The chips. Processors that do the maths, and the memory that feeds them.
Fabs, lithography, memory, advanced packaging and the processors themselves. The layer with the longest lead times and the fewest suppliers.
Sits on power, carries cloud. For two years the scarce thing here was packaging. This year it became memory, and that single change reset the cost of every layer above.
· 5 min
A record $54.23 billion quarter capped Micron's best year on record, and independent market data says the memory squeeze behind it keeps tightening into 2027.
· 4 min
September's $120.94 billion in exports and a $60.3 billion semiconductor haul both broke Korean records, capping a month of escalating chip-export milestones.
· 4 min
World Labs makes AI that builds 3D worlds, used to train robots in simulation. It is AMD's second-largest purchase, and Fei-Fei Li becomes AMD's chief scientist.
· 5 min
VSMC's first fab is in trial production and sold out for its first phase. The chairman of its Taiwanese parent says orders cannot all be met and a second fab is being studied.
· 3 min
The Zhenwu V900 has 50 percent more memory than the chip before it and is due in volume in early 2027, two quarters ahead of Alibaba's May roadmap.
· 6 min
Amkor is nearly tripling an Arizona plant that finishes chips after they leave the fab, a step mostly done overseas today. Construction does not start until late 2027.
· L2 Silicon · $4,999 · Confirmed
Nvidia is launching a new, lower-memory version of its DGX Spark desktop computer, a small machine meant for running AI models at a desk rather than in a data center. The 64GB version starts at $4,999 and goes on sale October 23 through PC makers including Dell, HP, and Asus. Two of these machines can be linked together to match the memory of the original, more expensive model. This gives developers and small businesses a cheaper way to experiment with AI models at home instead of paying for cloud computing time.
· L2 Silicon · Confirmed
On the same September 30 earnings call where Micron reported record revenue, already covered here, the company's own market outlook added a specific extension: supply and demand in calendar 2027 and 2028 will stay much tighter than in 2026, and Micron said it does not have line of sight to when that balance returns. This is Micron's own quarterly disclosure, not a third-party forecast, confirming in the company's own words what outside analysts had only predicted. Micron makes the memory chips used in AI servers as well as ordinary phones and laptops, so a longer shortage points toward memory prices, and potentially the price of phones, laptops, and other electronics, staying higher for longer.
· L2 Silicon · $300m+; 2023-2024 · Confirmed
US federal prosecutors have charged Greg Lui, a San Gabriel, California business owner, with shipping more than $300 million worth of advanced computer servers to China through Malaysia and Singapore without the export licenses US rules require for powerful chips, between 2023 and 2024. These are charges, not a conviction, and Lui has not yet had his day in court. Cases like this are the mechanism the US is using to try to keep its most advanced computing power out of reach of rival countries, even though enforcing it, one shipment at a time, is clearly hard.
· L2 Silicon · 431 TFLOPS (BF16); 861 TFLOPS (FP8) · Confirmed
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released, for free, software tools that let AI models run efficiently on Huawei's Ascend chips instead of the Nvidia chips most AI software is built around. The tools, posted on DeepSeek's own code pages, include performance figures like 431 trillion calculations per second on one common type of math Ascend chips do. Nvidia's chips are hard for Chinese companies to buy because of US export rules, so software that makes a Chinese-made alternative easier to use is part of China's effort to build an AI industry that doesn't depend on American chips.
· L2 Silicon · $54.23bn, record Q4 · Confirmed
Micron, one of only three companies that mass-produce the memory chips used in phones, laptops and AI servers, made $54.23 billion in revenue in the three months to early September, the biggest quarter in its history and up from $41.46 billion the quarter before. Its profit for the quarter was $37.70 billion. 'Micron delivered record fiscal 2026 results, and we expect an even stronger fiscal 2027,' said the company's chairman and chief executive, Sanjay Mehrotra, in the earnings release. For anyone buying a phone or laptop in the next year, a company this central to the world's memory-chip supply calling its own year ahead 'even stronger' is a sign the high prices behind this quarter are not about to reverse.
