If you're wondering what effect Intel's blockbuster deal with Nvidia will have on its existing product roadmaps, Intel has one message for you: it won't. PCWorld: "We're not discussing specific roadmaps at this time, but the collaboration is complementary to Intel's roadmap and Intel will continue to have GPU product offerings," an Intel spokesman told my colleague, Brad Chacos, earlier today. I heard similar messaging from other Intel representatives.

Nvidia's $5 billion investment in Intel, as well as Nvidia's plans to supply RTX graphics chiplets to Intel for use in Intel's CPUs, have two major potential effects: first, it could rewrite Intel's mobile roadmap for laptop chips, because of the additional capabilities provided by those RTX chiplets. Second, the move threatens Intel's ongoing development of its Arc graphics cores, including standalone discrete GPUs as well as integrated chips. We're still not convinced that Arc's future will be left unscathed, in part because Intel's claim that it will "continue" to have GPU product offerings sounds a bit wishy-washy. But Intel sounds much more definitive on the former point, in that the mobile roadmap that you're familiar with will remain in place.

Chinese AI developer DeepSeek said it spent $294,000 on training its R1 model, much lower than figures reported for U.S. rivals, in a paper that is likely to reignite debate over Beijing's place in the race to develop artificial intelligence. Reuters: The rare update from the Hangzhou-based company -- the first estimate it has released of R1's training costs -- appeared in a peer-reviewed article in the academic journal Nature published on Wednesday.

DeepSeek's release of what it said were lower-cost AI systems in January prompted global investors to dump tech stocks as they worried the new models could threaten the dominance of AI leaders including Nvidia. Since then, the company and founder Liang Wenfeng have largely disappeared from public view, apart from pushing out a few new product updates.

[...] The Nature article, which listed Liang as one of the co-authors, said DeepSeek's reasoning-focused R1 model cost $294,000 to train and used 512 Nvidia H800 chips. Sam Altman, CEO of U.S. AI giant OpenAI, said in 2023 that what he called "foundational model training" had cost "much more" than $100 million - though his company has not given detailed figures for any of its releases.

Nvidia has agreed to invest $5 billion in its struggling rival Intel [non-paywalled source] as part of a deal to develop new chips for PCs and data centres, the latest reordering of the tech industry spurred by AI. From a report: The deal comes a month after the US government agreed to take a 10 per cent stake in Intel, as Donald Trump's administration looks to secure the future of American chip manufacturing.

However, the pair's announcement makes no reference to Nvidia using Intel's foundry to produce its chips. Intel, which has struggled to gain a foothold in the booming AI server market, lost its crown as the world's most valuable chipmaker to Nvidia in 2020. On Thursday Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, hailed a "historic collaboration" and "a fusion of two world-class platforms," combining its graphics processing units, which dominate the market for AI infrastructure, with Intel's general-purpose chips. Further reading: Intel Weighed $20 Billion Nvidia Takeover in 2005.

China's internet regulator has told the country's biggest technology companies to stop buying all of Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips and terminate their existing orders, as Beijing steps up efforts to boost its homegrown semiconductor industry and compete with the US. From a report: The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) informed companies including ByteDance and Alibaba this week to terminate their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia's tailor-made product for the country introduced two months ago, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Several companies had indicated they would order tens of thousands of the RTX Pro 6000D, and had started testing and verification work with Nvidia's server suppliers before telling them to stop the work after receiving the CAC order, said the people. Nvidia CEO responds: In response to a question on the FT report, Huang said Wednesday that "we can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be."

"We probably contributed more to the China market than most countries have. And I'm disappointed with what I see," Huang said. "But they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States, and I'm understanding of that."

It comes after a tumultuous few years for Nvidia's business in China, which Huang described as "a bit of a rollercoaster."

"We've guided all financial analysts not to include China" in financial forecasts, Huang told reporters Wednesday at a press briefing in London. "The reason for that is because that's largely going to be within the discussions of the United States government and Chinese government."

AI is transforming corporate America, yet the boom remains understated in government growth statistics, according to Goldman Sachs. From a report: Analysts at Goldman pointed to the scale of the boom in a Saturday note: "Revenue at US companies providing AI infrastructure has risen by $400 billion since 2022, which at first glance seems to suggest that AI has been a meaningful driver of economic growth recently." But official numbers tell a different story.

