Apple's brand-new leasing program, dubbed Apple Upgrade, goes big on the idea that most consumers won't mind shelling out a tiny amount on a per-day basis just to use a new Apple device, negating the deleterious impact of the ongoing memory 'chipflation' in the process. Mark Gurman: "Instead of asking customers to justify spending more than $1,000 on a phone or laptop, it’s asking whether they can afford roughly a dollar a day" As we reported recently, Apple has just launched Apple Upgrade, a new device leasing program for "iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, and iPad available on the Apple Store […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/the-apple-upgrade-leasing-program-bets-that-consumers-wont-blink-at-1-per-day-for-a-brand-new-iphone-or-mac/

China's Dongfang Suanxin (DFSX) is on a quest to prove that memory bandwidth, and not an incessant obsession with node miniaturization, is the key to unlocking sizable economies of scale for AI workloads, as demonstrated by its DF1000 and the upcoming DF2000 chips, typically arrayed within TY64 SuperNodes to give NVIDIA's GB200 NVL72 system a run for its money. A DFSX TY64 SuperNode, made up of 14nm DF2000 chips, will offer a memory bandwidth of 960TB/s vs. just 576TB/s for NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems For the benefit of those who might not be aware, DFSX's DF1000 chip is fabricated using […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/chinas-dfsx-offers-2x-the-memory-bandwidth-of-nvidias-gb200-nvl72-system-with-a-14nm-supernode-that-skips-microbumps-for-vertical-compute-memory-towers/

Intel appears laser-focused on operationalizing its new Ohio fab complex by 2031, and is willing to award generous bonuses to achieve that overarching goal. Meanwhile, the tailwinds also appear to be aligning on Intel's EMIB-T packaging, with only the substrate yields now left as the sole unsolved piece of the puzzle. Disparate tailwinds are finally beginning to coalesce for Intel, indicating that its Ohio fab remains on schedule, and its EMIB-T advanced packaging is now poised to challenge TSMC's CoWoS-L For the benefit of those who might not be aware, Intel is building a gigantic 1,000-acre fab complex in Ohio […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/intel-starts-paying-overtime-bonuses-to-expedite-work-on-its-ohio-fab-as-emib-t-package-yield-approaches-90-percent/

We told our readers not to discount China's uncanny ability to trounce the West in a price war, and that's exactly what its AI labs have done: merely hours after OpenAI fired its first volley, DeepSeek's revamped V4 Flash model now offers unprecedented economy and performance, while the progenitor of the Kimi K3 model, Moonshot, has just secured a sizable cluster of NVIDIA GPUs to crank up its training workloads. OpenAI now faces a dual counterpunch in its still-fledgling price war from China's DeepSeek and Moonshot As we detailed recently, OpenAI has just launched a literal price war by discounting […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/deepseeks-v4-flash-guts-openais-price-war-within-hours-matching-opus-grade-output-at-0-14-per-million-tokens-as-moonshot-scales-with-20000-new-nvidia-gpus/

In what might well be the most significant statement from its latest earnings call, Apple has conceded that it's continuing to evaluate various memory sources, including Chinese vendors, despite the emerging strong opposition from the US lawmakers. Apple does not appear to be budging on trying to secure memory chips from China's CXMT and YMTC, saying the move would help ease the ongoing supply constraints Apple gave two very important pointers on the ongoing memory dynamics in its latest earnings call. First, it said: "We paid more for memory in the March quarter than the December quarter. We expected to […]

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Apple has just disclosed the earnings for its fiscal third quarter of 2026, delivering on heightened expectations with a strong print, albeit marred by weakness in its services segment. Apple's earnings highlights for its fiscal Q3 2026 Here are the key highlights from Apple's latest quarterly earnings release: Apple earned $78.68 billion from its products segment and $30.739 billion from its services segment, equating to 18.1 percent year-over-year growth for the former and 12.1 percent for the latter. Apple's Q3 2026 total sales managed to beat the consensus estimate of $108.85 billion. Likewise, its quarterly EPS of $2.02 also came […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-hits-it-out-of-the-park-with-tim-cooks-last-earnings-as-the-ceo-despite-scorching-hot-memory-prices-but-drops-the-ball-on-services/

