#chips-act

#chips-act

Quantum computing stocks continue to rebound following a Wall Street Journal article yesterday detailing potential U.S. government equity investments in the sector. The report outlined early discussions with the Commerce Dept., where firms could trade shares for at least $10 million each in federal funds. The story ignited investor excitement after consecutive days of declining stock prices, with QBTS, RGTI, IONQ, and QUBT all racing higher by double-digit percentages.

In some respects, it reflects a modern economic take on Roosevelt's Big Stick ideology, only Trump seems to have ignored the speaking softly bit and jumped straight to swinging his stick like every problem is a piñata with candy inside. Trump need not even swing his stick - all he has to do is make a threat, and those in its path scramble to appease him.

In a press briefing, Huang emphasized that the deal will allow Nvidia to scale its rack architecture systems that combine 72 GPUs with custom CPUs. Huang also said that working with Intel means Nvidia can take a bigger slice of the personal device market. "There are 150 million laptops sold per year," he said. "We're now creating a system-on-a-chip that fuses two processors into one giant SoC, and that will become a new class of integrated laptops that the world has never seen before."

AlixLabs has developed technology to shrink semiconductors like transistors and memory. They are building a pilot facility in Lund to handle wafers for global players like Intel and Taiwan's UMC. But their SEK 165M round has proven hard to fill in Europe. "Interest in Asia is much greater," says CEO Jonas Sundqvist, who keeps the round open for overseas investors. A few blocks away, NordAmps is raising SEK 65M for nanowire transistors that boost analog circuits with higher speed and lower energy use.

The deal was structured in a way to penalize Intel if it spins out its foundry business unit, which makes custom chips for outside customers, within the next few years. Last week's deal included a five-year warrant that would allow the U.S. government to take an additional 5% of Intel, at $20 a share, if the company held less than 51% equity in its foundry business. Zinsner said he expects that warrant to expire.

"The Biden administration literally was giving Intel money for free and giving TSMC money for free, and all these companies just giving the money for free, and Donald Trump turned it into saying, 'Hey, we want equity for the money. If we're going to give you the money, we want a piece of the action for the American taxpayer,'" Lutnick said.

AI models are energy-hungry and will drive increased cloud computing consumption. Data centers worldwide consumed roughly 1.5% of global electricity, and that number is expected to grow.