Bill Gates and Nvidia back Commonwealth’s plan to bottle a star

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has hoovered up another $863 million in fresh capital to fuel its dream of turning nuclear fusion into a commercial energy business that doesn’t melt the budget.

China’s silicon brigade tries to fill the GPU hole with homebrew parts

Chinese cloud giant Alibaba has wheeled out a shiny new AI chip, hoping to plug the silicon hole left after Nvidia was kicked in the export rules by Uncle Sam.

Waiver yanked, fabs stalled, shares tanked

Washington has slammed the door shut on a loophole that let South Korea’s biggest chipmakers sneak US gear into their Chinese fabs without the usual bureaucratic hoops.

Asia dominates global rankings for AI dependency

Singapore’s workforce is the most AI-addicted in the world, with nearly three-quarters of its workers hooked on digital thinking machines to get anything done.

Two potentially dead and alive cats

IBM and AMD say they’re going to “build the future of computing” by welding quantum hardware to high-performance silicon, creating hybrid systems to crack problems too gnarly for either approach.

Korean giant eyes redemption with second-gen GAA node

Samsung’s messy 3nm debut may soon be old news as attention shifts to its 2nm GAA roadmap.

New firmware locks voltages to calm CPU crematorium

ASRock has pushed a fresh BIOS update for its 800-series motherboards, claiming better CPU and memory stability after its boards developed a nasty habit of roasting AMD’s new Ryzen 9000 processors.

Redmond stonewalls watchdogs over Office 365 flows

Software King of the World, Microsoft is refusing to tell Police Scotland where the sensitive data it processes in Office 365 goes, leaving the force staring down a breach of UK law.

Copilot gets high-speed voice generation while foundation model debuts on LMArena

Software King of the World, Microsoft has trundled out two new in-house AI efforts, one already talking inside Copilot and the other still in the test arena.

Real countries have fabs

Intel has been strong-armed into holding on to its bleeding foundry business after Donald Trump’s administration tied subsidies to an equity grab.