“Technology has remarkably expanded the storage capabilities of this sustainable material. A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years’ worth of music.”
“By revenue, TSMC is the largest semiconductor company in the world. In 2020 it quietly joined the world’s 10 most valuable companies. It’s now bigger than Meta and Exxon. The company also has the world’s biggest logic chip manufacturing capacity and produces, by one analysis, a staggering 92 percent of the world’s most avant-garde chips—the ones inside the nuclear weapons, planes, submarines, and hypersonic missiles on which the international balance of hard power is predicated. Perhaps more to the point, TSMC makes a third of all the world’s silicon chips, notably the ones in iPhones and Macs. Every six months, just one of TSMC’s 13 foundries—the redoubtable Fab 18 in Tainan—carves and etches a quintillion transistors for Apple. In the form of these miniature masterpieces, which sit atop microchips, the semiconductor industry churns out more objects in a year than have ever been produced in all the other factories in all the other industries in the history of the world.”
“The EU has an ambitious goal of producing 20% of the world’s chips by 2030 — a move that requires the bloc quadruple its semiconductor production in just eight years. Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton has said the EU’s plans will be “commensurate” with the $52 billion recently announced by the U.S. to fund its own chip supply chain. ”
“Les tensions s’accumulent et devraient pousser les entreprises occidentales à vouloir augmenter leurs capacités de production pour réduire les risques d’approvisionnement. » Les tensions s’accumulent d’autant plus que Pékin a été placé dans une situation intenable par Washington. En interdisant à TSMC de vendre ses puces dernier cri au champion chinois du téléphone, Huawei, l’administration américaine a donné un coup d’arrêt à toute la chaîne de l’électronique chinoise, fer de lance de sa conquête mondiale. Privé de ces puces pour ses smartphones, Huawei a été éjecté violemment de cet immense marché. Car les producteurs locaux sont encore très loin en matière de technologie.La Chine importe aujourd’hui pour plus de 370 milliards de dollars de puces par an, davantage que de pétrole !”
“To evade the clampdown, big miners have sent their machines overseas. Mr Su, who also runs a logistics business that transports mining machines, has been chartering Boeing 747s to get used ones out swiftly. Most are going to Russia and Kazakhstan, which together account for about 13% of the world’s bitcoin mining. But there are few data centres abroad with space for lots of new machines, including in America, the second-biggest miner. Building a farm there costs between five and ten times what it does in China, says Mr Su. That is too much for most Chinese miners. More than half of their computers will stay put for now, he says.”
“The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine 46,225 mm2 with 1.2 Trillion transistors and 400,000 AI-optimized cores. By comparison, the largest Graphics Processing Unit is 815 mm2 and has 21.1 Billion transistors.”
The former president of Motorola, who left the Lenovo-led handset maker last month, has been hired by Google to run a new division to unify the company’s disparate hardware projects