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Google CEO Sundar Pichai talks about the company’s third-generation artificial intelligence chips.
Source: YouTube screenshot

Not content with relying on standard chips that are in high demand, some of the world’s biggest tech firms are developing their own semiconductors.

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Tesla and Baidu are all shunning established chip firms and bringing certain aspects of chip development in-house, according to company announcements and media reports.

“Increasingly, these companies want custom-made chips fitting their applications’ specific requirements rather than use the same generic chips as their competitors,” Syed Alam, global semiconductor lead at Accenture, told CNBC.

“This gives them more control over the integration of software and hardware while differentiating them from their competition,” Alam added.

Russ Shaw, a former non-executive director at U.K.-based Dialog Semiconductor, told CNBC that custom-designed chips can perform better and work out cheaper.

“These specifically designed chips can help to reduce energy consumption for devices and products from the specific tech company, whether it relates to smartphones or cloud services,” Shaw said.

The ongoing global chip shortage is another reason why big tech firms are thinking twice about where they get their chips from, Glenn O’Donnell, research director at analyst firm Forrester, told CNBC. “The pandemic threw a big wrench in these supply chains, which accelerated efforts to do their own chips.”

“Many already felt limited in their innovation pace being locked into chipmaker timelines,” O’Donnell said.

A.I. chips and more

At present, barely a month goes by without a Big Tech company announcing a new chip project.

Perhaps the most notable example came in November 2020 when Apple announced it was moving away from Intel’s x86 architecture to make its own M1 processor, which now sits in its new iMacs and iPads.

More recently, Tesla announced that it is building a “Dojo” chip to train artificial intelligence networks in data centers. The automaker in 2019 started producing cars with its custom AI chips that help on-board software make decisions in response to what’s happening on the road.

Baidu last month launched an AI chip that’s designed to help devices process huge amounts of data and boost computing power. Baidu said the “Kunlun 2” chip can be used in areas such as autonomous driving and that it has entered mass production.

Some of the tech giants have chosen to keep certain semiconductor projects under wraps.

Google is reportedly edging closer to rolling out its own central processing units, or CPUs, for its Chromebook laptops. The search giant plans to use its CPUs in Chromebooks and tablets that run on the company’s Chrome operating system from around 2023, according to a report from Nikkei Asia on Sep. 1. Google did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

Amazon, which operates the world’s largest cloud service, is developing its own networking chip to power hardware switches that move data around networks. If it works, it would reduce Amazon’s reliance on Broadcom. Amazon, which already designs a number of other chips, did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

Facebook’s chief AI scientist told Bloomberg in 2019 that the company is working on a new class of semiconductor that would work “very differently” than most of the existing designs. Facebook did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

Designing but not manufacturing

At this stage, none of the tech giants are looking to do all the chip development themselves.

“It is all about the design and performance of the chip,” Shaw said. “At this stage, it is not about the manufacturing and foundries, which is very costly.”

Setting up an advanced chip factory, or foundry, like TSMC‘s in Taiwan, costs around $10 billion and takes several years.

“Even Google and Apple are reticent to build these,” O’Donnell said. “They’ll go to TSMC or even Intel to build their chips.”

O’Donnell said there’s a shortage of people in Silicon Valley with the skills required to design high end-processors. “Silicon Valley put so much emphasis on software over the past few decades that hardware engineering was seen as a bit of an anachronism,” he said.

“It became ‘uncool’ to do hardware,” O’Donnell said. “Despite its name, Silicon Valley now employs relatively few real silicon engineers.”

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Tesla’s stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

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Tesla's stock erases loss for the year, soaring 85% from April low

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.

Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters

Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.

After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.

The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.

It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.

In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.

Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.

Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.

Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.

However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach $3 trillion market cap

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Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach  trillion market cap

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.

Camille Cohen | Afp | Getty Images

Alphabet has joined the $3 trillion club.

Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.

The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.

But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”

Read more CNBC tech news

Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.

The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.

CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.

The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.

WATCH: EU fines Google almost $3 billion

EU fines Google almost $3 billion over AdTech practices, reports say

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Bessent: TikTok deal ‘framework’ reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

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Bessent: TikTok deal 'framework' reached with China, Trump and Xi will finalize it Friday

Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images

The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.

“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.

Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”

Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.

TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.

At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.

Read more CNBC tech news

Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.

But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.

As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.

He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.

Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.

White House launches TikTok account

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