D wafer-level stacked AI acceleration chip, utilizing wafer-on-wafer packaging and hybrid bonding, with two layers of AI-specific high-speed DRAM and one layer of high-performance NPU stacked vertically, achieving a bandwidth of 1.22TB/s. Together with O3, it can achieve a maximum local AI inference speed of 330 Tokens/s. Xiaomi has restarted its large chip research and development for over five years, with a cumulative investment exceeding 21 billion yuan and a chip team of nearly 3000 people.

According to The Information, citing two NVIDIA employees, NVIDIA plans to ship a small batch of a Groq technology-based LPU (Language Processing Unit) to Chinese customers before the end of the year, with several Chinese customers already placing orders. The report states that this chip does not require a downgrade in specifications and can be used with processors available in the Chinese market through software adjustments.NVIDIA subsequently denied the report, stating it is "incorrect," and that the company currently has no LPU sales in China, nor is there a "China-specific LPU" in the product roadmap. In March of this year, Reuters also cited informed sources reporting that NVIDIA was preparing to sell Groq chips in China, to which Jensen Huang later stated in an interview with Punchbowl that the report was "completely wrong," clearly indicating that Groq chips would not enter China. It is recommended to rely on official statements.

Marvell Technology submitted documents to the U.S. SEC disclosing that the company has expanded its custom semiconductor collaboration with Google. The two parties signed a commercial agreement on July 29, covering AI inference accelerators, storage controllers, network interface controllers, memory interface controllers, and near-memory computing products related to the Google TPU ecosystem.As part of the collaboration, Marvell issued warrants to Google, allowing it to purchase up to approximately 58.97 million shares of the company's common stock at a price of $206.58 per share, with a total exercise value of about $12.2 billion. Approximately 1.36 million shares will vest over the first year, while the remaining shares will vest in batches based on Google's future revenue from custom product purchases (one batch for every $500 million in revenue), lasting until the fiscal year 2033, corresponding to a potential cumulative revenue cap of about $120 billion. Following the announcement, Marvell's stock price surged over 11%, while competitor Broadcom's stock price fell. Analysts believe this move strengthens Marvell's position in the custom chip sector for hyperscale cloud vendors.

Market news indicates that AI chip startup Fractile will sell chips worth approximately $250 million to Anthropic. After the deal is completed, Fractile plans to seek a valuation of about $6.5 billion.

On-chain data analyst Murphy pointed out that BTC purchased in 2025 has been in a state of unrealized loss until now. Currently, there are about 4.77 million coins from 2025, a decrease of 41.5% from the peak in December last year. The decline slope shows two phases: a rapid decline before February and a slowdown after February, but it still maintains a certain slope. This group is currently the largest supply side in the market.Comparing the data from 2024, 2023, and 2022, it is found that the old coins with unrealized gains have basically passed the steep decline phase; the longer the time, the smaller the slope, and the curve has almost flattened after February. Even if the price drops further, the changes in the number of these coins are not significant, and those that should have changed hands have already done so. In terms of historical data, during the bear bottom in 2022, the high-position coins from 2021 decreased by 51%, and during the bear bottom in 2018, the high-position coins from 2017 decreased by 62%.Murphy believes that if we simply refer to history, the maximum decline of the 2025 coins in this bear bottom may be between 50%-60% (currently at 41%), and this does not yet account for the BTC purchased by institutions such as ETFs and MicroStrategy in 2025, most of which are in a locked state.

According to South Korean media ZDNet Korea, Samsung Electronics is adjusting the original purpose of its NRD-K Line 2 at the Giheung campus from a research and development facility to a wafer foundry line, with the main target product being the 2nm base chips required for NVIDIA's HBM. This production line is expected to be operational in the second half of 2028, adopting a "Send-Fab" model, which involves receiving wafers from other mass production lines and performing specific processes.NRD-K is the most advanced composite research and development campus built by Samsung Electronics to seize future semiconductor technology, with a total investment of approximately 20 trillion won, planning for three production lines, of which the first line is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2024. This adjustment aims to proactively respond to the expansion of HBM demand driven by investments in AI infrastructure. Samsung plans to first apply the 2nm process to custom HBM and HBM5 to maintain performance advantages.Industry insiders point out that the scale of NRD-K Line 2 is relatively small, making it suitable for operation in the Send-Fab format. However, there are still about two years until the production line is operational, and the final purpose may be adjusted again based on market conditions. Samsung had previously considered using this production line for DRAM production, but after modifications to the relevant plans this month, DRAM capacity will be more concentrated in the Pyeongtaek campus. Equipment procurement orders have not yet been officially issued.

On-chain analyst Murphy stated that currently, all chips bought in BTC in 2025 are basically in a state of loss. Therefore, apart from wallet migrations, the reduction in the scale of 2025 chips likely means that holders are cutting losses and selling. Data shows that as of now, approximately 4.77 million BTC chips bought in 2025 remain, a decrease of 41.5% from the peak in December last year.From the downward trend, this group has experienced two phases: a rapid decrease in chips before February this year, and a significant slowdown in the rate of decline after February, although it still maintains a certain slope. Murphy believes that the 2025 chips may be the largest potential supply side in the current market scale. In contrast, the BTC chips formed in 2024, 2023, and 2022 have basically completed the release of high-level locked positions due to still having unrealized gains, and the slope of the curve is gradually flattening, indicating that the selling pressure from long-term holders is weakening.Historical data shows that during the bottom phases of the past two bear markets, high-level chips have shown a significant decline: at the bottom of the bear market in 2022, the chips bought at high levels in 2021 decreased by about 51%; at the bottom of the bear market in 2018, the chips bought at high levels in 2017 decreased by about 62%. If we refer to historical cycles, Murphy believes that in this bear market bottom phase, the reduction of high-level chips in 2025 may be in the range of 50%-60%, and the current decline of 41.5% indicates that there is still some room for release. However, this judgment has not yet considered the BTC bought by institutional investors such as spot ETFs and MicroStrategy, as this portion of chips is mostly in a long-term locked state, which may reduce the actual market supply pressure.