Artificial intelligence is the common underlying theme in most of the news this week. But first, some CHIPS Act updates.
Biden-Harris administration to finalize some subsidies
Some of the last moves from the Biden-Harris administration include finalizing part of the planned subsidies to support the U.S. semiconductor industry. TSMC Arizona has been awarded up to $6.6 billion to support the company’s planned investment of more than $65 billion in three greenfield leading-edge fabs in Phoenix, Arizona. GlobalFoundries has been awarded up to $1.5 billion to support the expansion of its existing fab in Malta, New York, the upgrading of its existing fab in Essex Junction, Vermont, and the construction of a new fab in Malta, New York. In addition to that, Akash Systems (Oakland, CA) has signed a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms with the U.S. Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act to receive over $68 million in direct funding to support the operational ramp-up of its Diamond Cooling semiconductor technologies.
Nvidia accelerates CAE digital twins
Nvidia has announced an Omniverse Blueprint that enables industry software developers to help their CAE customers create digital twins with real-time interactivity. Software developers such as Altair, Ansys, Cadence and Siemens can use the Nvidia Omniverse Blueprint, a reference workflow that includes Nvidia acceleration libraries, physics-AI frameworks and interactive physically based rendering to achieve – according to the company – 1,200x faster simulations and real-time visualization. One of the first applications of the blueprint is computational fluid dynamics simulations. Ansys ran Fluent at the Texas Advanced Computing Center on 320 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. A 2.5-billion-cell automotive simulation was completed in just over six hours, which would have taken nearly a month running on 2,048 x86 CPU cores.