Read the story: Micron's memory chips just had their biggest quarter ever, and prices are still rising · Micron · High-bandwidth memory
· L2 Silicon · $120.94bn; $60.3bn chips · Confirmed
South Korea's trade ministry says the country exported $120.94 billion worth of goods in September, 83.5 percent more than a year earlier, the first time Korea's monthly exports have topped $120 billion. Semiconductors, the chips that power phones, computers and AI data centres, made up a record $60.3 billion of that, up 262.8 percent from a year ago. Korea makes a large share of the world's memory chips, so a number this large is a sign of how hard AI demand is pulling on that one country's factories, though it does not by itself change what anyone outside Korea pays.
· L2 Silicon · ~$8.2bn all-stock; close by end of 2026; Li becomes AMD chief scientist · Confirmed
AMD said on 28 September it has signed a definitive agreement to buy World Labs, an AI model and research lab led by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion. World Labs builds what it calls spatial-intelligence models, which generate, rebuild and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video, along with technology for training robots in simulation. AMD, which makes AI-optimised processors, graphics chips and networking, says World Labs' view of how AI workloads are changing will help shape its future technology roadmaps. After the deal closes, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su. AMD expects the deal to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.
· L2 Silicon · RMB 17.1bn (US$2.5bn) backlog, +88.2% year on year · Confirmed
ACM Research, which supplies machines that process silicon wafers and panels for chipmaking and advanced packaging, said on 30 September that its Shanghai operating subsidiary's order backlog was 17.1 billion yuan, about $2.5 billion, as of 29 September. That is 88.2 percent higher than the backlog it disclosed a year earlier. The figure counts tools already shipped but not yet booked as revenue, and tools still to be shipped, and the company notes that backlog is not an accounting measure and may not all turn into revenue. Full results for the first nine months follow on 28 October. For people outside the chip industry nothing changes directly; it is one measure of how many chipmaking machines are on order.
· L2 Silicon · ~44,000 12-inch wafers a month by 2029; ~1,600 jobs; volume from Q1 2027 · Confirmed
VSMC, a joint venture of Taiwan's Vanguard International Semiconductor and the chipmaker NXP, opened its first factory on 28 September, in Tampines, Singapore. It makes chips on 12-inch silicon wafers using well-proven processes from 130 down to 40 nanometres, for power management, analog and mixed-signal chips and for interposers, the thin layers that link several chips inside one package. The fab is in risk production, a trial phase, with volume production planned from the first quarter of 2027. VSMC says its first sample batch came out with yields above 99 percent, and that at full capacity by 2029 it expects to make about 44,000 wafers a month and create around 1,600 jobs. These are the kinds of chips found in cars, phones and power supplies, not the processors that train AI models.
· L2 Silicon · ₩4.27tn Sejong + ₩2.51tn Vietnam = ₩6.78tn · Reported
Samsung Electro-Mechanics, the Samsung group's electronic components company, disclosed on 28 September that it will invest 4.27 trillion won to expand package-substrate production at its Sejong site in South Korea, and announced a further 2.51 trillion won for its production subsidiary in Vietnam, the Korean newswire Newspim reports. The two total 6.78 trillion won, which Newspim calls a record level for the company; at the European Central Bank's reference rates for that day it is about $5.0 billion. A package substrate is the board a chip is mounted on, carrying power and signals between the chip and the rest of a server, and Newspim ties the spending to a shortage of substrates for AI chips. In July the company said it would invest about 8 trillion won in Sejong by 2040; the report does not say how the two relate. This desk could not open the filing itself, so the item runs as Reported.
· L2 Silicon · 216GB memory; 1,200GB/s between chips; volume in Q1 2027; up to 500,000 cards · Confirmed
T-Head, Alibaba's chip design unit, unveiled the Zhenwu V900 at Alibaba's Apsara Conference, a chip for both training AI models and running them. Alibaba says it has 216GB of memory and 1,200GB/s of bandwidth between chips, supports the low-precision FP8 and FP4 number formats that make AI work cheaper, and is scheduled for mass production and commercial release in the first quarter of 2027. Alibaba also showed a new server built around the V900 and says a cluster of these servers can reach up to 500,000 cards. It gave no figure for the chip's raw computing speed.
