chip

According to Jinshi reports, Anthropic has confirmed that it is assembling an internal chip team for its artificial intelligence model Claude.

According to Jinshi reports, German chip manufacturer Infineon expects fourth-quarter revenue for the period ending in September to reach approximately 4.7 billion euros (5.4 billion dollars), exceeding analysts' average expectations of 4.6 billion euros. This growth is mainly attributed to the increased demand for data center chips and rising prices.Infineon CEO Jochen Hanebeck stated that the demand for power solutions aimed at artificial intelligence data centers remains strong, becoming an important growth driver for the company.

According to Gate market data, Zhongwei Company's stock price has risen over 10%. Media reports indicate that South Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are evaluating chip manufacturing equipment from China's Zhongwei Semiconductor, considering using it in their factories in China.

According to the Electronic Times, TSMC plans to further expand the outsourcing scale of the CoW (Chip-on-Wafer) segment in its CoWoS advanced packaging, entrusting more packaging orders to ASE and other OSAT manufacturers. CoWoS is TSMC's 2.5D packaging technology that connects AI processors such as GPUs with HBM through an intermediary layer, where CoW is the step of combining the chip with the intermediary layer, and WoS is the step of packaging the substrate. Previously, TSMC mainly outsourced the WoS segment, with only a small portion of CoW being entrusted.This move aims to alleviate the packaging capacity bottleneck caused by the continuous surge in demand for AI chips. TSMC holds about 90% of the global AI chip manufacturing market, but as the demand for self-developed chips from manufacturers like Nvidia and AI data centers skyrockets, capacity has become difficult to meet. Industry insiders expect OSATs to significantly increase equipment investment, especially in post-process areas such as wafer cutting and bonding. Several laser processing and bonding equipment suppliers in South Korea have been confirmed to be negotiating with OSATs regarding the supply of CoW equipment.

According to Bloomberg, Blackstone Inc. is in preliminary discussions with investors to assess the feasibility of raising a second large-scale debt financing for Anthropic to support its plan to procure Google AI chips. Sources revealed that a preliminary proposal put forward by Blackstone had a scale of at least $36 billion.The scale, structure of the financing, and whether Blackstone will ultimately lead the deal are still under discussion, and relevant details may change. This financing plan reflects that AI companies are acquiring computing resources through large-scale capital operations. As the demand for training and inference of large models continues to grow, AI companies are seeking new financing methods to support the construction of expensive computing infrastructure.

South Korean AI chip design company DeepX has completed the first transaction of its Series D financing, raising 4.2 billion won from existing investors BNW Investment Co. and DS Asset Management Co. The latest valuation is approximately 3.14 trillion won (about 2.2 billion USD), which is an increase of about 4 times compared to the previous round's valuation.

Analyst Murphy stated that there have been consecutive transfers of over 65,000 BTC in a single day in the past two days (excluding internal transfers within the same entity), leading to a significant decrease in the net holdings of long-term holders (LTH). He pointed out that LTH net holdings have changed the previously continuous upward trend since May, remaining stagnant until July, which is a rare phenomenon in the past year.Murphy mentioned that nearly 14,000 BTC were transferred to exchanges, for example, a publicly listed company under Trump transferred 2,628 BTC to the Crypto.com exchange, which is part of this. The remaining destinations and purposes of the LTH net reduction are still unknown.He also listed current macro-level risk points that may impact BTC, including the Federal Reserve's recent interest rate cut with a 9 to 3 split vote, conflicts in the Middle East and oil prices, the highly concentrated valuation of the AI sector in the US stock market relying on debt and private credit financing, and the yen carry trade positions accumulating again to a nearly historically extreme net short state, while also noting that the sensitivity of the current BTC chip structure may amplify the above risks.

The South Korean stock market fell sharply on Monday, with major chip stocks experiencing profit-taking after last Friday's record surge, while investors also reduced leveraged trading. Analysts indicated that this round of adjustment was mainly due to profit-taking after the previous surge and the exit of leveraged funds. In addition, the strengthening of the Korean won and news related to advancements in AI and semiconductor technology in China also increased market pressure.Data shows that last Friday, the South Korean stock market recorded its largest single-day gain, with the KOSPI rising by 18%, and the large foreign purchases were believed to be related to short covering. However, in early trading on Monday, global investors shifted to selling, with foreign investors selling more than 1 trillion won (approximately 698 million USD) in the South Korean stock market.

