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CHONGQING, CHINA – MAY 4, 2023 – Young technicians test the quality of electronic chips at a dust-free production workshop in Chongqing, China, May 4, 2023.

CFOTO | Future Publishing | Getty Images

Industry analysts are optimistic that Chinese chip makers will develop their own advanced semiconductors despite Washington’s attempts to cut the country off from accessing or manufacturing the technology.

“I don’t underestimate China’s ability and resolve to find a way to build next generation technologies and to also utilize some lagging technologies to still build really important products,” Daniel Newman, CEO and principal analyst at research firm Futurum Group, told CNBC.

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Chinese companies such as Huawei and Alibaba are studying methods to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence performance with fewer or less powerful semiconductors, or combine different chips to reduce reliance on a single hardware, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

U.S.-China chip war: Need to figure out how to 'play nice in the sandbox,' investment officer says

Industry experts believe it will be a “challenge” for these Chinese tech firms, but some experiments have shown “promise,” the WSJ reported.

Paul Scharre, vice president and director of studies at the think tank the Center for a New American Security, said that “nothing’s impossible”

“I certainly think in the long run, we should expect the Chinese to be able to make these technological advancements. It’s quite possible that they’re able to do so faster than maybe others might expect,” he said.

In a retaliatory move to Washington’s efforts to cut China off from advanced chip tech, China banned key infrastructure operators in the country from buying products from U.S. chip giant Micron Technology in May. Washington also reportedly urged South Korea to not let its chip makers fill Micron’s void in China.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said last week that the resources China is dedicating into its chip industry is “quite massive, so you can’t underestimate them.”

China is pouring more than 1 trillion Chinese yuan ($140 billion) into its chip industry, according to a Reuters report. Domestic chip makers already benefit from government subsidies and state-backed research projects.

As a result, there are “many GPU startups in China” and existing players have to “run very fast ourselves” in order to stay in the competition, Huang told media at the Computex Taipei 2023 event last week. GPUs, or graphics processing units, are used to power AI applications.

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China could also pursue dominance in legacy chips where it is already making headway, analysts believe.

“China is showing good progress in making chips based on mature technology,” said Charles Shi, a principal and senior semiconductor analyst at asset management firm Needham & Company.

Mature technology refers to processes involved in making 28-nanometer or larger chips — generally considered legacy chips, with higher numbers denoting older technology. “These chips are increasingly important for the automotive industry,” said Shi. These 28-nanometer chips are widely used in automobiles, consumer electronics, among other products.

U.K.-based analysis provider Total Telecom said that China has acquired competency in 28-nanometer and 14-nanometer chip manufacturing back in 2021.

The demand for 28-nanometer chips is expected to more than triple by 2030, creating a market worth $28.1 billion, according to consultancy International Business Strategies Inc.

“I certainly think that big Chinese chip makers will be able to survive building legacy chips and there’s a very healthy market for legacy, older model chips,” said Scharre.

“There’s absolutely a lot of money to be made and opportunity in legacy chips versus China’s ability to manufacture the most advanced chips, which, at least in the near term, they’re not going to be able to do and will take a really focused amount of resources and attention and human capital to get to,” he added.

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Lawmakers just released a much-awaited crypto market structure bill. Here’s what it means for digital assets and what comes next

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Lawmakers just released a much-awaited crypto market structure bill. Here's what it means for digital assets and what comes next

The U.S. Capitol is shown the morning after the Senate passed legislation to reopen the federal government on Nov. 11, 2025 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee | Getty Images

The Senate Agriculture Committee has released a draft of its portion of a much-awaited digital assets market structure bill — a critical step toward accelerating institutional and retail adoption of cryptocurrencies. 

Unveiled on Monday by Agriculture Chair John Boozman, R-Ark., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., the bipartisan discussion draft lays the groundwork for creating guardrails for the crypto industry in the U.S. It also establishes guidelines for institutions that want to work with digital assets, from bitcoin and ether to tokenized financial instruments.

“This is the most consequential roadmap for how an institution is going to integrate digital assets into their business,” Cody Carbone, CEO of crypto trade association Digital Chamber, told CNBC. “It’s like the best possible step-by-step of what type of compliance rules requirements they would need to follow to work with crypto.”

Here are five key takeaways from the discussion draft.

1. Grants favorable regulatory status to some cryptocurrencies

The text classifies some of the largest digital assets by market capitalization such as bitcoin and ether as “digital commodities,” placing them under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s purview.  

This provision removes a major blocker to digital asset adoption for institutional fiduciaries, Juan Leon, an analyst at crypto-focused asset manager Bitwise, told CNBC.

“Compliance and risk departments will finally have a federal statute to point to,” Leon said. “This shifts the internal conversation … [and] it provides the legal certainty required to move assets into a formal, strategic allocation.”

It will also create “a starkly bifurcated market” consisting of regulated and unregulated tokens, with the former class of assets seeing “a massive influx of institutional capital, deep liquidity and a robust derivatives ecosystem.”

2. Requires crypto firms to segregate funds and manage conflicts of interest

The draft calls for crypto companies to “establish governance, personnel, and financial resource separation among affiliated entities that perform distinct regulated functions.”

Bitwise’s Leon interprets the provision as a challenge to the “all-in-one” business model that is common among crypto exchanges. According to those models, an exchange, broker, custodian, and proprietary trading desk are all wrapped up into one entity. 

In other words, digital asset firms could be required to keep their various businesses separated like traditional financial companies, according to Leon. The change would serve as “a foundational pillar for institutional adoption.”

3. Gives the CFTC more power to regulate digital assets 

The text gives more power to the CFTC, empowering it to work in tandem with the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue joint rulemaking on crypto-related matters.

