Future Technology[Daily Briefing] TSMC eyes Intel fabs 🏭 / patch now 🔒 / Venus cracks 🌋
TSMC is reportedly being asked to help run Intel's factories
For most of the last decade, the question of who makes the world's most advanced chips had a dull answer. Almost all of them come off a handful of production lines run by TSMC on a single island, Taiwan. Intel, which used to lead, fell behind and has been trying to claw its way back ever since. This week the story took a genuinely odd turn.
According to several reports, TSMC has floated a plan that would have sounded far-fetched a year ago. It would take a hand in running Intel's foundry business, the part of Intel that actually manufactures chips, and bring in Intel's own biggest rivals, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom, as investors and customers. Separately, Nvidia and Intel are said to be lining up TSMC to build a new class of chips for data centres and PCs.
Picture the shape of that. The company that overtook Intel is now being asked to prop it up, and the firms that compete with Intel every day are being asked to help pay for it. Behind the strangeness sits one shared worry in Washington and across the industry. If nearly every leading chip is made in one place, the whole modern economy has a single point of failure, and everyone wants a plan B.
Why it matters: if any version of this comes off, the map of who makes your chips, and where, slowly starts to change. More advanced manufacturing outside Taiwan is a supply chain that is harder to knock over, though it almost certainly means higher prices before it means lower ones. Nothing is signed, and these are reports rather than done deals, so treat it as a direction of travel, not a destination.
Read more on Future Technology
Quick hits
Two Windows zero-days are being exploited right now. Microsoft's July update fixed a record 570 flaws, and two are already used in real attacks, including one that lets an attacker climb to admin rights through Active Directory Federation Services. US federal agencies have been given until today to patch it, which tells you how seriously to take it. If you run Windows, update. Read on FT (3 min read).
Nvidia is wiring up Japan. It launched a new Cosmos vision model for machines that need to see and reason, and teamed with the government to build national AI infrastructure on its next generation Rubin chips. The chip race is quietly becoming a map of which countries own the compute. Read on FT (3 min read).
Washington cracks the door on China chip sales. The US has approved a limited batch of advanced AI chips for a few Chinese buyers, even as Nvidia trims its list of Asian customers. Export policy is still the wildcard hanging over every chipmaker's forecast. Read on FT (2 min read).
Venus may still be tearing itself apart. Fresh evidence suggests our nearest neighbour is far from a dead world, with its surface still being reshaped from the inside rather than frozen solid. It changes how we read every rocky planet we find. Read on FT (3 min read).
Webb stared at a world where it rains rock. NASA's James Webb telescope pulled new detail from 55 Cancri e, a planet so close to its star that its surface is a molten ocean. Each reading like this sharpens the hunt for planets that are not death traps. Read on FT (3 min read).
Tool of the day
After a Venus story and a lava planet story, here is a free way to actually look up. Stellarium is a planetarium that runs on your computer or phone and shows exactly what is overhead right now, from planets to passing satellites, when you point the screen at the sky.
Honest take: the desktop version is free, open source and gorgeously detailed, and the phone app has a free tier that does the job when you are standing in the garden squinting upwards. The catch is not the software, it is the sky. Light pollution will hide plenty of what the app happily labels, so treat it as a map, get somewhere dark now and then, and it turns a clear night into an hour of real wonder. More on Future Technology.
One question before you go. If advanced chipmaking really does spread beyond Taiwan over the next few years, would you pay a little more for a laptop to know its brain was made somewhere less fragile? Hit reply and tell me, I read every one.
Nath, Future Technology
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