Amkor raises its Arizona packaging campus to about $12 billion, nearly tripling its cleanroom
The AI stack on 8 September 2026. 21 moves, 18 with a primary source.
Amkor raises its Arizona packaging campus to about $12 billion, nearly tripling its cleanroom
· 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.
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.
Abu Dhabi Global Market, a financial free zone in the UAE, says entities registered there now hold more than 100 billion US dollars in AI-focused investment. That is a cumulative total of money already raised or allocated to AI by firms based in the zone, not new spending announced this week. The zone also says its total assets under management grew 54 percent in the first half of 2026 against the first half of 2025, and that it now has 13,974 active licences. Nothing changes for an ordinary person today; this describes capital registered in a financial hub, not a product reaching anyone.
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.
Brazil's Senate approved PLP 74/2026 by 66 votes to nil on 3 September, a bill that bundles a special tax regime for data centre services together with unrelated measures, including a federal financing programme for cancer and disability support and tax relief for local reinsurance companies. The Senate sent it to the president on 4 September, and on 8 September, the date on this item, it formally notified the lower house that it had done so. An earlier version of this item gave 8 September for the vote itself. The bill's own text does not spell out what data centres must do to qualify for the tax treatment, and no companion bill setting those conditions could be found. It was signed into law as Lei Complementar 237 on 15 September, with one article vetoed. For people in Brazil, this is a step toward using tax policy to attract data centre investment, bundled inside a broader fiscal bill.
HGP Intelligent Energy, a startup that builds AI-based control systems for retrofitting former Navy nuclear reactors to power data centres, agreed to go public by merging with a blank-cheque company called Meshflow Acquisition Corp. The deal values the combined company at approximately 1.29 billion dollars, according to the companies' own filing, though the merger has not yet closed and depends on shareholder votes and other conditions. HGP says its technology lets nuclear reactors ramp their output up and down to follow the power an AI data centre actually needs, rather than running at constant output and drawing extra electricity from the public grid. For anyone near a nuclear plant being considered for this kind of retrofit, this deal is one example of that idea being pitched directly to investors, though it will not affect anyone's electricity until well after the merger closes, if it closes at all.
Soluna Holdings, a company that builds computing sites for Bitcoin mining and AI, said Texas grid operator ERCOT has conditionally classified its full 166 megawatt Kati campus, including a planned AI expansion, as Base Load in the state's Batch Zero process for sorting a backlog of large power requests. Soluna also finished the last 14 megawatts of the first phase of that campus, taking its total operating capacity across all sites to about 206 megawatts. Getting sorted into a workable category in ERCOT's queue is a necessary step before a project can actually get built and connected to the grid. For Texans, this is one more data point in a large and ongoing backlog of computing projects waiting on the state's grid, and a Base Load classification is a procedural step, not a guarantee of when power will actually flow.
A new ASML campus in the Netherlands will eventually house up to 20,000 workers
· 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.
Baseten, a company that runs AI models on servers for other businesses, said it can now update a large model like GLM-5.3 across independent computer clusters around the world in under 40 seconds, with only 6 seconds where incoming requests have to wait. It does this by sending only the parts of the model that actually changed, compressing what would otherwise be 716.56 gigabytes of updated data down to 1.55 gigabytes. These are Baseten's own reported figures for its own system, not independently benchmarked, but they describe a real engineering change rather than a new product. For anyone using an AI powered app or chatbot, this is part of why those services can update to a smarter model without going offline while it happens.
ASML and TSMC launch an industry push to make chipmaking photomasks bigger, targeting 2031
· 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.
China's chip exports more than double for the year so far, customs data shows
· 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.
Kenya's Communications Authority is proposing to create a standalone licence category for data centres, rather than regulating them under the same category used for general telecoms network infrastructure, according to a report of the regulator's statement. Right now data centres in Kenya are licensed under that general Network Facilities Provider category. For anyone building or investing in data centre capacity in Kenya, this would be a clearer regulatory path once it takes effect, though no timeline has been set.
The US National Security Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI published a joint advisory that names DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI. The agencies say these companies "extracted billions of tokens across millions of exchanges/requests" from American models including variants of Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok, "since at least late 2024", and that this happened "likely with Chinese government awareness". Distillation, in plain terms, is training a new model on the answers of an existing one; the advisory says the technique is legitimate in research but that these campaigns were "industrial-scale". China's Ministry of Commerce replied the next day that the allegation has "no basis in fact and no basis in law" and that China "will resolutely take measures to counter" any US action against its AI companies. If US labs follow the advisory's recommendations, anyone using their models through an API may see closer monitoring of new accounts' usage and of usage patterns, both of which the advisory lists by name.
After the Texas governor's directive of 3 August, the state utility commission on 20 August let the grid operator ERCOT hand out conditional classifications to large power connection requests while it audits the data centre projects in its queue, Galaxy says. The results are now arriving through the companies themselves. Galaxy says five of its Texas data centre projects, covering approximately 4.2 gigawatts of gross power capacity, received conditional classifications: 800 megawatts and 830 megawatts at its Helios campus as "Base Load", capacity Galaxy says ERCOT had approved in January 2026, and 700, 900 and 1,000 megawatts as "Studied Load", including one project it had submitted as Base Load. Galaxy's release says Base Load projects are not subject to further capacity allocation in ERCOT's study, while Studied Load projects are. Galaxy says ERCOT expects its audit to take several months, so nothing is final. For people in Texas, this is the process that decides how much new data centre demand gets a place on their grid, and the labels handed out this week are its first visible output.
Egypt's communications ministry says its minister witnessed the signing and launch of new partnerships, including one between Vodafone Business, Elsewedy Electric and Cassava Technologies to found Africa Data Centres Egypt. The ministry's release says the project targets an initial 20 megawatts in its first three years, with an expansion path targeted at 200 megawatts, and that it is expected to attract about 200 million dollars of foreign direct investment in its first phase, with total investment reaching one billion dollars once the targeted capacity is complete. Elsewedy Electric, which is listed in Cairo, sent the same figures to the Egyptian Exchange. Every number here is a target, not a spend. The ministry expects up to 200 direct jobs and about 2,000 indirect ones, which is the concrete effect for people in Egypt for now.
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.
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.
Cognition makes software that writes and fixes computer code on its own. It has raised over 2 billion dollars from investors who now value the company at 48 billion dollars, and says its revenue, measured at its current annual pace, has grown from 492 million to almost 900 million dollars.
A nuclear plant in Iowa stopped generating in 2020. The US government has now completed a loan of up to 1.9 billion dollars to help pay for restarting it. The Energy Department says the plant is 615 megawatts, enough to power nearly 500,000 homes.
A million tokens is roughly a 700,000 word conversation, about seven long novels. Software that runs AI models can now hold one that long on a single machine, so the cost of AI that works for hours on one task just fell without anyone buying new hardware.