Round-up
Highlights
- Taiwan blacklists Huawei & SMIC for advanced-node gear. Taipei quietly added the two mainland giants to its export-control list, further choking their access to EUV repair parts and EDA updates.1
- Nvidia courts Europe with “sovereign-AI” gigafactories. A €18 billion ($20 billion) plan anchored by 18 000 H200 GPUs aims to keep EU workloads off U.S. clouds and on local silicon.2
- EnCharge’s EN100 puts 200 TOPS of analog in an M.2 card. The compute-in-memory startup says its 40 TOPS/W chip will sample to PC OEMs this year, undercutting discrete GPUs on efficiency.3
Other developments
- U.S.–China rare-earth truce leaves military-grade magnets unresolved.4
- South Korea forms a cross-ministry team to blunt incoming U.S. chip tariffs.5
- Intel warns Oregon fab floor cuts start in July.6
Did You Know? A new Xinhua-reported probe array can test micro-LED wafers with just 0.9 MPa of pressure—one-ten-thousandth that of conventional probes—slashing yield-loss risk for display fabs.7
In-depth
1. Government & Corporate Policy
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Taiwan hardens export list.
- Huawei and SMIC now require individual licenses for any semiconductor equipment at 14 nm and below.1
- Firms caught shipping without approval face fines up to NT$10 million (~$308 000).
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Seoul’s tariff task force.
- New liberal administration names trade-law veteran Yeo Han-koo to lead talks on steel, autos and semiconductors with Washington.5
- Industry groups urged an immediate waiver to preserve DRAM and foundry margins.
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Rare-earth flashpoint in London.
- Beijing links samarium-cobalt magnet approvals to U.S. AI-chip export curbs, stalling a broader pact.4
- Treasury officials hint at extending 55 % China tariffs past the 10 Aug deadline.
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EXIM’s Greenland gamble.
- A $120 million letter of interest for the Tanbreez mine would be the first U.S. overseas mining loan since 2019.8
- Project targets 85 000 t/yr concentrate by 2026, enough neodymium for ~8 million EV motors.
2. Economics, Finance & Business Outlook
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Intel trims U.S. fabs.
- Internal memo says factory layoffs start mid-July as Phoenix and Hillsboro lines shift to 14A pilot runs.6
- Cost-cut comes weeks after CFO’s “$10 billion efficiency” pledge.
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Nvidia’s European courting.
- First French site will deploy 18 000 H200s, expand to 60 000 across four EU “AI gigafactories” by 2026.2
- EU funds cover up to 35 % of cap-ex under its €43 billion Chips Act.
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Tariff ‘stacking’ squeezes importers.
- U.S. companies in tooling and PCB laminate now pay effective rates above 70 % when new China levies pile on old Section-301 duties.9
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Lam Research attracts quiet smart-money.
- QRG Capital lifted its LRCX stake 4.5 % to 449 k shares (~$32.7 million), citing hybrid-bonding tailwinds.10
3. Technology & R&D
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Passive evaporative cooling for AI racks.
- UC San Diego fiber membrane removes >800 W/cm² without pumps—potential 40 % data-center energy cut.11
- Team spinning out a startup to build cold-plates for GPUs.
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Damage-free micro-LED wafer testing.
- Tianjin University’s flexible 3-D probe maintains integrity after 1 million cycles; key to scaling 8-inch MicroLED lines.7
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Analog AI slips into client PCs.
- EnCharge EN100 packs 200 INT8 TOPS on an M.2 stick, bundles 32 GB LPDDR, and draws 8.25 W—good for on-device Gen-AI.3
- 40 TOPS/W matches mobile-GPU class efficiency without HBM cost.
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Nvidia’s ‘AI-SSD’ target—100 M IOPS.
- Silicon Motion CEO says Nvidia wants 33× faster flash to un-bottleneck HBM3E GPUs; Kioxia prototyping XL-Flash drives for 2026.12
Footnotes
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https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-adds-huawei-smic-export-control-list-2025-06-15/ ↩︎ ↩︎
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https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/nvidias-pitch-sovereign-ai-resonates-with-eu-leaders-2025-06-16/ ↩︎ ↩︎
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https://www.eetimes.com/encharge-picks-the-pc-for-its-first-analog-ai-chip/ ↩︎ ↩︎
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https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-china-trade-truce-leaves-military-use-rare-earth-issue-unresolved-sources-say-2025-06-15/ ↩︎ ↩︎
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https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-launches-task-force-us-trade-negotiations-2025-06-16/ ↩︎ ↩︎
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https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/intel-to-begin-laying-off-factory-workers-in-july-heres-what-the-company-said/articleshow/121854413.cms ↩︎ ↩︎
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https://en.people.cn/n3/2025/0616/c90000-20328191.html ↩︎ ↩︎
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https://www.reuters.com/business/us-export-import-bank-considers-120-million-loan-greenland-rare-earths-project-2025-06-15/ ↩︎
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https://www.reuters.com/business/tariff-stacking-adds-another-headache-us-importers-2025-06-16/ ↩︎
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https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/filing-lam-research-co-nasdaqlrcx-shares-acquired-by-qrg-capital-management-inc-2025-06-16/ ↩︎
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https://techxplore.com/news/2025-06-evaporative-cooling-tech-curb-centers.html ↩︎
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https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/smi-ceo-claims-nvidia-wants-ssds-with-100m-iops-up-to-33x-performance-uplift-could-eliminate-ai-gpu-bottlenecks ↩︎