Semiconductors

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A large grey Texas Instruments sign with the red company logo on a flowered planter beside a tree-lined road, with the address 12500 TI Blvd.
Markets

Texas Instruments' Revenue Rose 28 Per Cent and Its Guide Is Flat at the Midpoint. Federal Chip Grants Supplied $1.1 Billion of Its $8.4 Billion Free Cash Flow.

Texas Instruments said on Wednesday 21 October that third-quarter revenue rose 28 per cent to $6.06 billion and earnings rose 77 per cent to $2.62 a share. It guided fourth-quarter revenue to $5.80 billion to $6.30 billion, a midpoint level with the third quarter. Trailing 12-month free cash flow was $8.42 billion, including $1.10 billion of CHIPS Act incentive proceeds.

Two patterned silicon wafers on display, catching coloured light.
Technology

Japan Will Pay Up to $21 Billion for Two New Fabs in Upstate New York. GlobalFoundries Will Run Them, and Washington Will Own About 4 Per Cent of the Company.

GlobalFoundries said on Wednesday 14 October that it will be the technology provider and operator for two new chip plants at its Malta, New York site, funded by up to $21 billion from Japan under the U.S.-Japan trade agreement. The first fab is expected to come online in 2029. In a separate agreement, the Commerce Department will take about 4 per cent of the company.

A large office building on ASML's campus in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, clad in angular white aluminium panels, under a partly cloudy sky.
Markets

ASML Reported a Record €11.7 Billion Quarter and Guided the Next One to Between €14.2 Billion and €15.2 Billion. It Still Does Not Publish Orders.

ASML reported record third-quarter net sales of €11.7 billion on Wednesday 14 October, toward the high end of its guidance, with a gross margin of 57.5 per cent. It guided fourth-quarter sales to €14.2 billion to €15.2 billion and 2026 sales to €44 billion to €45 billion. It does not disclose bookings, but its balance sheet moved.

Close-up of a silicon wafer patterned with a grid of rectangular chip dies.
Markets

TSMC's Third-Quarter Sales Rose About 51 Per Cent, Above Its Own Guidance. Analysts Expect Its Net Margin to Fall From 55.6 Per Cent to About 50.

TSMC's monthly sales figures, released on 8 October, put third-quarter revenue at a record of about NT$1.49 trillion, up about 51 per cent and above the top of its own guidance. It reports full results on Thursday 15 October, and analysts expect net profit of about NT$746 billion, a net margin near 50 per cent against 55.6 per cent in the second quarter. Fourth-quarter guidance has not yet been issued.

ASML's headquarters in Veldhoven, the Netherlands: a tall dark office tower beside lower white buildings, behind grass and trees.
Markets

ASML Reports Wednesday and No Longer Publishes Orders. China Was 16 Per Cent of Its First-Half Sales, Against a Full-Year Guide of About 20 Per Cent.

ASML will announce third-quarter results on Wednesday 14 October and has guided to net sales of €11.0 billion to €12.0 billion. China was €2.9 billion, or 16 per cent, of first-half sales, against management's full-year expectation of about 20 per cent. The company stopped publishing bookings this year, so Wednesday's release will carry no order figure.

A glass-fronted TSMC fab building lit up at dusk beside a road streaked with car light trails, in Taiwan.
Technology

The Chip Fabs Are Running. The Supply Chain Around Them Is Not Built Yet.

TSMC's Arizona Fab 21 is producing 4-nanometer chips at 24,000 wafers per month. Intel's Ohio campus has shipped revenue wafers. Samsung's Texas facility is running. Combined, the three facilities represent roughly 8 percent of global advanced-node capacity. The gap between what is producing and what the full domestic supply chain requires is measured in years.