Let the AI price wars begin. OpenAI has just fired a veritable volley across the bow of China's growing number of AI labs, sacrificing its sky-high margins to try to starve the budding open-weight AI economy. OpenAI is now trying to starve out China's AI labs by cutting token prices by as much as 80% on GPT-5.6 Luna OpenAI has just slashed the token-based pricing for GPT-5.6 Luna by 80 percent, with input tokens now priced at just $0.2 per 1 million from their earlier perch at $1, and output tokens priced at just $1.20 per 1 million vs. the […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/openai-goes-after-the-jugular-of-chinas-open-weight-ai-models-cuts-token-prices-by-up-to-80/

It seems AI-generated slop is everywhere these days, from YouTube videos to Instagram reels. Even so, one would not ordinarily expect such low-effort content to start topping bestseller lists. And yet, this is exactly what is fast becoming a norm, with AI-generated fiction books now commanding a whopping 20% share of total sales in 2026, with a third of new entrants in bestseller lists containing AI content. Around 1 in 5 books out of the 14,419 self-published fiction ebooks were found to have substantial AI content An interesting new paper has profound implications for the growing menace of AI-generated slop. […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/a-new-research-paper-claims-ai-generated-fiction-books-now-make-up-33-of-new-bestseller-entrants-crushing-human-authors-earnings/

With TSMC's CoWoS advanced capacity egregiously constrained, and Intel's more nimble EMIB attracting a growing volume of orders, the Taiwan-based chipmaker has realized that it needs to change course to retain its competitive edge. And, it has chosen to do so by attempting to clone some elements of Intel's novel approach to advanced packaging, as per the reporting by The Information. Apparently, the new packaging project is referred to internally at TSMC as a "quasi-EMIB," borrowing heavily from Intel's novel approach For the benefit of those who might not be aware, TSMC's Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS-S) packaging solution uses large, expensive silicon […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/tsmc-concedes-intels-emib-packaging-is-a-potent-contender-starts-building-quasi-emib-as-cowos-remains-choked-through-2026/

Microsoft is moving aggressively to expand its compute footprint, and hedging its bets on the way by tapping rack-scale systems from both NVIDIA and AMD in what is an echo of its AI model-agnostic approach within Azure and Copilot. Microsoft's Satya Nadella has just declared that Azure will be among the first to deploy "rack scale AI infrastructure based on AMD Helios and NVIDIA Vera Rubin" Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, has revealed a nugget during the just-concluded earnings call, declaring that Azure will be among the first cloud platforms to "deploy next generation rack scale AI infrastructure based on AMD […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amds-helios-rack-reportedly-costs-40-more-than-nvidias-vera-rubin-yet-microsoft-hedges-its-bets-by-committing-to-deploy-both/

If you think NVIDIA's margins are obscene, you haven't seen anything yet, quite literally. After all, Precigenitics, a biotech company that focuses on live-cell drug discovery, has just inked a $2.3 million deal at a potential margin of over 95 percent! You can fabricate microfluidic environment chips for around $30 to over $500, but Precigenetics has just sold 11 of these chips at $200,000 each For the benefit of those who might not be aware, instead of analyzing traditional, static cellular snapshots, or destroying cells during testing, Precigenetics uses a photonic-AI platform - called Cell Cinema - to continuously image […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidia-would-die-for-these-margins-precigenetics-sells-its-microfluidic-environment-chips-for-200000-each-at-an-implied-margin-of-over-95/

It seems hell hath no fury like a commodity DRAM chip spurned. As HBM continues to hog DDR wafers, the supply of DRAM might plummet as much as 70 percent in 2027, according to the CEO of Apacer, which echoes recent pronouncements from the CEO of SK hynix. The CEO of Apacer expects the supply of commodity DRAM to fall off the proverbial roof in 2027, echoing pronouncements from the CEO of SK hynix, who thinks "next year will be the worst year in the industry's history from the supply perspective" According to the CEO of Apacer, C.K. Chang, DRAM […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apacer-ceo-warns-that-commodity-dram-supply-will-fall-by-70-in-2027-echoing-a-doomsday-take-from-the-ceo-of-sk-hynix/