On-chain analyst Murphy pointed out that Bitcoin has accumulated up to 890,000 BTC at the single price level of $63,000, showing an extreme distribution. Excluding the 550,000 BTC locked by Coinbase in the $83,000 to $84,000 range, the accumulation at this price level may have exceeded 1 million BTC, accounting for about 5% of the total circulation. Historically, exceeding this scale has generally triggered significant volatility.Currently, the combined total of the two price levels, $62,000 and $63,000, accounts for about 8% of the circulation, and the concentration of chips within a 5% range of the spot price has simultaneously risen to 13%. Although it has not yet reached the historical high probability trigger line of 15%, it has surpassed the level that caused severe volatility in May, officially entering the alert zone.Analysts emphasize that a high concentration of chips means a sharp increase in price sensitivity. When overly concentrated chips are gathered in a narrow range, even a slight change in price may exacerbate the turnover of sensitive chips, leading to violent redistribution either upwards or downwards.The massive short-term chips accumulated near $63,000 are forming a potential trigger for volatility, and any external event could become the detonator. The market may have entered a tense state where a significant directional choice could occur at any moment.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. market has frequently seen bubbles around specific industries and themes in recent years, but these localized bubbles usually do not drag down the overall stock market when they burst.The current storage chip bubble rapidly inflated and burst within about 4 months, accompanied by severe volatility and a hedge fund falling into crisis, yet the S&P 500 index is only 1.6% away from its historical high, and the equal-weighted S&P 500 index set a new high last week. The pullback in AI-related stocks has also been almost completely offset by gains in other sectors.Over the past decade, the U.S. market has experienced bubbles in 3D printing, Chinese concept stocks, low-volatility products, SPACs, clean energy, cannabis, space, crypto assets, and AI concept stocks. Strategy fell 83% from its peak, Trump Media's stock price dropped 89%, and SK Hynix fell 55% before rebounding last Friday.Loose funding, speculative demand, and expectations for new technologies have driven these bubbles, while margin debt and leveraged ETFs in recent years have further amplified the volatility.These localized bubbles have not caused severe shocks to the economy, mainly because most were not financed by large amounts of debt. After the bubbles burst, the losses were primarily borne by investors, and the banking system did not suffer significant shocks.Macro strategist Russell Napier stated that the banking system remains healthy, so there is always more credit available in the market to create the next round of bubbles.However, AI investments are pushing the market into a more dangerous territory. Data center spending is expected to reach $7 trillion over the next four years, and if the productivity gains from AI are not sufficient to support such a scale of investment, capital misallocation could severely harm the economy.As AI construction increasingly relies on debt financing, if broader AI investments ultimately prove to be a bubble, their burst could impact the financial system, making it difficult for the overall market to remain unaffected.

Crypto analyst Murphy stated that the Bitcoin URPD (UTXO Realized Price Distribution) data shows that there are 890,000 coins concentrated at the $63,000 level and 710,000 coins at the $62,000 level, together accounting for about 8% of the circulating supply, which is significantly higher than usual.Murphy believes that this data is similar to the concentration seen just before the FTX incident in 2022. The high concentration increases Bitcoin's price sensitivity, making it prone to sharp fluctuations, ultimately leading to violent redistribution, which could be an important directional choice at the end of a bear market.In response, Jiang Zhuoer commented that if the CLARITY Act cannot be passed before Congress goes into recess, Bitcoin may complete its final drop to the bear market bottom.

According to Gate market data, U.S. stocks closed higher on Thursday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average initially up 1.19%, the S&P 500 index up 1.67%, and the Nasdaq up 2.78%. Micron Technology rose 18%, SanDisk rose 26%, SK Hynix rose 17%, and Nvidia rose over 2%.The Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index rose 1.05%, and iQIYI rose 4%.

According to The Information, TSMC (TSM.N) will develop AI chip packaging technology.In the past, packaging has been regarded as a relatively conventional process in semiconductor manufacturing, but with the surge in AI demand, chip design companies need to integrate more processors and high-bandwidth memory into increasingly large and complex packages. Advanced packaging has become one of the industry's most critical bottlenecks. Intel has developed a packaging technology called Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB).This technology uses small silicon bridges to establish high-speed connections between processors and memory, enabling support for larger-scale multi-chip designs, thus creating more powerful AI chips and helping chip designers achieve supply chain diversification, which has attracted the attention of potential customers such as NVIDIA (NVDA.O).Insiders say that within TSMC, engineers refer to this advanced packaging project as "EMIB-like" and have discussed this solution with some customers.

According to Jinshi News, Samsung Electronics expects that the chip shortage situation will further worsen next year and continue until 2028. The company stated that it is difficult to significantly increase supply in the short term, as it takes more than 3 years and 6 months from the construction of new production facilities to actual wafer production.Samsung Electronics pointed out that the popularity of AI is driving a surge in memory demand, especially as the memory demand for AI servers and general computing servers reaches unprecedented levels.

According to Jinshi, U.S. President Trump praised NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and NVIDIA's chip technology.

According to a report by Sifted, ETH Zurich spin-off startup ZuriQ announced the completion of a $25.5 million seed round financing.The company is dedicated to developing a new type of quantum chip architecture, which is said to have stronger scalability compared to existing solutions and is expected to accelerate the scaling process in the field of quantum computing.