AI technology has lifted real US economic activity by about $160 billion since 2022, or 0.7% of GDP, the analysts calculated. Yet only around $45 billion, or 0.2% of GDP, of AI-spurred growth has been recorded in official statistics. That leaves roughly $115 billion uncounted, according to the analysts. That gap highlights the difference between what companies report and what the government measures due to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis method for calculating growth.

They stole a woman's phone in Barcelona. Unfortunately, her husband was security consultant/penetration tester Martin Vigo, reports Spain's newspaper El Pais.

"His weeks-long investigation coincided with a massive two-year police operation between 2022 and 2024 in six countries where 17 people were arrested: Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru...." In Vigo's case, the phone was locked and the "Find my iPhone" feature was activated... Once stolen, the phones are likely wrapped in aluminum foil to prevent the GPS from tracking their movements. "Then they go to a safe house where they are gathered together and shipped on pallets outside of Spain, to Morocco or China." This international step is vital to prevent the phone from being blocked if the thieves try to use it again. Carriers in several European countries share lists of the IMEIs (unique numbers for each device) of stolen devices so they can't be used. But Morocco, for example, doesn't share these lists. There, the phone can be reconnected...

With hundreds or thousands of stored phones, another path begins: "They try to get the PIN," says Vigo. Why the PIN? Because with the PIN, you can change the Apple password and access the device's content. The gang had created a system to send thousands of text messages like the one Vigo received. To know who to target with the bait message, the police say, "the organization performed social profiling of the victims, since, in many cases, in addition to the phone, they also had the victim's personal belongings, such as their ID." This is how they obtained the phone numbers to send the malicious SMS...

Each victim received a unique link, and the server knew which victim clicked it... With the first click, the attackers would redirect the user to a website they believed was credible, such as Apple's real iCloud site... [T]he next day you receive another text message, and you click on it, more confidently. However, that link no longer redirects you to the real Apple website, but to a flawless copy created by the criminals: that's where they ask for your PIN, and without thinking, full of hope, you enter it... "The PIN is more powerful than your fingerprint or face. With it, you can delete the victim's biometric information and add your own to access banking apps that are validated this way," says Vigo. Apple Wallet asks you to re-authenticate, and then everything is accessible...

In the press release on the case, the police explained that the gang allegedly used a total of 5,300 fake websites and illegally unlocked around 1.3 million high-end devices, about 30,000 of them in Spain.
Vigo tells El Pais that if the PIN doesn't unlock the device, the criminal gang then sends it to China to be "dismantled and then sent back to Europe for resale. The devices are increasingly valuable because they have more advanced chips, better cameras, and more expensive materials."

To render the phone untraceable in China, "they change certain components and the IMEI. It requires a certain level of sophistication: opening the phone, changing the chip..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: Intel has removed its chief executive officer of products, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, as part of a major shake-up of the executive branch of the embattled chip firm, according to Reuters. This is part of new CEO Lip-Bu Tan's plan to reshape the company under his leadership, flattening the leadership structure so he makes more of the important decisions about day-to-day operation. [...] Holthaus is the latest high-profile figure at Intel to get the axe, ending a 30-year career at Intel, but a mere 10 months in her CEO of products role, and a temporary position as co-CEO after the previous CEO, Pat Gelsinger, suddenly left in 2024. "Throughout her incredible career, Michelle has transformed major businesses, built high-performing teams and worked to delight our customers," Tan said in a statement. "She has made a lasting impact on our company and inspired so many of us with her leadership. We are grateful for all Michelle has given Intel and wish her the best."

Intel has said Holthaus will remain with the company in an advisory role, but her position will not be filled by anyone else. What Intel is doing, though, is bringing in executives from elsewhere, including one who worked at Tan's previous endeavour, Cadence. Srinivasan Iyengar joined the company in June and will take on the role of head of a new central engineering division. This group will focus on developing a new custom silicon business for external customers. Although Intel's fabrication business has been one of its worst-performing in recent years, and there are still talks of it selling large portions of it, it's found a new lease of life following U.S. government investment and Bu Tan's leadership. With Iyengar's new role, though, it's possible we'll see Intel designing chips for customers, rather than merely producing them. That could see it compete against the likes of Broadcom and Marvell. With Tan pushing for a faster, leaner business overall, Iyengar will report directly to him in his new role. Intel also announced that it had acquired the services of former executive vice president of solutions engineering at Arm, Kevork Kechichian. He'll begin heading Intel's datacenter group, and brings years of experience at ARM, NXP Semiconductor, and Qualcomm.

