Hardware News.
The chips, GPUs and data-center hardware underneath the AI boom, explained without the spec-sheet jargon. We cover new silicon from Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple and the custom-ASIC challengers, and why each launch matters for cost, performance and who wins.
Hardware
Huawei, Cambricon Hike AI Chip Prices as HBM Squeeze Bites
Huawei has raised the price of its Ascend 950DT AI chip above $37,255, up 20% to 50% in two months, while Cambricon repriced its next-gen 690 chip 20% to 30% higher, as both pay grey-market premiums for HBM memory that US export controls keep them from buying directly.
Hardware
AMD Launches Budget Ryzen 5500F and 7500 to Dodge RAM Prices
AMD launched the Zen 3 Ryzen 5 5500F and Zen 4 Ryzen 5 7500 today, two budget desktop chips built to soften the blow of DDR4 and DDR5 prices that have roughly quadrupled since spring.
Hardware
Apple's A20 Pro Is the First 2nm Smartphone Chip
Apple announced the A20 Pro at its September 9 event: the first smartphone chip on a 2nm process, with two desktop-class CPU super cores, a 7-core GPU and a 32-core Neural Engine built to run AI models on the phone.
Hardware
Tesla's Cybercab Launch Triggers Federal Safety Probe
Hours after Tesla began driverless Cybercab rides on Austin streets, NHTSA opened a federal audit into how the wheel-less, pedal-less vehicle was self-certified as compliant with federal safety standards.
Hardware
AMD's Threadripper Halo Station Targets Trillion-Parameter AI
AMD unveiled the Threadripper Halo Station at its IFA 2026 keynote today: a liquid-cooled workstation with a 96-core Threadripper PRO CPU, dual Instinct MI350P accelerators, and up to 576GB of HBM3E memory, built to run AI models with more than a trillion parameters entirely on-device.
Hardware
Missouri City Recalls Councilman Over AI Data Center Deal
Independence, Missouri voters recalled City Council member John Perkins on Tuesday by a 68-32 margin, the city's first successful recall ever, after he backed more than $6 billion in tax breaks for a Nebius AI data center.
Hardware
Nvidia Bets $3.5 Billion on MediaTek to Ride the Custom-Chip Wave
Nvidia is putting $3.5 billion into MediaTek through a convertible bond deal that pulls MediaTek's custom AI chips onto Nvidia's NVLink Fusion platform, and MediaTek shares jumped 10% on the news.
Hardware
Nvidia's DLSS 5 Launches September 3 With Neural Rendering
Nvidia's DLSS 5 arrives September 3 in NBA 2K27 with 3D-Guided Neural Rendering, an AI system that generates lighting and material detail rasterized frames never had, exclusive to RTX 50-series GPUs.
Hardware
TP-Link Archer 8 Ultra: First Wi-Fi 8 Router Ships Sept 30
TP-Link's Archer 8 Ultra BN19000 launches September 30 as the first consumer Wi-Fi 8 router, with 18 antennas and 19 Gbps aggregate speed, but the company still lacks the FCC clearance it needs to sell new hardware in the US.
Hardware
Nvidia's $96.2B Quarter Meets Its First Real Challenger
Nvidia posted $96.2 billion in Q2 FY2027 revenue, up 106% year over year, and guided Q3 to roughly $108 billion, but the same week OpenAI's new Jalapeño chip claimed it already beats Blackwell on efficiency.
Hardware
Samsung's LPDDR5X-PIM Crams a Processor Into Every DRAM Bank
Samsung showed LPDDR5X-PIM at Hot Chips 2026, mobile-class DRAM with a small processor built into each of 16 banks. It ran Llama 3.1 at 81.3 tokens per second versus 27 for plain LPDDR5X, using the same 561-ball package as a drop-in swap.
Hardware
AWS and Nvidia to Add 2 Million More AI GPUs by 2028
AWS and Nvidia announced on August 26 that AWS will deploy 2 million additional Nvidia GPUs, including Blackwell Ultra and Rubin chips, across its data centers in 2027 and 2028, doubling the scale of their prior 1 million GPU commitment.
Hardware
Apple's Mac Mini Gets the First M6 Chip, Built for On-Device AI
Apple's Mac mini now starts at $899 with the new M6 chip, the first Apple silicon built on TSMC's 2-nanometer process, delivering roughly 4x the on-device AI performance of the outgoing M4 model.
Hardware
Infineon Acquires C2i to Solve AI Power Delivery
Infineon is acquiring Bengaluru-based C2i Semiconductors, whose software-defined multiphase controllers regulate power delivery inside AI servers, in a deal expected to close in Q3 2026 that signals power delivery has become as critical a bottleneck as compute in scaling AI data centers.
Hardware
Nevada Clears 7,000 Robotaxis for Tesla, Waymo and Uber
Nevada regulators unanimously approved paid robotaxi permits for Tesla (5,000 vehicles), Waymo (1,000) and Uber (1,000, via Zoox and Motional) in Clark County on August 20, 2026, six weeks after capping Tesla at just 10 cars.
