Semiconductor News 20250731

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1. Samsung-Tesla AI Chip Deal: Samsung’s AI chip deal with Tesla will reportedly mark the dawn of a resurgence in the company’s foundry business, which is likely to adopt the 2nm process and expand chip production for Tesla in 2028 to peak in 2029-2032. The deal also reportedly gives South Korea new bargaining power in U.S. tariff negotiations, and Samsung is considering expanding its plant in Taylor and introducing advanced packaging.
2. Agreement on tariff negotiations between the U.S. and South Korea: Against the backdrop of the Samsung-Tesla deal, tariff negotiations between the U.S. and South Korea have reached an agreement, with the South Korean president announcing that “we have overcome a major predicament on terms equal to or better than those of major countries,” and that uncertainty in the export environment has been eliminated.
3. Surging Demand for AI Chips and Strong Performance of Related Companies: Against the backdrop of strong AI chip demand and a weaker yen, Japan’s Advantest has raised its fiscal year 2025 earnings outlook. In addition, NVIDIA has reportedly received an order for 300,000 H20 chips from a Chinese cloud services provider, signaling a boom in China’s CSPs (cloud service providers).
4. Trends in advanced packaging technology CoWoP: NVIDIA is considering the use of CoWoP (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Platform PCB) packaging starting with the Rubin GR150 GPU, and whether this technology will be revolutionary beyond CoWoS or just a buzzword, Skepticism is also expressed among PCB manufacturers.
5. ASML ‘s tariff exemption on shipments of equipment to the U.S.: ASML does not charge tariffs on shipments of equipment to the U.S., which is expected to make it easier for major semiconductor manufacturers such as TSMC and Samsung to establish facilities in the U.S.
6. Qualcomm’s solid performance: Qualcomm’s Q2 2025 revenue exceeded expectations, with $10.37 billion in sales; the Snapdragon brand accounted for 61% of total revenue, and the company is diversifying aggressively to compensate for Apple’s departure as a customer.
7. Industry’s First PCIe Gen6 SSD Announcement by Micron: Micron announced high-capacity, ultra-fast storage solutions for data centers supporting the AI revolution, including the 9650 SSD, the world’s first PCIe Gen6 SSD with read speeds up to 28 GB/s.
8. Rapidus Starts 2nm GAA Transistor Prototyping: Japan’s Rapidus has begun prototyping 2nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistors, taking a concrete step toward establishing advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology.
9. China’s AI Infrastructure Enhancement and Domestic Chip Development: China unveiled its first optical interconnect GPU supernode as part of its AI infrastructure enhancement, and domestic companies Lisuan and Intellifusion announced SMIC-based GPUs and NPUs, accelerating the move to support China’s AI stack. The first optical interconnect GPU supernode was unveiled as part of the
10. AMD ‘s AI and High-Performance CPU Progress: AMD is looking to improve AI performance for PCs and is considering introducing dedicated discrete NPUs similar to gaming GPUs. The Threadripper 9980X also shows the strength of the Zen 5 Threadripper chip, outperforming the 96-core Threadripper PRO 7995WX despite having 32 fewer cores.

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