Apple has unveiled its iPhone 17 lineup, introducing three distinct models targeting different market segments. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max feature an aluminum unibody design incorporating a vapor chamber for thermal management, enabling the A19 Pro chip to deliver 40% better sustained performance than its predecessor. Both Pro models include three 48MP cameras offering 8x optical zoom -- the longest in an iPhone -- and an 18MP Center Stage front camera.

The standard iPhone 17 gains ProMotion display technology previously exclusive to Pro models, along with dual 48MP rear cameras and the Center Stage system. Apple introduced iPhone Air as the thinnest iPhone at 5.6mm, built on a titanium frame housing the A19 Pro, N1 wireless, and C1X cellular chips. All models feature Ceramic Shield 2 protection offering three times better scratch resistance than previous generations. The iPhone 17 starts at $799 with 256GB storage, iPhone Air at $999, iPhone 17 Pro at $1,099, and Pro Max at $1,199.

According to the Financial Times (paywalled), OpenAI is preparing to launch its first in-house AI chip in 2026 through a partnership with Broadcom. From a report: OpenAI plans to put the chip to use internally rather than make it available to external customers [...]. Last year, Reuters reported that OpenAI was working with Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co to develop its first in-house chip to power its artificial intelligence systems, while also incorporating AMD chips alongside Nvidia chips to meet the surge in infrastructure demands. At the time, OpenAI had examined a range of options to diversify chip supply and reduce costs.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said on Thursday that the company expects artificial intelligence revenue growth for fiscal 2026 to "improve significantly," after securing more than $10 billion in AI infrastructure orders from new customer, without naming it. A new prospect placed a firm order last quarter, making it into a qualified customer, Tan said on an earnings call.

Europe on Friday inaugurated Jupiter, its first exascale supercomputer and the most powerful AI machine on the continent. Built in Germany with 24,000 Nvidia chips, the 500-million-euro system aims to close the AI gap with the US and China while also advancing climate modeling, neuroscience, and renewable energy research. France 24 reports: Based at Juelich Supercomputing Centre in western Germany, it is Europe's first "exascale" supercomputer -- meaning it will be able to perform at least one quintillion (or one billion billion) calculations per second. The United States already has three such computers, all operated by the Department of Energy. Jupiter is housed in a centre covering some 3,600 meters (38,000 square feet) -- about half the size of a football pitch -- containing racks of processors, and packed with about 24,000 Nvidia chips, which are favored by the AI industry.

Half the 500 million euros ($580 million) to develop and run the system over the next few years comes from the European Union and the rest from Germany. Its vast computing power can be accessed by researchers across numerous fields as well as companies for purposes such as training AI models. "Jupiter is a leap forward in the performance of computing in Europe," Thomas Lippert, head of the Juelich centre, told AFP, adding that it was 20 times more powerful than any other computer in Germany. [...]

Yes, Jupiter will require on average around 11 megawatts of power, according to estimates -- equivalent to the energy used to power thousands of homes or a small industrial plant. But its operators insist that Jupiter is the most energy-efficient among the fastest computer systems in the world. It uses the latest, most energy-efficient hardware, has water-cooling systems and the waste heat that it generates will be used to heat nearby buildings, according to the Juelich centre.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: President Donald Trump said on Thursday his administration would impose tariffs on semiconductor imports from companies not shifting production to the U.S., speaking ahead of a dinner with major technology company CEOs. "Yeah, I have discussed it with the people here. Chips and semiconductors -- we will be putting tariffs on companies that aren't coming in. We will be putting a tariff very shortly," Trump said without giving an exact time or rate.

