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On September 8, TSMC announced that starting in 2030, it will adopt a new "high NA" extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine manufactured by ASML from the Netherlands for mass production. Both parties also stated that they will carry out industry-wide improvements on the high NA machines. ASML monopolizes the supply of EUV lithography machines used to form nanoscale ultra-fine circuits and will begin shipping high NA machines capable of drawing finer circuits starting in December 2023. Intel has already introduced high NA machines, while TSMC previously delayed mass production due to high costs and other reasons.TSMC and ASML will launch an industry-wide project to enlarge the photomask, which serves as the original circuit pattern, from the current 6-inch (approximately 15 centimeters) square to a 12-inch square, and develop high NA machines and related components corresponding to the large masks. A large mask pilot production line is planned to be established before 2031, and the high NA machines corresponding to the large masks are expected to reach a state suitable for advanced semiconductor production before 2033. Major semiconductor manufacturers and mask companies have expressed interest in participating.High NA machines can draw finer circuits, but the area that can be drawn in a single exposure is reduced to half that of traditional models, requiring multiple exposures for large chip circuits, which complicates the process and increases costs. Enlarging the photomask can expand the exposure area and reduce costs. TSMC Chairman and CEO C. C. Wei stated that the company will gather expertise from the entire industry to continuously promote technological innovation that makes advanced technology widely usable and convey its benefits.

The Hashgraph Group, in collaboration with Merck and with consulting and implementation support from PwC Germany, is piloting a cocoa traceability solution. This solution combines Merck's M-Trust physical authentication technology with the TrackTrace digital product passport platform based on the Hedera network, aiming to verify the origin, authenticity, quality, recall requirements, and compliance data of cocoa from farm to consumer.Cocoa is one of the seven commodities covered by the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). According to the rescheduled arrangement reached in December 2025, large operators and traders must fulfill their obligations starting from December 30, 2026, while micro and small operators will be subject to this from June 30, 2027. The solution also aligns with the direction of promoting digital product passports under the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR); however, food and feed are currently explicitly excluded from the scope of the ESPR, and for cocoa, EUDR due diligence remains a recent binding requirement.Partners indicate that this framework is not limited to cocoa and can be expanded to areas such as pharmaceuticals, luxury goods, and industrial components in the future. Husen Kapasi, head of PwC Germany's enterprise blockchain business, pointed out that this solution has verifiability and can play a key role in food recalls or compliance investigations.

ASML stated that it plans to collaborate with its major customers to develop new solutions capable of producing advanced chip manufacturing equipment to meet the demand for large data center chips designed by companies like NVIDIA.Currently, the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines produced by ASML, which are widely used, can manufacture chips with a maximum area of about 800 square millimeters. The next-generation "high numerical aperture" EUV lithography machine that ASML is about to launch will be able to produce finer chips. However, due to its use of smaller mask sizes, it is currently limited in the area of chips it can manufacture.ASML plans to showcase a pilot production line using larger mask sizes by 2031 and aims to enable this new technology for mass production by 2033.

The Financial Times of the UK reports that Huawei is becoming more deeply involved in the domestic photolithography machine supply chain, not only investing in related equipment and component companies but also coordinating suppliers, wafer fabs, and complete machine manufacturers to promote domestic DUV into actual production lines. Bernstein analysts describe Huawei as the "project manager" for China's DUV projects.The fastest progress is being made by Shanghai Yuliangsheng. The company is involved in the development of domestic advanced DUV, with equipment already tested at wafer fabs such as SMIC and Huawei's own production lines, planning to produce 12 units by the end of this year. At this stage, the focus is primarily on simpler chips, with the ultimate goal of being used for advanced AI chip manufacturing.Currently, domestic DUV has not completely eliminated reliance on overseas supply chains. The projection lenses used by Yuliangsheng still come from Germany's Zeiss, and high-power light sources are also a major bottleneck. Huawei has invested in companies such as Qiqi Photon and Keyihongyuan to supplement domestic lenses and light sources.

According to the Financial Times, citing informed sources, Chinese memory chip manufacturers Changxin Storage and Yangtze Memory Technologies have purchased enough deep ultraviolet lithography machines (DUV) from ASML to meet their expansion plans for the next three years.

ASUS and Gigabyte, among other graphics card manufacturers, plan to raise product prices in the mainland Chinese market again in September, by up to 500 yuan (approximately 2,300 New Taiwan dollars). The price increase effect will also boost the performance of ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Leadtek, and Chengqi.According to reports from mainland Chinese media IT Home, ASUS will raise the net cost price of the NVIDIA RTX 5070 series by 150 to 300 yuan in September, while prices for other series models will remain unchanged. Gigabyte will increase the price of all models in the NVIDIA RTX 5060TI 16G series by 200 yuan in September, while other models will remain the same. AMD's RX 9070 XT series will increase by 200 yuan; the RX 9060 XT 16G/8G series will increase by 200 to 250 yuan; and the RX 7650 GRE series will increase by 400 yuan.The main reason for the price increase is the shortage of memory, and production capacity has also shifted towards manufacturing AI computing power GPUs. NVIDIA has again lowered the overall shipment volume of consumer GPUs by 15% to 20% for the third quarter, and the estimated supply for various brands in September is similar to that in August, with supply still tight. The high-end models such as the NVIDIA RTX 5080 and 5070 TI remain among the most out-of-stock models. This year, NVIDIA has raised graphics card prices multiple times, and September marks another increase.