· L2 Silicon · in force 22 Sep to 3 Dec; tariffs and minimum prices from 4 Dec · Confirmed
The Commerce Department published a temporary rule on 24 September, in force from 22 September to 3 December, to stop companies stockpiling polysilicon and products made from it before new tariffs and minimum import prices take effect on 4 December. Importers that registered on or after 6 August, when the President ordered those measures, may bring in only small weekly amounts of each product type, set from historic import data, unless Commerce approves more. Existing importers bringing in far more than their usual volumes can be barred from further imports until December. The rule calls polysilicon the base material for semiconductors, which it says enable all digital products and services, and notes that it is also essential for solar products. The tariffs themselves start on 4 December.
· L2 Silicon · $102.96bn orders, +71.4% y/y · Reported
Taiwan's export orders reached 102.96 billion dollars in August, up 71.4 percent on a year earlier and the first month ever above 100 billion dollars, according to the economy ministry's figures as reported by the Taiwanese financial news site cnyes.com. The report credits demand for AI, high-performance computing and cloud services. Orders for electronic products rose 83.9 percent to 45.75 billion dollars and for information and communication products 100.5 percent to 34.21 billion; the United States was the biggest source of orders at 42.13 billion dollars, up 88.9 percent. This desk could not read the ministry's own release, so the item runs as Reported. For most people nothing changes directly, and the ministry expects orders to keep growing in September.
· L2 Silicon · $34.12bn chip exports, +259% y/y · Reported
South Korea's chip exports reached 34.12 billion dollars in the first 20 days of September, up 259 percent on the same days last year, according to customs figures reported by the Korea Times. Total exports over the same period were 71.4 billion dollars, against 40 billion a year earlier. Divide one by the other and chips were about 47.8 percent of everything Korea sold abroad in those 20 days; that share is this desk's own arithmetic, not a figure the article states. This desk could not read the Korea Customs Service's own release, so the item runs as Reported. For people in Korea, chips are now close to half of what the country sells abroad, so a swing in chip sales now moves the whole country's trade figures.
· L2 Silicon · Rs 1,27,500 crore outlay; 200 chip-design firms targeted, from 105 attempted · Reported
India's IT and Electronics Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced the second phase of the national semiconductor mission, Semicon 2.0, at SEMICON India 2026 in New Delhi on 17 September, with an outlay of 1,27,500 crore rupees and a target of at least 200 chip-design startups and companies. The comparison he drew is the useful part: under the first phase more than 105 startups attempted chip design, and about 20 of those secured venture funding, worth roughly 800 crore rupees between them. So the target is not quite a doubling of attempts, and the first round's conversion rate into funded companies was about one in five. This desk could not locate a government document carrying these figures, so the item runs as Reported on the minister's on-record remarks as carried by Indian business press. India is trying to become a designer and maker of chips rather than only a buyer of other countries', and this is the more concrete of the two phases so far.
· L2 Silicon · 256,000 cards · Confirmed
Huawei said on its own website that an Atlas 950 SuperCluster with 256,000 cards is already being deployed, part of a computing architecture it calls Peerium and unveiled at Huawei Connect 2026 in Shanghai. A successor, the Atlas 960, built on near-packaged optics, is under testing. This is a separate claim from Huawei's already-reported plan to bring its next AI chip forward: that one was about when a chip arrives, this one is about how many of today's chips it can wire together so they behave as one machine. Huawei gives no performance figure for the cluster and no customer for it. Bigger clusters acting as one computer generally mean models can be trained faster or answer more at once, which matters to the companies and governments buying the hardware rather than to anyone directly.
· L2 Silicon · 960DT: Q4 2027 → Q1 2027; 960PR: one quarter early to Q3 2027 · Reported
Huawei's rotating chairman Tao Wang told the company's Huawei Connect conference that its next AI chip, the Ascend 960DT, is ready three quarters ahead of plan and will launch in the first quarter of 2027, with a second chip, the Ascend 960PR, arriving one quarter early. He said performance doubles, but gave no benchmark, no memory figure and no power number to support that, and Huawei's own website did not carry a readable version of the remarks at the time of writing, so this rests on Chinese trade press reporting from the keynote. If accurate, it is a sign China's leading chipmaker is pulling its own AI hardware roadmap forward as it works around restrictions on buying chips from Nvidia and other US companies.
