Chips & Semiconductors

U.S. semiconductor stocks were set to lose about $2 trillion in market value on Thursday, extending a steep selloff that had already erased $1.64 trillion over the previous six trading sessions, according to Reuters.

GlobalFoundries has been selected as the technology provider and operator for two new semiconductor manufacturing facilities at its Malta, New York, site under a U.S.-Japan initiative providing up to 21 billion dollars in funding. The company announced the plan on October 14, saying Japan will provide the investment while GlobalFoundries contributes its manufacturing technology and operational expertise. The fabs are intended to expand trusted U.S. production of foundational semiconductors and strengthen supply chains for automotive, industrial and connected infrastructure markets.

Oxford-based Salience Labs has closed an oversubscribed $125 million Series B funding round to scale its photonic networking chips for AI data center infrastructure. The round was led by Bullhound Capital, whose principal Callum Stewart is joining the company's board. New and returning backers include AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and the British Business Bank, along with existing shareholders Applied Ventures, Oxford Science Enterprises, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Silicon Catalyst Ventures.

ASML gave the clearest signal yet on Wednesday that the artificial intelligence buildout is still accelerating upstream, in the factories that make the chips themselves. The Dutch lithography giant reported third-quarter net sales of 11.662 billion euros and net income of 4.960 billion euros, with a gross margin of 57.5 percent and basic earnings per share of 12.95 euros.

Marvell Technology, Microsoft and Oracle have formed a new working group under the Open Compute Project to standardize a piece of security hardware that has traditionally lived outside the server. The group, organized under the OCP Security Track, will define open specifications for an integrated hardware security module designed for cloud and hyperscale data centers.

Microsoft is making its biggest push yet to run its own AI services on its own silicon. The company said Monday that its newest in-house accelerator, the Maia 300, will start rolling out next year, and that it expects to install its Maia chips at multiple-gigawatt scale across its data centers. The plan would make Maia the primary inference system behind Microsoft products — the hardware that answers every Copilot prompt, summarizes every Teams meeting, and generates every research response.

Solidigm, the NAND flash subsidiary of SK hynix, is adding a new original design manufacturer (ODM) site in Taiwan for data-center SSDs, according to industry reporting that surfaced October 5, 2026, from Seoul Economic Daily, Aju Press, and DIGITIMES. The company told customers via a product change notification last month; products built at the new site are expected to begin shipping in December under the same quality standards and terms as existing output.

The union representing workers at Micron Technology's Taoyuan plant in Taiwan announced on October 7, 2026, that its members have authorized a strike over the company's bonus scheme. Of 2,258 eligible members, 2,012 cast ballots, with 1,994 voting in favor — roughly 99 percent of votes cast and about 88 percent of all eligible members. The vote gives the union the legal right to strike, though no walkout date has been set and the union said timing details were still under discussion.

Toronto-based Xanadu Quantum Technologies and GlobalFoundries announced on October 6, 2026, a multi-year strategic manufacturing partnership that moves the core components of Xanadu's photonic quantum computers onto a commercial semiconductor production line. The deal puts Xanadu's ultra-low-loss silicon nitride photonics and its superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) into fabrication on GlobalFoundries' 300 mm line in Malta, New York — a shift from lab-scale prototyping to industrial, repeatable manufacturing.