The G7 Cybersecurity Working Group stated in its latest report that quantum computing poses security threats to both public and private institutions, as well as economic threats, and relevant organizations should begin migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) immediately. The working group noted that the migration process could take several years, and attackers can currently collect and store encrypted data to decrypt it once sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available.Quantum computing may also break digital signatures, leading to identity theft and exposing businesses and their supply chains. The report did not mention cryptocurrencies, but similar public key cryptography is used for blockchain wallets and transaction authorizations. Currently, quantum computers are unable to break Bitcoin's cryptography, but developers are considering post-quantum solutions such as BIP-360. Ethereum researchers plan to replace several cryptographic components used by accounts, validators, and applications. The Solana Foundation has tested post-quantum signatures on its testnet and launched an optional hash-based vault. The G7 working group also urged governments to support relevant research, public-private collaboration, and national PQC strategies.

Venture capital firm Social Graph VC recently published an article on market entry stating that data center capital expenditures will exceed $1 trillion by 2026, approximately double the spending of the four major hyperscale cloud providers in 2025. Jensen Huang expects it to reach $3 to $4 trillion annually by the end of this decade, potentially hitting $10 trillion by 2031. AI investments account for about 0.9% of global GDP, rising to approximately 1.4% by 2028.The article states that Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 each have training power consumption below 2GW, with costs around $120 billion. Each generation of models can recoup costs on their own, while laboratory losses stem from the next-generation models that are expanding training scales by 10 times. Computing cannot be procured at a single price; H100 rental rates are about $1.95/hour in the market, while hyperscale cloud rates are $8-9/hour, with hourly rates fluctuating by 137% over the year. There is a financing gap of $1.5 trillion within the approximately $3 trillion global data center expenditures expected by 2028.The article also mentions that CME plans to launch cash-settled H100 and B200 monthly lease futures on NYMEX on October 5, 2026, pending regulatory review, with settlement referencing the Silicon Data Index; ICE has also announced GPU futures based on the Ornn Index.

According to Bloomberg, UBS analysts expect that China's semiconductor manufacturing capabilities may struggle to make sufficient progress in the next decade to develop solutions that can truly replace ASML's cutting-edge EUV lithography technology. UBS analysts wrote in their report, "The stage they are currently at seems comparable to ASML's in 2004." Based on patent application activities, especially in the fields of light sources and laser subsystems, China's current technological maturity is roughly equivalent to ASML's level 15 years before it began mass production of EUV equipment.UBS also expects that China is likely to have the capability for mass production of immersion DUV lithography machines within the next two to five years. Although immersion DUV is not as advanced as EUV, it remains an indispensable tool in chip manufacturing. ASML's immersion DUV machines are priced at nearly $90 million, while EUV equipment costs over $200 million each. China is one of ASML's largest markets, but due to export restrictions, ASML is prohibited from selling EUV equipment to China. UBS pointed out that considering the yield and capacity gaps and regulatory restrictions, Chinese lithography equipment is unlikely to be applied overseas. An ASML spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. The report is based on UBS analysts' predictive views, and actual progress will depend on industry dynamics.

The Zcash full node client team, Zakura, has released Zakura Common, a set of cryptographic and protocol libraries for the Zcash ecosystem. Official benchmarks show that the proof generation speed on mobile has increased by over 14 times (over 5 times on desktop), Sinsemilla hash speed has increased by over 21 times, decryption trial speed has increased by over 1.5 times, and zk-SNARK verification speed has increased by 4 to 8 times; in many cases, the waiting time for wallet transaction creation can be reduced from over 3 seconds to under 200 milliseconds.This upgrade does not require a network upgrade and has been open-sourced under the MIT/Apache 2.0 dual license. Zakura 1.3.0 will switch to this technology stack.

Arthur Hayes posted on the X platform that the FLOP tokenomics infographic for his AI/crypto project Flop Labs will be released this week. Hayes stated that there will be an AMA on X Spaces and YouTube next week to answer questions about the tokenomics and gather feedback to improve the design.