· L2 Silicon · 3.2T photonics engine, 2x bandwidth, ~400GB/s · Confirmed
Taiwan's economy ministry showed a silicon photonics engine called 3.2T at the Taiwan Innotech Expo in Taipei, developed by the government-backed Industrial Technology Research Institute with the ministry's support. The ministry says it doubles the transmission capacity of the previous 1.6T generation and can move about 400 gigabytes of data a second. Silicon photonics moves data with light instead of electrical signals, and the ministry pitches it at AI computing. The institute has lined up 20 companies across chip design, manufacturing, testing and packaging around it, and it was one of 64 technologies the ministry put on show. For ordinary people nothing changes yet; this is a demonstration, not a product on sale, and a sign that Taiwan is aiming its chip industry at AI computing.
· L2 Silicon · about Rs 10,000 crore, roughly $1.1bn on this desk's conversion · Reported
Lam Research said on 16 September that it plans to invest approximately 10,000 crore rupees over the next several years to build its first silicon-component manufacturing facility in India, covering silicon ingot production and processing for advanced chip technologies, according to the news agency ANI. No dollar figure appears in the reporting; the rupee number is the only one stated, and the conversion above is this desk's own. No Lam Research release could be reached directly, so this runs as Reported. The announcement came ahead of SEMICON India 2026 in Bengaluru. If built, it adds a link to a chip supply chain that today leans heavily on the United States, Japan and Taiwan.
· L2 Silicon · $1.12bn all-cash; share to ~34%; prices +100-120% H1 · Reported
Winbond, a Taiwanese memory chip maker, has agreed to buy Infineon's NOR Flash and F-RAM chip business for 1.12 billion dollars in cash, in what trade press calls Taiwan's largest overseas memory acquisition. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2027, and industry data firm TrendForce expects it to take Winbond's share of the global NOR Flash market to roughly 34 percent. NOR Flash is an older, simpler type of memory chip used for storage in cars, appliances and industrial gear. TrendForce says a sharp shift in supply and demand has already pushed contract prices up 100 to 120 percent in the first half of 2026, with a further 90 to 110 percent rise projected for high-capacity parts in the second half. If an electronic device you buy in the next year costs more or takes longer to arrive, this kind of memory shortage is part of the reason.
· L2 Silicon · 30tn yuan (~$4.47tn) by 2030 · Confirmed
China's industry ministry and its top economic planning agency jointly published a five-year plan on 15 September 2026 that sets a goal of more than 30 trillion yuan, about 4.47 trillion dollars, in revenue at the country's larger electronics firms by 2030. The plan organises 17 tasks under four headings, and the first task under strengthening the industry's foundations is what the document calls full-chain breakthroughs in integrated circuits, meaning China wants to design and make chips at every stage rather than assemble them from imported parts. It also sets a target of 3.5 percent of revenue going to research. For people outside China, it is Beijing's stated plan for the industry that makes the world's electronics.
· L2 Silicon · 512GB DDR5, 12TB per server, 16.0W vs 44.2W · Confirmed
Micron says it has demonstrated the world's first 512 gigabyte memory module of a type called DDR5, meant for the servers that run AI systems. With these, a single two-processor server could hold up to 12 terabytes of memory, and Micron measures one module at 16 watts against 44.2 watts for the four smaller modules it replaces, more than 60 percent less. AMD and Intel are still validating it and volume production is planned for the second half of 2027, so this is a preview of the next generation of AI servers rather than something you can buy. More memory per server, drawing less power, is one of the few levers the industry has against data centre electricity bills rising even faster than they already are.
· L2 Silicon · more than €200M · Confirmed
Euclyd, a Dutch startup building specialised chips for running already trained AI models rather than training new ones, signed a Series A financing round of more than 200 million euros, co-led by Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners and Scaleup Europe Fund. Peter Wennink, the former president and chief executive of ASML, the Dutch company that makes the machines used to manufacture advanced chips, joins as chairman. It is the second large round this month for a company betting that specialised, cheaper chips beat general purpose ones at running trained models, after Positron AI's 875 million dollars on 10 September, our own observation rather than a comparison Euclyd makes. For most people nothing changes yet; this money funds chip development.
