Chips & Supply · United States

Musk rules out TSMC role in Texas Terafab project

Credited to Taipei Times · taipeitimes.com · Just now

Elon Musk said his business empire would build and operate Terafab independently, quashing speculation about industry leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) swooping in to run his ambitious chipmaking venture.

Based in Texas, the Terafab project is Musk’s effort to break into the business of fabricating chips, in service of his companies Tesla Inc and SpaceXAI. While Musk had said that he was in discussions with TSMC, the trillionaire clarified in an X post yesterday that the only matter under consideration is for TSMC potentially leasing some part of the planned site and would not involve any operational role.

“Maybe TSMC subleases part of the Terafab if they want, but nothing more than that,” Musk said in a response to a video posted on his social network.

TSMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Intel Corp is helping Musk’s companies with developing the technology that would go inside the Terafab. The US chipmaker would continue its involvement in Terafab, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) said prior to an event in Tokyo commemorating the US company’s 50th year of operations in Japan on Tuesday.

Terafab is expected to supply advanced semiconductors for the needs of Musk’s empire, across the Tesla carmaking and robotics business and the consolidated SpaceXAI that includes spacefaring technology and the xAI group developing Grok. Musk said that his companies would “build and run the fab.”

TSMC, for its part, is weighing an expansive new chipmaking campus in Texas, Bloomberg News reported last week. If it decides to proceed with expansion in Texas, that would add to the state’s growing base of chipmaking expertise and capacity, as it has Samsung Electronics Co developing a plant there as well as the Terafab project.

Bankers in Hong Kong skipped the summer break as an artificial intelligence (AI)-fueled rush for capital sent share sales to a record, defying a bruising selloff in the city’s stocks. Initial public offerings (IPOs), placements and block trades raised US$47.5 billion in July to last month, the biggest haul ever for the period, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. That pushed fundraising this year above US$92 billion and within reach of the US$112.5 billion record set in 2021. AI has been at the heart of Hong Kong’s deal revival, but this summer brought a new level of intensity. Chinese companies raised ever-larger sums

SILICON ISLAND: When asked about geopolitical tensions, Lisa Su said that ‘Taiwan is absolutely critical to the semiconductor supply chain, and very, very critical for AMD’ Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) yesterday said the company plans to “substantially” increase manufacturing capacity next year through its Taiwanese supply chain, particularly with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), as surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-related processors continues to outstrip supply. “It is a very exciting time right now for all kinds of compute, and especially on the CPU [central processing unit] side,” Su said during a visit to Taiwan. “The overall market has increased a lot in 2026, and so we have also increased our own supply and capacity in 2026, but I can

BOOMING BUSINESS: Memory supply constraints would be even more severe in 2027 and 2028, prompting customers to sign long-term supply agreements, Micron said Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光) yesterday said it is accelerating memorychip capacity expansion amid growing artificial intelligence (AI)-driven demand, with its accumulated investment in Taiwan reaching NT$1.6 trillion (US$50.2 billion) as of June. The company’s investment in Taiwan has surged over the past four years, with recent spending equaling the total invested over the past 25 years, Micron Taiwan chairman Donghui Lu (盧東暉) told a media briefing in Taipei. “The launch of ChatGPT and the outbreak of COVID triggered increasing demand for memory chips. Since then, demand has gathered pace rapidly, with only a brief pause in 2023 when a major downturn”

Sea levels in California are set to rise by as much as a foot (30cm) in the coming days as an enormous wave washes up the US West Coast. The huge surge of energy, known as a “coastal trapped wave” or a “Kelvin wave,” is part of El Nino, a months-long phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean that scientists say could generate powerful storms and floods in some parts of the world, while leaving others in drought. The Kelvin wave is not anything like a tsunami; nor does it crash on beaches. Rather it is a sustained bulge of excess water up to

Chips & SupplyUnited States

Broadcom, Oracle, and SpaceX pursue blockbuster debt deals amid AI buildout - WSJ

Credited to Investing.com · investing.com2h ago

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Chips & Supply · United States

Intel and Applied Materials to collaborate on chip manufacturing advancements

Credited to Data Center Dynamics · datacenterdynamics.com · 11h ago

Photograph · Data Center Dynamics

Work will take place at the companies' respective R&D facilities

Intel has partnered with Applied Materials to drive future developments in the semiconductor manufacturing space.

According to the companies, the collaboration will span front-end and back-end-of-line advancements, with work to be undertaken at both Intel’s R&D campus in Hillsboro, Oregon, and Applied’s EPIC (Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization) Center in Silicon Valley, a semiconductor R&D facility slated to open later this year.

The partnership will focus on next-generation transistors, interconnect scaling, and the development of advanced packaging technologies for Foveros-based 3D stacking to support higher interconnect density, improved power delivery, and enhanced thermal performance for high-performance compute platforms necessary for agentic AI workloads.

“With the chipmaking roadmap becoming more complex at each process node, accelerating innovations in semiconductor devices, interconnects and packaging requires deeper collaboration across R&D and manufacturing,” said Dr. Prabu Raja, president of the semiconductor products group at Applied Materials. “We look forward to working closely with Intel as a founding partner of the EPIC Center to shorten development cycles and bring new technologies to market faster.”

Naga Chandrasekaran, EVP, chief technology and operations officer and GM of Intel Foundry, added: “Accelerating our R&D to keep pace with the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure is critical to delivering the technology, manufacturing excellence and foundry services our customers expect from Intel Foundry. Applied Materials’ new EPIC Center provides an environment where our teams can collaborate even more closely and at higher velocity to accelerate materials development and process innovations.”

Earlier this year, Applied announced it was partnering with SK Hynix to co-develop and deploy next-generation DRAM and high-bandwidth memory at its $5 billion EPIC R&D facility in Silicon Valley.