[Daily Briefing] Intel wins EUV race 🏁 / 570 patch flaws 🛡 / Alien air 🪐

Intel just won the first lap of the High-NA race

Intel has become the first chipmaker to ship high-volume logic chips made with ASML's High-NA EUV lithography, beating TSMC and Samsung to using the machines at scale.

The chips are part of Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake laptop line, built on selected layers of its 18A process and coming out of Hillsboro, Oregon. ASML confirmed the milestone in mid-July, and Intel says yields already match its existing EUV platform. High-NA prints features finer than anything in mass production, on a scanner that costs about 400 million dollars each.

After years of watching TSMC set the pace, this is the clearest sign yet that Intel's foundry comeback is real rather than a slide-deck promise.

Why it matters: whoever masters High-NA first sets the roadmap for the next few process nodes, and that decides who makes the best chips through the late 2020s.

Read more on Future Technology

Quick hits

Microsoft's July Patch Tuesday fixes around 570 flaws, some already under attack. Two zero-days, in SharePoint Server and Active Directory Federation Services, are being actively exploited, so treat this as a patch-now update. What to prioritise · Source: BleepingComputer (3 min read)

DeepSeek is building its own inference chip. The Chinese lab wants off Nvidia and Huawei, joining OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to own the silicon under the model. US export controls make the attempt itself the story. The details · Source: Bloomberg (2 min read)

Astronomers detected an atmosphere on a rocky planet in the habitable zone. A first. Starlight passing through the planet's air left a chemical fingerprint we could read from light years away. How they did it · Source: FT science desk (2 min read)

SambaNova raises 1 billion dollars to undercut Nvidia on inference. The 11 billion dollar valuation shows the money moving from training hype to the cost of actually serving models. Why inference is the new battleground · Source: FT desk (3 min read)

Tool of the day: PortaPow USB Data Blocker

This week a popular browser extension, ModHeader, was pulled from the Chrome and Edge stores after hidden code was caught siphoning user data. The lesson is that the risk is not always the dramatic hack, it is the small thing you plug in or install without thinking. A USB data blocker is a cheap dongle that sits between your cable and any public charging port, letting power through while physically blocking the data pins. Honest take: at home you do not need one, but if you charge at airports or hotels it is worth insurance against juice-jacking. Check price on Amazon

One question before you go: after a scare like the ModHeader story, which browser extension or app have you actually gone and removed? Hit reply, I read every one.

Nath, Future Technology

Forwarded this? Get your own free briefing at futuretechnologyhq.com/newsletter

Some links may be affiliate links.