· L2 Silicon · 12 projects, >₹1.64 lakh crore committed, 3 producing · Confirmed
India's government says 12 semiconductor projects have been approved across six states, with investment commitments of more than 1.64 lakh crore rupees, roughly 18 billion dollars on this desk's conversion at about 91 rupees to the dollar, and that three facilities have already started commercial production. The projects span silicon and compound semiconductor fabs, display manufacturing and advanced packaging. This is a different figure from the 1,27,500 crore rupee Semicon 2.0 push in this site's Pulse for 17 September; the government describes that as the outlay it approved in July to scale this foundation, while this counts projects already approved. The figures came in a government backgrounder two days before Prime Minister Modi opened SEMICON India 2026. For ordinary Indians, most of these are approvals rather than working factories so far; if they are built, the effect over the next several years is more chips made in India and more jobs making them.
· L2 Silicon · 100-120% in 1H26; 3-5x more NOR Flash per AI server · Confirmed
TrendForce reported on 14 September that NOR Flash memory prices rose by a cumulative average of 100 to 120 percent in the first half of 2026 for high-capacity parts of 256 megabits and up, and forecasts a further 90 to 110 percent in the second half, which is a forecast rather than a measurement. This site already carries those two percentages from the Winbond acquisition item on 16 September; what is new here is the reason, direct from TrendForce: an AI server needs three to five times as much NOR Flash as an ordinary one. NOR Flash stores a device's startup instructions and goes into nearly every server, so a doubling in its price works through to what AI cloud companies charge and from there into the cost of the tools built on top.
· L2 Silicon · $59.98bn exports, +162.6% y/y · Confirmed
South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said the country's information and communications technology exports reached 59.98 billion dollars in August, a record and more than double the 22.84 billion exported a year earlier, driven largely by semiconductors. Imports rose to 18.61 billion dollars, leaving a trade surplus of 41.37 billion, the first time Korea's technology trade surplus has topped 40 billion dollars in a single month, according to the ministry's own release. This is a government tally of a whole export sector, not one company's results. Korea's chip exports have been one of the clearest ways the AI boom shows up in a national economy, and a surplus this large can support the country's currency and public finances, though an ordinary person sees no direct change from the figure itself.
· L2 Silicon · $16.483bn semiconductor exports, +270.1% year over year · Reported
Korea's customs service says the country exported about $35 billion worth of goods in the first ten days of September, a record for the period and up 82.6 percent from a year earlier, according to a Korean financial newspaper's report of the announcement. Semiconductor exports alone reached $16.483 billion, up 270.1 percent, and now make up 47.1 percent of all Korean exports, a share 23.9 percentage points higher than a year ago. This is early, ten day data, not a full month. For an ordinary person nothing changes today; this is an early read on Korea's export economy, not a price.
· L2 Silicon · $875M at $5bn · Confirmed
Positron AI, a startup that designs chips specialised for running already trained AI models rather than training new ones, raised 875 million dollars in a Series C that values it at 5 billion dollars after the investment. The money came in two parts: 375 million dollars at a 3.5 billion dollar valuation before the investment, co-led by NEA, Andra Capital, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and SemiAnalysis Capital, then up to 500 million dollars in a second tranche led by NEA and Jim Clark. This is one of the largest fundings this year for the bet that specialised, cheaper chips beat general purpose ones at running trained models. Nothing changes for most people; this money funds chip development, not a product on a shelf.
· L2 Silicon · approx NT$514.81bn · Confirmed
TSMC, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, reported August revenue of approximately 514.81 billion Taiwan dollars in a filing with the US securities regulator. That is 10.1 percent more than in July and 53.3 percent more than in August 2025. Revenue for the first eight months of the year came to 3,386.87 billion Taiwan dollars, 39.3 percent above the same period last year. For an ordinary person nothing changes today; this is the monthly receipt of a chip factory, not a price anyone pays.
Read the story: The chip factory the whole stack runs through took in NT$514.81bn in August · TSMC
· L2 Silicon · US surplus $140.7bn, Korea deficit $42.2bn, Jan-Aug · Reported
Taiwan's finance ministry says the island ran a record 140.7 billion dollar trade surplus with the United States and a record 42.2 billion dollar deficit with South Korea in the first eight months of 2026, according to Taiwan's Central News Agency. A ministry official described the pattern as an iron triangle, driven by Taiwan's chip exports to the US and its memory chip imports from Korea. This is a different measure from Taiwan's record August export total already covered here: it looks at the balance with each country rather than the total. For most people it is a snapshot of how tightly three economies are now locked together by AI chip supply chains, not something that moves a price or a product.
