The Hot Take: Nvidia starting to feel the heat of competition and see those $ evaporate as they try other vendors.
Nvidia is preparing to launch a new chip designed to speed up AI responses, breaking with its long-running habit of flogging the same processor for every job.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang is expected to unveil a chip focused on āinferenceā, meaning running models rather than training them.
According to people familiar with the plans for GTC next week, the chip is the first new product to emerge from Decemberās $20bn deal to hire the founders of Groq, a start-up building ālanguage processing unitsā tuned for high-speed answers to complex AI queries.
Three months after that deal, Nvidia is expected to debut a Groq-based LPU to sit alongside its forthcoming flagship Vera Rubin graphics processing unit. It is part of a product family meant to head off challengers and meet new kinds of AI applications.
The move lands as the worldās most valuable company gets grief from start-ups and customers, such as Google, all busy cooking up their own AI chips. This week, Meta announced a new family of four inference-focused processors.
One Silicon Valley venture investor said: āWe are entering an interesting phase that is not āNvidia dominantā,ā
For the past three years, Nvidiaās $4.5tn market capitalisation has been built on its GPUs, which have become the backbone of generative AI. They train models such as the ones behind OpenAIās ChatGPT.
Huang has insisted that a single system can handle training and then run the chatbots and coding tools built on top. Big Tech has spent hundreds of billions deploying these boxes while funding their own specialised silicon.
But the growing sophistication of AI tools, including āagenticā coding systems, is pushing Huang to ditch the mantra that one GPU fits every workload.
The Groq deal was worth about $20bn, according to people familiar with the transaction, making it one of the biggest deals in Nvidiaās 33-year history. It includes licensing and the hiring of key talent, including Groq founder and former Google chip executive Jonathan Ross.
Groq, which had been working with Samsung to manufacture its products, previously bragged that its LPUs were faster and more efficient than Nvidiaās GPUs for inference. Nvidia clearly listened.
Nvidiaās flagship Blackwell and Rubin systems lean on high-bandwidth memory to cope with the massive data loads that AI models fling around. But HBM is expensive and in increasingly short supply as SK Hynix and Micron struggle to keep up with demand.
The Groq-style chip will use SRam rather than the dynamic Ram used for HBM, according to people familiar with Nvidiaās plans, because SRam is more available and better suited to speeding up AI āreasoningā tasks.
Bank of America reckons that by 2030, inference will account for 75 per cent of AI data centre spending, up from about 50 per cent last year, and it expects a ābroadened AI portfolioā at GTC.
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The Hot Take: Intel doing what it's great at with it's CPUs, software optimizations.
With the introduction of the new Binary Optimization Tool (BOT), Intel is taking a significantly different approach to boosting the performance of modern processors than in the past. While traditional optimizations rely heavily on developers and are determined during the software compilation process, Intel is now focusing on a post-compilation optimization layer based directly on [ā¦]
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The Hot Take: Linux appears to be getting more Rust by the day.
BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member, signaling a deeper investment in the Rust programming language and its role in modern infrastructure. The company already maintains an up-to-date Rust toolchain for Ubuntu and has begun integrating Rust into parts of its stack, citing memory safety and reliability as key drivers. By joining at a higher tier, Canonical is not just adopting Rust but also stepping closer to its governance and long-term direction. The move also highlights ongoing tensions in Rust's ecosystem. While Rust can reduce entire classes of bugs, it often depends heavily on external crates, which can introduce complexity and auditing challenges, especially in enterprise environments. Canonical appears aware of that tradeoff and is positioning itself to influence how the ecosystem evolves, as Rust continues to gain traction across Linux and beyond. "As the publisher of Ubuntu, we understand the critical role systems software plays in modern infrastructure, and we see Rust as one of the most important tools for building it securely and reliably. Joining the Rust Foundation at the Gold level allows us to engage more directly in language and ecosystem governance, while continuing to improve the developer experience for Rust on Ubuntu," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "Of particular interest to Canonical is the security story behind the Rust package registry, crates.io, and minimizing the number of potentially unknown dependencies required to implement core concerns such as async support, HTTP handling, and cryptography -- especially in regulated environments."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The Hot Take: If this proves true ASML better watch out. Their monopoly might come crashing down if they don't get something that competes.
Lace Lithography raised $40 million in Series A funding on Monday to develop a chipmaking tool that uses a helium atom beam instead of light to pattern silicon wafers.
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By ckasprzak | TkOut
| March 26, 2026 |
Hardware
The Hot Take: US domestic job market appears to be expanding in tech.
The Trump administration is targeting $4 trillion Pax Silica investment for semiconductors. Itās not currently clear how the Trump administration arrived at the $4 trillion figure, or how it will ultimately materialize.
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The Hot Take: With GPUs and CPUs getting smaller and hotter need better transmission of heat.
A thermal pad with a vapor chamber on top might be the TIM your next phone's SoC will use. Xerendipity's new products are meant to keep your phone cooler without sacrificing thickness or cost.
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By ckasprzak | TkOut
| March 26, 2026 |
Hardware
The Hot Take: I'm thinking more Ai slashing.
The Grey Box Shifter Dell is still swinging the axe through FY26, chopping 11,000 roles and shrinking its workforce by 27 per cent from FY23 to FY26.
This latest trim was flagged in US Securities and Exchange Commission filings, with Reuters first clocking the move and the paperwork doing the grim confirmation.
In its 10-K filed on 16 March 2026, Dell said its FY26 headcount was 97,000 employees.
That is down 10 per cent from 108,000 a year earlier, which is a tidy slide for a company that sells itself on stability and long-term relationships.
Stretch the view out, and the cuts look even less like a one-off ārestructureā and more like a habit.
SEC filings show that Dell had 133,000 employees in FY23, then ended up at 97,000 by FY26, which is how you get to that 27 per cent drop.
The money trail is there in the severance charges, which the Grey Box Shifter listed as roughly $569m (Ā£426.4m, about ā¬492m) in FY26.
Dell booked $693m in FY25 and $648m in FY24, so the cost of sending staff packing has turned into its own chunky line item.
The headcount numbers tell customers and staff the same thing: the box-shifting machine is being tuned to run leaner, whether the workload agrees or not.
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The Hot Take: This with Ai scare me, but I'm sure it's inevitable at this point...
The partnership between the U.S. and the U.K. is a key advantage, as it was during World War II.
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The Hot Take: I wonder why given that Windows has gotten bashed for the lack of performance vs Linux.
Microsoft has blocked the registry trick that allowed Windows 11 users to enable a native NVMe driver on their PCs. However, third-party tools can still help with a workaround.
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The Hot Take: Interesting place to put an Ai Data-Center, giving it's probably hardened against military attacks.
10GW server farm, 10GW of new generation, and $4.2bn grid upgrade. And someone else is paying for the uranium cleanup Softbank's SB Energy is redeveloping Department of Energy (DoE) land in Ohio for a massive datacenter campus, adding extra generation facilities and power infrastructure alongside it.ā¦
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