SK hynix is reportedly considering DRAM production at Intel's New Albany, Ohio site, either by leasing part of the plant or through a joint venture with Intel and a major US cloud company, Seoul Economic Daily reported, citing industry sources and foreign media. Intel has pushed completion of its first Ohio fab from 2025 to 2030, with operations starting in 2030–2031, and a 2023 US Foreign-Trade Zones Board approval for the site lists electronic memory circuits among permitted products. SK hynix is building a high-bandwidth memory packaging plant in Indiana, targeting mass production in 2029. An SK hynix official said there is nothing specific to confirm on cooperation with Intel or US DRAM production (Seoul Economic Daily)
Private Companies
Anthropicother
Anthropic is telling prospective IPO investors that Claude is speeding up its custom chip work, The Information reported. The company disclosed in recent meetings that a newly formed 15-person hardware unit is using Claude models to accelerate silicon development. Anthropic has not said it plans to commercialize Claude's chip design capabilities. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in September that OpenAI used internal systems to design its custom Jalapeño chip with Broadcom in nine months (The Information)
Public Markets
Tower fell 6.7% on the session it reported third-quarter revenue of $526M, up 33%, and guided the fourth quarter to $600M. It is targeting a $1.1B silicon photonics revenue run rate by the fourth quarter (Tower Semiconductor press release)
Emerging
Precision set at runtime: A paper from Boyang Chen, Xiao Wu, Haoran Wu and Yiren Zhao, Elastic Precision: Software-Hardware Co-Design of a Mixed-Precision Architecture for Long-Context LLM Inference, proposes a chip design that chooses the bit width of each matrix-multiply tile on the fly, using an error estimate, to cut memory traffic during long-context decoding. System modeling projects up to 2.55x the throughput and 2.61x the energy efficiency of a reconfigured PLENA baseline, and up to 4.96x the throughput and 12.56x the energy efficiency of an Nvidia B200. Those figures are modeled projections, not measurements from fabricated hardware (arXiv)