"We will be putting a very substantial tariff, not that high, but fairly substantial tariff with the understanding that if they come into the country, if they are coming in, building, planning to come in, there will not be a tariff," Trump told reporters. "If they are not coming in, there is a tariff," Trump said in his comments on semiconductors. "Like, I would say (Apple CEO) Tim Cook would be in pretty good shape," he added, as Cook sat across the table. Further reading: Trump Basks in Tech Leaders' Spending Vows at White House Dinner

Intel shelled out $16.5 billion on R&D in 2024, outspending Nvidia by 28% and AMD by 156%, with much of the cash going into chip design, fabrication tech, and the upcoming Nova Lake architecture. "When you compare the R&D expenditures to the amount of revenue, though, the story takes on a very different look," notes PC Gamer. "Intel spent 31% of its net revenue, and 26% for AMD, but Nvidia and Samsung got by on just 10% and 4%, respectively." From the report: An analysis of research and development expenditure by TechInsights was reported by Korea JoongAng Daily, but you can get the numbers yourself by pulling up each company's 2024 financial results. For example, AMD declared that it spent $6.456 billion last year (pdf, page 1) on R&D, whereas Nvidia forked out $12.914 billion. It's worth noting that Nvidia's financial statements are numbered one year ahead of the actual period (FY 2026 is 2025 and so on).

Anyway, those figures pale in comparison to how much cash Intel burned through in 2024 to research and develop chip, fabrication technologies, software, and all kinds of tech stuffâ"a staggering $16.546 billion (pdf, page 25). That's 28% more than Nvidia and a frankly unbelievable 156% more than AMD. The nearest non-US semiconductor firm is Samsung Electronics, which spent a reported $9.5 billion on R&D. That would place third, comfortably ahead of AMD, and it strongly suggests that if you have your own foundries for making chips, you need to spend a lot of cash on finding ways to make better processors.

Intel amended its deal with the U.S. Department of Commerce "to remove earlier project milestones," reports Reuters, "and received about $5.7 billion in cash sooner than planned."

"The move will give Intel more flexibility over the funds." The amended agreement, which revises a November 2024 funding deal, retains some guardrails that prevent the chipmaker from using the funds for dividends and buybacks, doing certain control-changing deals and from expanding in certain countries.
The move makes the Wall Street Journal wonder what, beyond equity, the U.S. now gets in return, calling government's position "a stake without a strategy." The U.S. has historically shied away from putting money into private business. It can't really outguess the market on where the most promising returns lie. Yet there are exceptions. Sometimes a company or industry risks failing without public support, and that failure would hurt the whole country, not just its shareholders and employees. Intel meets both conditions. It isn't failing, but it is losing money, its core business is in decline, and it lacks the capital and customers needed to make the most advanced semiconductors. If Intel were to fail, it would take a sizable chunk of the semiconductor industrial base with it. At a time of existential competition with China, that is a national emergency...

[U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick] said as a shareholder, the U.S. would help Intel "to create the most advanced chips in the world." And yet the deal doesn't provide Intel with new resources to accomplish that. Rather, to get the remaining $9 billion, Intel had to give the U.S. equity. This is more like a tax than an investment: Shareholders gave up a 10th of their ownership in return for money the company was supposed to get anyway... Some of the administration's forays into private business do reflect strategic thinking, such as the Pentagon's 15% stake in MP Materials in exchange for investment and contracts that help make the company a viable alternative to China as a supplier of rare-earth magnets for products such as automobiles, wind turbines, jet fighters and missile systems. But more often, companies recoil from government ownership...

Though the U.S. stake dilutes Intel's existing shareholders, its stock has held up. There could be several reasons. It eliminates uncertainty over whether the remaining $9 billion in federal funds will be forthcoming... [B]ecause Washington has a vested interest in Intel's share price, investors believe it may prod companies such as Nvidia and Apple to buy more of its chips.
But that only goes so far, the article seems to conclude, offering this quote from an analyst Bernstein investment research. "If Intel can prove they can make these leading-edge products in high volume that meets specifications at a good cost structure, they'll have customers lined up around the block. If they can't prove they can do it, what customer will put meaningful volume to them regardless of what pressure the U.S. government brings to bear?"

CBS News also notes the U.S. government stake "is being criticized by conservatives and some economic policy experts alike, who worry such extensive government intervention undermines free enterprise."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

Alibaba, China's largest cloud-computing company, has developed a domestically manufactured, versatile inference chip to fill the gap left by U.S. restrictions on Nvidia's sales in China. The Wall Street Journal reports: Previous cloud-computing chips developed by Alibaba have mostly been designed for specific applications. The new chip, now in testing, is meant to serve a broader range of AI inference tasks, said people familiar with it. The chip is manufactured by a Chinese company, they said, in contrast to an earlier Alibaba AI processor that was fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Washington has blocked TSMC from manufacturing AI chips for China that use leading-edge technology.