· L2 Silicon · $53.49bn combined, +11.5% QoQ · Confirmed
TrendForce says the combined revenue of the world's ten biggest contract chipmakers, the companies that manufacture chips designed by other firms, rose 11.5 percent from the first quarter to nearly $53.49 billion in the second quarter of 2026, a record for the group. TSMC took 72.5 percent of that at $40.2 billion, up 12.1 percent. Samsung's foundry business ranked second at $3.26 billion, up 1.8 percent, with its share slipping to 5.9 percent. China's SMIC ranked third and grew fastest, up 20 percent to more than $3 billion, with its share edging up to 5.4 percent and narrowing the gap with Samsung. For an ordinary person nothing changes today; this is an industry researcher's tally of who makes chips for whom, not a price.
· L2 Silicon · approx $179.2bn · Confirmed
Broadcom, which designs custom AI chips for large customers, says in its quarterly filing, signed 9 September and filed 10 September, that its multi-year customer contracts with firmly committed amounts, across both its chip and its software businesses, had remaining obligations of approximately 179.2 billion dollars as of 2 August, including a long-term contract for custom AI accelerators signed in the spring quarter. It expects approximately 25 percent of that to be recognised as revenue over the next 12 months. The same filing lists 126.8 billion dollars of unconditional purchase commitments, the money Broadcom has promised to pay its own suppliers, with 52.7 billion falling in fiscal 2027 and 73.0 billion in fiscal 2028. For an ordinary person nothing changes today; these are contracts between companies, not prices.
· L2 Silicon · US$82.4bn · Reported
Taiwan sold more abroad in August than in any month on record, 82.4 billion dollars worth, 41.0 percent more than in the same month a year earlier. Electronic parts and information technology products together made up 79.3 percent of the total.
· L2 Silicon · ~$12bn total; cleanroom 33,000 to about 93,000 square metres · Confirmed
Amkor said on 8 September that it is expanding its Arizona chip-packaging campus, taking total planned investment to approximately 12 billion dollars. The new phase adds 60,000 square metres of cleanroom, bringing the site to about 93,000 square metres, nearly triple the 33,000 planned for phase one. Amkor says the expansion is driven by customer commitments that had already passed what phase one could hold. Construction does not start until late 2027 and finishes at the end of 2029, and the two phases together are expected to employ more than 3,500 people in Arizona. Amkor takes finished chips, often made by TSMC, and seals them into the casing and connections that let them work inside a phone, laptop or server, a step called advanced packaging that is mostly done overseas today. Amkor calls this the first US production site doing that work at high volume for outside customers. A chip made in Arizona currently still leaves the country to be packaged before it comes back; this is a bet on closing that gap, three years from now.
Read the story: America is trying to build the one chip factory step it never kept at home
· L2 Silicon · up to $375M · Confirmed
The US Department of Commerce signed a final award of up to 375 million dollars to GlobalFoundries, a company that manufactures chips, under the CHIPS and Science Act, the law meant to fund more chip factories inside the United States. The word final matters: this specific commitment is now signed rather than only proposed. The amount is a ceiling, not a guaranteed payment. Nothing changes immediately for most people; this is government support for a chip factory, not a change to what anything costs today.
· L2 Silicon · 1 million+ wafers · Confirmed
ASML, which makes the machines used to print the finest features on advanced computer chips, said Intel has now run more than one million silicon wafers through its newest High NA EUV lithography machines, across certification, research and actual production of Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 chips. ASML says the results on these newest machines meet or exceed what its previous generation can do. This is a production milestone for one very expensive class of equipment central to making the most advanced chips, including those used in AI computing, rather than a change in chip prices or supply. Nothing changes today in what anyone pays for a chip, but High NA becoming a proven high-volume tool at Intel is a step toward the more advanced chips future AI hardware will need.
· L2 Silicon · up to 20,000 workplaces · Confirmed
ASML, which makes the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines used to produce the most advanced logic chips, including those at the centre of AI computing, began construction on a new campus in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, that it says will eventually provide space for up to 20,000 workers across roughly 350,000 square metres. The first phase, due to finish in 2029, will house at least 3,000 employees. ASML did not disclose a construction cost or say why it is expanding now. Nothing changes for an ordinary person today; this is a multi-year construction project that will not affect chip supply or prices until the years ahead.