Hardware
Nvidia in Talks to Invest In or Acquire Rebellions
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met Rebellions CEO Sunghyun Park in Santa Clara this week to discuss a possible partnership, investment, or acquisition of the Korean AI inference chip startup, which is separately preparing a KOSPI IPO.
Hardware
Google Can Buy $12.2B of Marvell Stock in New Chip Deal
Marvell has granted Google a warrant to buy up to $12.2 billion of MRVL shares, nearly 59 million at $206.58 each, tied to Google's custom AI chip purchases, and the stock jumped roughly 8 to 10 percent on the news.
Hardware
Cerebras CS-4: Same Chip, Three Wafers, New Wiring
Cerebras' CS-4, unveiled August 19, 2026, gets its speed from bolting three existing WSE-3 Turbo wafers together with a new interconnect called Nexus, not from a smaller manufacturing process.
Hardware
Samsung Hiked Foundry Prices After Losing a Third of Share
Samsung raised advanced chip manufacturing prices by up to 15 percent in July 2026 even as its foundry market share fell to 7.3 percent from 11.5 percent a year earlier, because AI demand has booked up TSMC's capacity and left Samsung's customers with nowhere better to go.
Hardware
Kioxia and SanDisk unveil 9th-gen QLC flash built for AI
Kioxia and SanDisk introduced a 9th-generation 2Tb QLC 3D flash technology on August 12 with a 4.8 Gb/s interface, 33% faster than their previous generation, and bit density above 37 Gb/mm², up to 60% denser, aimed at AI storage tiers.
Hardware
Intel puts its next CPU core on desktop before the data center
Intel VP Robert Hallock says the company's next new CPU core, Coyote Cove in Nova Lake, will debut on desktop before any data center chip ships with it, reversing the industry's server-first default and handing enthusiasts first silicon.
Hardware
Applied Materials lifts chip-gear outlook past 30%
Applied Materials posted record Q3 FY2026 revenue of $9.115 billion, up 25% year over year, and raised its 2026 semiconductor equipment growth outlook to over 30% from roughly 20%. The guidance revision matters more than the beat: it is the clearest read yet that AI demand has moved from chip designers into the factory tools that make the chips.
Hardware
Nvidia's $21B SpaceX stake is already worth $17B
Nvidia's 13F, filed after Friday's close, shows 122.76 million SpaceX shares worth $21.0 billion on June 30. SPCX has fallen about 17% since, so the same position is nearer $17.3 billion today, and Nvidia's two biggest equity holdings are now both companies it does business with.
Hardware
Australia Hits 500,000 Home Batteries. Did They Cut Prices 47%?
Australia passed 500,000 subsidised home batteries on August 14, and ministers credited the scheme for a 47 percent fall in wholesale power prices. The 47 percent is real AEMO data, but the market operator lists three drivers, and household storage is the third of them.
Hardware
Foxconn's AI Servers Now Outsell Everything Else It Makes
Foxconn's cloud and networking division, which builds its AI server racks, hit 51% of Q2 2026 revenue, passing 50% for the first time and leaving iPhone assembly at 29%. Operating profit rose 68% year on year to NT$94.8 billion on revenue of NT$2.53 trillion.
Hardware
This Student Built a Powerbank With Batteries You Can Actually Replace
Panos Koutsoumanis had to throw away a dead powerbank once because its cells were spot-welded to the board. So he designed Juicebox, a 3D-printed, 6700mAh powerbank with spring-contact battery holders, so a dead cell means a swap instead of e-waste.
Hardware
Heart Aerospace X1 Flies as Largest Electric Aircraft
Heart Aerospace flew its X1 demonstrator for 27 minutes on August 12, 2026, making the 25,000-pound aircraft the heaviest battery-electric aeroplane ever flown. It drew more than one megawatt from its batteries and burned about $5 of electricity doing it.
Hardware
This Student Built the Codebase Aalborg Uses to Teach Magnetic Levitation Robotics
Nikolaj Bjornager built the C# control framework that Aalborg University's Smart Production Laboratory now uses to teach new students its ACOPOS 6D magnetic levitation table. He's upfront that the project is archived and unfinished: the XML-based state machine layer he planned never got built.
Hardware
Snapdragon C specs land, minus the plugged-in benchmarks
Qualcomm published a full Snapdragon C spec sheet for the first time on August 13, 2026: an 8-core Kryo CPU peaking at 3.0 GHz single-core and 2.0 GHz multi-core, 2 MB of total cache, an Adreno GPU at 900 MHz, and a Hexagon NPU with no TOPS figure attached. Every performance claim against Intel's N250 was measured on battery, and Qualcomm published nothing for plugged-in performance.
Hardware
Intel's $15B Stock Sale Bets on Packaging, Not CPUs
Intel is raising $15 billion in new stock, and its own list of priorities puts advanced packaging and external wafers ahead of CPUs. Selling equity rather than debt is deliberate: it protects the investment-grade rating Intel says it wants to keep.