[...] Private-sector cloud companies including Alibaba have refrained from bulk orders of Huawei's chips, resisting official suggestions that they should help the national champion, because they consider Huawei a direct rival in cloud services, people close to the firms said. China's biggest weakness is training AI models, for which U.S. companies rely on the most powerful Nvidia products. Alibaba's new chip is designed for inference, not training, people familiar with it said. Chinese engineers have complained that homegrown chips including Huawei's run into problems when training AI, such as overheating and breaking down in the middle of training runs. Huawei declined to comment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AMD's X3D-series Ryzen chips have become popular with PC gamers because games in particular happen to benefit disproportionately from the chips' extra 64MB of L3 cache memory. But that extra memory occasionally comes with extra headaches. Not long after they were released earlier this year, some early adopters started having problems with their CPUs, ranging from failure to boot to actual physical scorching and burnout -- the problems were particularly common for users of the 9800X3D processor in ASRock motherboards, and one Reddit thread currently records 157 incidents of failure for that CPU model across various ASRock boards.

In an interview with the Korean language website Quasar Zone (via Tom's Hardware), AMD executives David McAfee and Travis Kirsch acknowledged the problems and pointed to the most likely culprit: motherboard makers who don't follow AMD's recommended specifications. Some manufacturers have historically shipped their AMD and Intel motherboards with elevated default power settings in the interest of squeezing a bit more performance out of the chips -- but those adjustments can also cause problems in some cases, especially for higher-end CPUs.

Nvidia has launched its Jetson AGX Thor robotics chip module, a $3,499 "robot brain" developer kit that starts shipping next month. CNBC reports: After a company uses the developer kit to prototype their robot, Nvidia will sell Thor T5000 modules that can be installed in production-ready robots. If a company needs more than 1,000 Thor chips, Nvidia will charge $2,999 per module. CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company's largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence, which has led to Nvidia's overall sales more than tripling in the past two years. "We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software," said Deepu Talla, Nvidia's vice president of robotics and edge AI, on a call with reporters Friday.

The Jetson Thor chips are based on a Blackwell graphics processor, which is Nvidia's current generation of technology used in its AI chips, as well as its chips for computer games. Nvidia said that its Jetson Thor chips are 7.5 times faster than its previous generation. That allows them to run generative AI models, including large language models and visual models that can interpret the world around them, which is essential for humanoid robots, Nvidia said. The Jetson Thor chips are equipped with 128GB of memory, which is essential for big AI models. [...] The company said its Jetson Thor chips can be used for self-driving cars as well, especially from Chinese brands. Nvidia calls its car chips Drive AGX, and while they are similar to its robotics chips, they run an operating system called Drive OS that's been tuned for automotive purposes.

Intel said Monday that converting $8.87 billion in federal chip subsidies into a 10% equity stake creates unprecedented complications and potential "adverse reactions" for a company deriving 76% of revenue internationally. The arrangement transforms Biden-era CHIPS Act grants into share purchases at $20.74 -- a discount to Friday's $24.80 close -- with the Department of Commerce receiving up to 433 million shares by Tuesday's expected closing.

Foreign governments may impose additional regulations on Intel due to US government ownership, the company warned in securities filings, while the precedent could discourage other nations from offering grants if they expect similar equity conversions. China alone represents 29% of Intel's revenue. The deal also restricts Intel's strategic flexibility, requiring government votes align with board recommendations except on matters affecting federal interests.

The U.S. government's 10% stake in Intel "is a mistake," writes the Washington Post's editorial board, calling Intel "an aging also-ran in critical markets" that "has spent recent years stumbling on execution and missing one strategic opportunity after another."

But TechCrunch points out that the U.S. government "does not appear to be committing new funds. Instead, it's simply making good on what Intel described as 'grants previously awarded, but not yet paid, to Intel.'" Specifically, the $8.9 billion is supposed to come from $5.7 billion awarded-but-not-paid to Intel under the Biden administration's CHIPS Act, as well as $3.2 billion also awarded by the Biden administration through the Secure Enclave program. In a post on his social network Truth Social, Trump wrote, "The United States paid nothing for these shares..." Trump has been critical of the CHIPS Act, calling it a "horrible, horrible thing" and calling on House Speaker Mike Johnson to "get rid" of it...