· L2 Silicon · 12-inch pilot line by 2031 · Confirmed
ASML, which makes the machines that print circuits onto chips, and TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, say they have formed an industry initiative to move photomasks, the stencils used in chipmaking, from today's 6-inch size to 12-inch. They are targeting a 12-inch pilot production line by 2031 and full readiness for advanced chip production by 2033, with TSMC saying it intends to start using the underlying High NA lithography machines in high volume manufacturing from 2030. A bigger photomask means each production step can pattern a larger area at once, which the companies say helps offset a throughput loss with High NA tools. For an ordinary person nothing changes today; this is a multi-year plan to keep chip factories efficient as chips get more complex.
· L2 Silicon · $256.751bn Jan to Aug, +103.9% year over year · Reported
China's General Administration of Customs says the country's integrated circuit exports reached $256.751 billion in the first eight months of 2026, up 103.9 percent from the same period last year, with August alone accounting for $40.731 billion. Integrated circuits are chips, and this figure covers everything China ships out, from simple chips to advanced ones. For an ordinary person nothing changes today; this is a national trade statistic, not a price.
· L2 Silicon · up to $60bn · Confirmed
Qualcomm disclosed in a filing that on 3 September it issued an Amazon subsidiary a warrant, the right to buy up to 25 million Qualcomm shares at 161.26 dollars each, in connection with a collaboration under which Amazon Data Services buys Qualcomm server chip products, technology, systems and manufacturing services. The shares vest in tranches tied to commercial arrangements, binding orders and actual purchases, counted up to a maximum of 60 billion dollars in payments; 3.75 million shares vested at issuance on the initial purchase commitments. The filing does not name the chips and does not use the word AI, and the 60 billion is a ceiling on the payments that count toward the warrant, not a promise to buy. For an ordinary person nothing changes; this is a supplier and a customer agreeing how the supplier's shares reward future orders.
· L2 Silicon · By 2028 · Confirmed
ASML makes the machines that print the patterns onto a chip. Samsung says it plans to use the newest generation of those machines for full-scale memory production by 2028, a first for the industry.
Read the story: The memory bill, from a factory in Korea to your invoice
· L2 Silicon · $154.73bn industry revenue, +59.5% QoQ · Confirmed
TrendForce, a technology market research firm, says the DRAM memory chip industry took in nearly $154.73 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 59.5 percent from the first quarter, as contract prices for memory chips rose sharply while shipment volumes grew only modestly. Samsung led with $60.98 billion of that revenue, up 63.4 percent, followed by SK Hynix at $38.59 billion, up 37.9 percent, and Micron at $36.0 billion, up 65.5 percent. DRAM is the memory that computers and AI servers use to hold data they are actively working on. For anyone buying a computer, a phone or anything else with memory chips inside it, these are the price rises TrendForce describes.
Read the story: The world's three big memory chip makers post their strongest quarter in years as prices surge · Micron · Nvidia
· L2 Silicon · $40.53bn · Confirmed
Before anyone can make a chip, someone has to sell the machines that make chips. Bills for those machines came to 40.53 billion dollars worldwide in the second quarter, almost a quarter more than in the same quarter a year earlier.
· L2 Silicon · $16.7bn · Confirmed
Broadcom makes chips used to build AI systems. Revenue from those chips came to 16.7 billion dollars in three months, more than three times the same three months a year earlier, out of 29.6 billion dollars of company revenue in total.
· L2 Silicon · $46.65bn · Confirmed
South Korea publishes a national trade count every month, and August puts chip exports at $46.65bn, up 209.0 percent on the same month last year. It is a record, and it made semiconductors just under half of everything the country sold abroad. The figure is the government's own, not a company's.
· L2 Silicon · 71 to 72% · Confirmed
Nvidia told investors its profit margin will bottom at 71 to 72 percent early next year. The reason it gave is memory. The chips that feed its processors have become expensive enough that the most profitable company in the industry is absorbing the cost. The figure was said on the earnings call, not written in the filing.
Strata, the whole AI stack, explained simply. Every number carries a source and a confidence label.
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