Unsurprisingly, most news updates this week concern artificial intelligence in one way or another, with several new processor announcements. The so-called chip war is also in the news, with CHIPS Act updates and an analysis about Huawei.
US CHIPS Act updates: TSMC, Applied Materials
US CHIPS and Science Act’s recent updates include some applicant receiving the green-light and others getting a denial, reportedly due to “overwhelming demand”. The U.S. Department of Commerce and TSMC Arizona have signed a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms to provide up to $6.6 billion to support TSMC’s investment of more than $65 billion in three greenfield leading-edge (2-nanometer) fabs in Phoenix, Arizona. On the other hand, the CHIPS Program Office has announced that it would not move forward with its third Notice of Funding Opportunity to construct, modernize, or expand commercial R&D facilities in the United States at this time. As a consequence, US-headquartered equipment maker Applied Materials may reportedly postpone or abandon its plans to build a $4 billion research and development facility in Silicon Valley.
Datacenter processor update: Google, Meta, Intel
Two hyperscalers have recently announced new homegrown processors. Google has unveiled the Axion Processors family, its first custom Arm-based CPUs designed for the data center. Based on Neoverse V2 CPU, the new devices will be available to Google Cloud customers later this year. According to the company, Axion processors deliver instances with up to 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based instances available in the cloud today, up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy-efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances.