According to The New York Times, some bankers and lawyers believe the CHIPS Act may not allow the government to convert its grants to equity, opening this deal to potential legal challenges.
Reuters writes that the money "will not be enough for its contract-chipmaking business to flourish, analysts said. Intel still needs external customers for its cutting-edge 14A manufacturing process to go to production, says Summit Insights analyst Kinngai Chan, "to make its foundry arm economically viable." "We don't think any government investment will change the fate of its foundry arm if they cannot secure enough customers..."

Reuters has reported that Intel's current 18A process — less advanced than 14A — is facing problems with yield, the measure of how many chips printed are good enough to make available to customers. Large chip factories including TSMC swallow the cost of poor yields during the first iterations of the process when working with customers like Apple. For Intel, which reported net losses for six straight quarters, that's hard to do and still turn a profit. "If the yield is bad then new customers won't use Intel Foundry, so it really won't fix the technical aspect of the company," said Ryuta Makino, analyst at Gabelli Funds, which holds Intel stock.

Makino, who believes that Intel can ultimately produce chips at optimal yields, views the deal as a net negative for Intel compared with just receiving the funding under the CHIPS Act as originally promised under the Biden Administration. "This isn't free money," he said. The federal government will not take a seat on Intel's board and has agreed to vote with the company's board on matters that need shareholder approval, Intel said. But this voting agreement comes with "limited exceptions" and the government is getting Intel's shares at a 17.5% discount to their closing price on Friday. The stake will make the U.S. government Intel's biggest shareholder, though neither Trump nor Intel disclosed when the transaction would happen...

Some analysts say Intel could benefit from the government's support, including in building out factories. Intel has said it is investing more than $100 billion to expand its U.S. factories and expects to begin high-volume chip production later this year at its Arizona plant. "To have access to capital and a new partial owner that wants to see you succeed are both important," said Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment Counsel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After the Trump administration confirmed a rumor that the US is planning to buy a 10 percent stake in Intel, US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) came forward Wednesday to voice support for the highly unusual plan, finding rare common ground with Donald Trump. According to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the plan would see the US disbursing approved CHIPS Act grants only after acquiring non-voting shares of Intel and likely other chipmakers. That would allow the US to profit off its investment in chipmakers, Lutnick suggested, and Sanders told Reuters that he agreed American taxpayers could benefit from the potential deals.

"If microchip companies make a profit from the generous grants they receive from the federal government, the taxpayers of America have a right to a reasonable return on that investment," Sanders said. While Lutnick gave Trump credit for coming up with what White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described as a "creative idea that has never been done before" to protect US national and economic security, it appears that Lutnick is driving the initiative. "Lutnick has been pushing the equity idea," insiders granted anonymity previously told Reuters, "adding that Trump likes the idea."

So far, Intel has engaged in talks, while the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and other major CHIPS grant recipients like Samsung and Micron have yet to comment on the potential arrangement the Trump administration seems likely to pursue. They may possibly risk clawbacks of grants if such deals aren't made. On Wednesday, Taiwan Economy Minister Kuo Jyh-huei said his ministry would be consulting with TSMC soon, while noting that as yet, it's hard to "thoroughly understand the underlying meaning" of Lutnick's public comments. So far, Lutnick has only specified that "any potential arrangement wouldn't provide the government with voting or governance rights in Intel," dispelling fears that the US would use its ownership stake to try to control the world's most important chipmakers. Further reading: Intel is Getting a $2 Billion Investment From SoftBank

US tech stocks sold off as warnings that the hype surrounding AI could be overdone hit some of the year's best-performing shares. From a report: Nvidia, the chips group that has surged to become the world's first $4tn company on the back of AI, fell 3.5 per cent on Tuesday, while software group Palantir dropped 9.4 per cent and chip designer Arm shed 5 per cent.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed down 1.4 per cent, the biggest one-day drop for the index since August 1. The blue-chip S&P 500 fell 0.7 per cent. European and Asian markets largely followed Wall Street lower on Wednesday. [...] Japan's Nikkei 225 index fell 1.5 per cent and South Korea's Kospi slipped 0.6 per cent. Futures price indicated moderate declines when Wall Street opens.

Traders pinned some of the declines in the US on a critical report on Monday authored by a branch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Researchers said "95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return" from their investments in generative AI, the technology that has sent US stocks soaring to record highs in recent months.