Ethernet cables plugged into the ports of a network switch, in warm low light.
Technology

Marvell Raises Its 2028 Revenue Target to $20 Billion and Sketches a Road to $90 Billion

Marvell Technology raised its fiscal 2028 revenue forecast to about $20 billion at its investor day on Tuesday, above the $18.2 billion analysts expected, and introduced a first-ever fiscal 2031 revenue range of $70 billion to $90 billion. From fiscal 2026 revenue of $8.2 billion, the targets imply compound annual growth above 50 percent for five straight years, powered by custom AI chips, networking and optical interconnects for data centers.

A container ship stacked high with shipping containers sails on the Savannah River at sunset, with a cable-stayed bridge and port cranes in the background.
The Numbers

America Imported a Record $421 Billion in August. Without Computers, Chips and Telecom Gear, Imports Are Down This Year.

The United States imported $420.8 billion of goods and services in August, the most in any month on record, and the trade deficit widened to $105.6 billion, the largest since March 2025. The last record was set by consumer goods rushed in ahead of tariffs. This one is made of capital goods. Four lines of hardware account for more than the whole rise in goods imports this year.

A green computer memory module with a row of black memory chips lies on a light wooden surface, photographed close up with a shallow depth of field.
The Numbers

Chip Sales Passed $1 Trillion by August. In February, That Was the Forecast for the Whole Year.

The world's chipmakers sold $159.7 billion of semiconductors in August, 144 per cent more than a year earlier, the Semiconductor Industry Association said on Monday, and passed $1 trillion for the year to date. In February the industry's forecast for all of 2026 was roughly $1 trillion. It is now more than $1.6 trillion. Micron's results show how much of the jump is price.

Shoppers, several wearing face masks, walk past a large Huawei store with cars on display inside a bright shopping centre with Chinese signage.
Technology

Qualcomm Will Buy Patents From Huawei. Two Years Ago, Washington Stopped It Selling Huawei Chips.

Huawei and Qualcomm announced a multi-year cross-licence on Monday covering 5G, computing, AI and networking, and Qualcomm agreed to buy some of Huawei's American patents. Neither company disclosed the price. Huawei called it its first revenue-positive agreement with Qualcomm, and Nikkei reported that Qualcomm will be the net payer for the first time. The purchase needs regulatory approval.

A computer processor held upright by black tweezers, its gold contact pads facing the camera, against a plain grey background.
AI

Five Tech Groups Asked Trump to Spare Data Centers From Chip Tariffs. For Now, They Are Exempt.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association and four other technology trade groups wrote to President Trump on Friday warning that broad Section 232 tariffs on semiconductors, robots and industrial machinery would raise the cost of building AI data centers and factories. Advanced chips bound for American data centers are exempt from the 25 per cent tariff imposed in January. A second phase under discussion may end that.

Several tall construction cranes over a building site and rows of houses at sunset, with mountains behind, in Lehi, Utah.
The Numbers

America Now Spends More Building Data Centers Than Chip Plants. Most Other Private Building Is Shrinking.

Spending on data center construction reached a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $85 billion in August, the Census Bureau said, up 73 per cent in a year. Spending on computer, electronics and electrical factories, the category that includes chip plants, has fallen to $52 billion from $126 billion in mid-2024. Without data centers, private nonresidential construction is down about 6 per cent on a year ago.

A white Nvidia sign with the company's green logo, marked 2800 and 2806 Scott Blvd., outside its headquarters campus in Santa Clara, California.
The Numbers

The Market Read the Essay as a Forecast for Chip Demand

Chip stocks fell before Monday's open after the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI said the industry should slow the rate at which AI models improve. Nvidia was down 3 percent in premarket trading, Marvell and Arm 6 percent, and ASML 9.5 percent. The labs are mostly private. The public way to express a view on slower AI is to sell the companies that supply it.

A macro photograph of computer memory modules and their contacts.
The Numbers

The $875m Bet Is That Inference Is a Memory Problem

Positron raised $875m on Thursday at a $5bn valuation, having been worth about $1.06bn in February. Its chips are built around memory capacity and bandwidth rather than raw compute, using commodity LPDDR5X rather than the high-bandwidth memory that constrains everybody else. That choice is the entire thesis.