China rocked the Western AI moat thesis via a trifecta of volleys in the past few days: when Moonshot released its hyper-competitive Kimi K3 AI model, when CXMT soared nearly 500 percent in its public market debut, and when it came out that a secretive Chinese company was gunning for mass production of DUV lithography machines. Now, we've just gleaned some juicy tidbits regarding China's third volley that's related to its concerted DUV push, reportedly spearheaded by none other than a subsidiary of Shanghai Electric, called Shanghai Aishegna. China's DUV push is reportedly being spearheaded by a subsidiary of Shanghai […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/shanghai-aishengna-the-secretive-company-behind-chinas-latest-duv-lithography-push-thoroughly-unmasked-as-beijing-hedges-with-glass-substrates-and-an-euv-prototype/

Things are about to get very ugly for at least one of the so-called 'Big Three' memory players, as SK hynix has just reported a bruising miss on consensus expectations, courtesy of its heavy tilt towards AI-centric HBM. SK hynix misses Q2 2026 consensus expectations for its revenue and operating profit by 5.4 percent and 5.9 percent, respectively SK hynix has just reported $54.6 billion (79.3 trillion won) in revenue vs. a consensus estimate of $57.7 billion (83.9 trillion won). Also, the high-flying memory player has disclosed an operating profit of $41.6 billion (60.5 trillion won) against a consensus estimate […]

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AMD appears to have chosen its partner quite wisely to bolster the Helios rack-scale system's inferencing capabilities, with an OpenAI researcher recently singing what is nothing short a paean in favor of Cerebras' Wafer-Scale Engine. OpenAI researcher on the capabilities of chips from AMD Helios partner, Cerebras: "They're incredible because they have such fast inference" As we explained in a dedicated post recently, Helios is AMD's first full-stack rack-level solution for AI workloads, consisting of: To further bolster the utility of its Helios systems for AI workloads, AMD has partnered with Cerebras, and plans to integrate Cerebras' Wafer-Scale Engine with its Helios […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/openai-finds-that-systems-from-amds-helios-partner-cerebras-are-incredible-at-inference-tasks-showing-that-amd-chose-wisely/

Either Moonshot is oblivious to the dangers of the path its skirting, or egregiously indifferent. After all, why else would it choose to double down on the same furtive strategy that worked for the Kimi K3 model, and likely will for the Kimi K4 as well, but at huge geopolitical costs, risking the utter wrath of the Trump administration in the process. Moonshot is trying to furtively leverage an even bigger stash of compute resources from NVIDIA to train its upcoming Kimi K4 model As we explained in a recent post, Moonshot has just unveiled its brand-new, open-source Kimi K3 model, […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/moonshot-openly-defies-the-trump-administration-by-seeking-access-to-additional-nvidia-gpus-for-training-the-next-gen-kimi-k4-model/

Apple seems to have found a very clever way to counter the ongoing malaise in the consumer electronics sphere, partnering with Klarna to launch a new device leasing program that is now offering unbelievably attractive deals. You can now borrow a 256GB iPhone 17 Pro for $45.99 per month for 12 months, saving $547 off the original $1,099 list price The Cupertino-based tech giant has just launched Apple Upgrade, a new device leasing program for "iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, and iPad available on the Apple Store online, in the Apple Store app, and at Apple Store locations in the United […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apples-new-leasing-program-now-allows-you-to-save-a-whopping-547-on-a-1099-iphone-17-pro/

It's a familiar story by now. With Samsung reportedly increasing its DRAM prices by around 20 percent for the ongoing quarter, NVIDIA felt it had no choice but to raise the prices of its consumer graphics cards, constituting the third such inflationary episode so far this year, one that has purportedly emptied store shelves as distributors enter a full-on panic mode. Unlike NVIDIA's price hike in May, the current inflationary episode has reportedly impacted a lot more consumer-facing graphics card models, spurring empty store shelves as rumors ran rampant According to Taiwan's Economic Daily, NVIDIA has increased the prices of […]

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NVIDIA and TSMC have just achieved a major milestone that significantly bolsters the prospects of on-shore chip fabrication, insulating the US against geopolitical shocks. Even so, there is still quite a lot left to be done, including on the advanced packaging front. TSMC has just fabricated some of the first NVIDIA GB300 GPUs in its Arizona facility, taking a significant step towards fulfilling the demands of the US to onshore chip manufacturing According to the Commercial Times, TSMC has just fabricated some of the first NVIDIA GB300 AI GPUs on its 4nm node in Arizona's Fab 21. Even so, the […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/nvidias-first-made-in-america-gb300-gpus-roll-off-tsmcs-arizona-based-fab-21-but-still-fly-to-taiwan-for-packaging/