Cryptocurrency infrastructure provider Zerohash has resubmitted its national trust bank charter application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), marking its second attempt following the rejection of its application in July. Previously, on July 17, the OCC returned Zerohash's application, citing "insufficient materials."Zerohash stated that the return was part of an administrative process, allowing it to reapply this month, a practice coordinated with the OCC and not a judgment on the substantive content of the application, nor does it affect the company's existing operations. The company noted that the initial application covered "a wide range of digital assets and fiduciary services," and thus decided to adopt a "phased" approach, focusing on "national trust business that aligns more closely with the established launch timeline."Zerohash is a Chicago-based cryptocurrency infrastructure platform that provides backend operational support for cryptocurrency businesses to institutions such as E*Trade under Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Stripe, Interactive Brokers, and DraftKings, and it already holds a state trust bank charter.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a new article titled "Obfuscation (Part 3): Local Mixing," which delves into a cryptographic obfuscation technique being explored—"Local Mixing." He claims it may become a new foundational cryptographic tool following elliptic curves, RSA, and lattice-based cryptography.Vitalik states that current mainstream obfuscation techniques mainly rely on complex mathematical assumptions, often resulting in extremely high computational overhead. In contrast, Local Mixing adopts a completely different approach, not relying on elliptic curves, large integer factorization, or lattice cryptography. Instead, it draws on experiences from symmetric cryptography and hash function design, continuously shuffling, reconstructing, and hiding circuit structures to eliminate information leakage while maintaining functionality.The Local Mixing technique primarily includes steps such as reversibility, hardening, mixing, splitting, crossing walk, and "gadgetization." By introducing random structures into the circuit, rearranging logic gates, and employing nonlinear hiding mechanisms, it makes it difficult for attackers to recover the original computational logic.Vitalik points out that this technology is still in its early stages, with security not yet validated over the long term and facing challenges such as random attacks and linear analysis. However, he believes that Local Mixing represents a completely new path for cryptographic exploration, aiming to construct more efficient indistinguishable obfuscation (iO) schemes.If breakthroughs in Local Mixing technology are achieved, it could lead to new quantum-resistant public key encryption schemes and promote the development of general obfuscation techniques. The field still requires years of cryptanalysis and optimization validation, but AI-assisted research may significantly accelerate this maturation process. Vitalik states that obfuscation technology is seen as the "final frontier" of cryptography because, theoretically, other cryptographic primitives can be constructed based on obfuscation and one-way functions. Local Mixing may not only reduce the costs of traditional obfuscation schemes but could also become an important direction for future cryptographic infrastructure.

According to Cryptopolitan, cybersecurity company Adversa AI disclosed that xAI's AI assistant Grok has a security vulnerability known as "cryptographic context injection." Attackers can hide cryptographic commands within ordinary web pages, and when users request Grok to summarize the page, Grok automatically decrypts and executes the hidden commands, sending the user's name, geographical location, subscription level, and complete chat history to the attacker's server.The vulnerability was reported to xAI through the HackerOne platform on June 3, 2026. Researcher Rony Utevsky followed up on August 4 and 10, but as of August 19, the vulnerability had still not been fixed on Grok.com, and xAI had not provided a patch timeline.

South Korean enterprise-level AI data infrastructure company GraphAI announced the completion of a $12 million Series A financing round, led by K2 Investment Partners, with participation from A-Ventures and Jiyu Investment, as well as previous participants in the Pre-A round, Quad Ventures, Kiwoom Investment, and We Ventures. To date, the company has raised a total of $14.7 million.GraphAI was founded in 2022 by Professor Min-Soo Kim from the KAIST School of Computing, with the goal of providing next-generation data infrastructure for enterprise AI applications by integrating the capabilities of graph databases, vector databases, and relational databases. Its Akasic platform offers an integrated solution covering enterprise data connectivity, collection, transformation, AI inference, and intelligent agent execution environments.

Justin Drake posted on the X platform that Ethereum L1 will no longer use the SNARK-friendly hash function Poseidon, which has dominated since 2019, and will instead turn to traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2s.This adjustment is based on advancements in the field of SNARK design, shifting the focus from "SNARK-friendly hashing" to "hash-friendly SNARK." By aligning Boolean operations in traditional hashing with binary field native, the proof performance of traditional hashing in SNARK has reached 1 million per second, with an overhead of about 100 times.Research from Binius and Flock has driven relevant progress. The Ethereum Foundation's post-quantum team is advancing this route, with a roadmap that includes deploying production-level leanVM in 2027, and deploying in the consensus layer, execution layer, and data processing layer in 2028.Justin Drake also stated that the enhanced capabilities of AI in cryptanalysis have recently led to setbacks for the lattice-based scheme HAWK and the homomorphic scheme SQIsign, with hash-based schemes being used for post-quantum signatures on the blockchain. The trend of open-source automated research is also accelerating, with SNARK.fast achieving 1.8 million BLAKE3 proofs per second.

The Graph QoS oracle has been down for over a month, and the official Subgraph has stopped parsing new data.

According to official news, OpenAI has released research results stating that its next-generation AI model Astra has made progress in the fields of mathematics and theoretical computer science, involving areas such as high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, group theory, quantum complexity, post-quantum cryptography, and extremal combinatorial mathematics. The 10 published results include: the high-dimensional sphere packing problem, binary and spherical coding problems, non-sofic group problems, Connes rigidity conjecture, arithmetic circuit complexity problems, quantum parallel repetition problems, nearest vector problems, Ehrhart volume conjecture, multi-color Ramsey number problems, and extremal graph theory conjectures.It is reported that these results were derived using an internal version of the Astra model, with the computational cost of finding solutions amounting to approximately $2000 (calculated based on Sol API prices).Subsequently, human researchers used the same model to assist in compiling the results into a paper and generated verifiable proof certificates through the Lean formal proof system.