“There’s a lot more power or authority delegated to the CFTC to have jurisdiction over this industry,” Carbone said. 

The shift comes after the SEC for years served as the main regulator of digital assets, after it edged out the CFTC to gain authority over the industry. 

4. Allows the CFTC to collect fees

The draft calls for regulated entities to pay fees to the CFTC. Those fees would go toward registering digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers, in addition to conducting oversight of regulated entities and carrying out education and outreach. 

5. Establishes listing standards for tokens

The text calls for crypto exchanges to only permit trading of digital commodities that are “not readily susceptible to manipulation.”

It’s a provision that could reduce the number of “rug pulls” and other scams that are still common in some parts of the crypto industry, with the goal of establishing standards and building confidence in the market.

What’s next?

The Senate Agriculture Committee’s discussion draft is far from final, but it does offer critical insights into the direction of efforts to pass crypto-friendly regulations in the U.S., according to Carbone.

“It’s not final, it’s not done, but this gives a good sense of where Congress is going and what the final rules may be,” Carbone said. 

The committee will likely spend the next few weeks getting feedback on their draft, meaning it may be “almost impossible to get [a final version of this part of the bill] done by the end of the year,” he added.

However, that period will give lawmakers time to offer more concrete guidance on several issues that are bracketed – or not yet finalized – in the discussion draft. Those include provisions on anti-money laundering rules and regulations specific to decentralized finance players.

Several crypto players plan to work in tandem with lawmakers to help iron out those details, among others. 

“We’ve long said crypto is a bipartisan issue, and this draft from Chairman Boozman and Senator Booker reflects that,” Moonpay President Keith Grossman told CNBC. “It’s critical that legislation distinguishes between centralized intermediaries and decentralized systems, and we look forward to working with the Committee to get it right.”

The discussion draft is only one piece of larger legislative efforts to overhaul regulations for the crypto industry, according to Carbone. Ultimately, the text will be combined with the Senate Banking Committee’s draft on the digital assets market structure in a bid to create one comprehensive bill.

And although lawmakers are nowhere near the finish line in that process, crypto firms are finding other ways to work with regulators and other authorities to meaningfully advance their industry, Grayscale Investments Chief Legal Officer Craig Salm told CNBC.

“In the absence of comprehensive legislation, we’ve still seen meaningful progress on the regulatory front,” Salm said, adding that the SEC, Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department have recently provided guidance around staking in crypto exchange-traded products. “That said, thoughtful legislation will be critical to solidifying the foundation of the digital asset industry in the U.S. and unlocking even greater value for investors and consumers.”

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AMD’s Lisa Su sees 35% annual sales growth driven by ‘insatiable’ AI demand

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AMD's Lisa Su sees 35% annual sales growth driven by 'insatiable' AI demand

Lisa Su, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), during a Bloomberg Television interview in San Francisco, California, US, on Monday, Oct. 6, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

AMD CEO Lisa Su said on Tuesday that the company’s overall revenue growth would expand to about 35% per year over the next three to five years, driven by “insatiable” demand for artificial intelligence chips.

Su said that much of that would be captured by the company’s AI data center business, which it expects to grow at about 80% per year over the same time period, on track to hit tens of billions of dollars of sales by 2027.

“This is what we see as our potential given the customer traction, both with the announced customers, as well as customers that are currently working very closely with us,” Su told analysts.

Ultimately, Su said that AMD could be able to achieve “double-digit” share in the data center AI chip market over the next three to five years.

AMD shares fell 3% in extended trading.

The AI chip market is currently dominated by Nvidia, which has over 90% of the market share, according to some estimates, and which has given the company a market cap of over $4.6 trillion, versus AMD’s roughly $387 billion valuation.

AMD is holding its first financial analyst day since 2022, as the company has found itself at the center of a boom in data center spending for AI.

While companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars in total on graphics processing unit (GPU) chips to build and power artificial intelligence applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, they are also looking for alternatives to increase capacity and control costs. AMD is the only other major developer of GPUs aside from Nvidia.

In October, AMD announced a partnership with OpenAI in which it would sell the AI startup billions of dollars in its Instinct AI chips over multiple years, starting with enough chips in 2026 to use 1 gigawatt of power.

As part of the deal, OpenAI could end up taking a 10% stake in the chipmaker. Su also highlighted long-term deals with Oracle and Meta on Tuesday.

AMD shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025.

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OpenAI is also helping AMD set up its next-generation systems based around its Instinct MI400X AI chips, which ship next year.

AMD has said that its chips will be able to be assembled into a “rack-scale” system where 72 of its chips work together as one, which is essential for running the largest AI models.

If AMD succeeds at its rack, it will catch up with Nvidia’s AI chips, which have been offered in rack-scale systems for three product generations.

Su said that the company now sees the total market for AI data center parts and systems hitting $1 trillion per year in 2030, representing 40% annual growth per year. AMD reported $5 billion in AI chip sales in its fiscal 2024.

That’s up from the company’s previous forecast of a $500 billion market in 2028 for AI chips. But the updated AMD figure also includes central processors (CPU), an important kind of chip that sits at the heart of a computer, but isn’t a pure AI accelerator like the GPUs made by Nvidia and AMD.

AMD’s Epyc CPUs are still the company’s most important product by sales. It primarily competes with Intel and some smaller Arm-based processors in the CPU market. AMD also makes chips for game consoles, networking parts, and other devices.

On Tuesday, although AMD focused much of its focus on its growing AI business, it told shareholders that its older businesses were growing too.

“The other message that we want to leave you with today is every other part of our business is firing on all cylinders, and that’s actually a very nice place to be,” Su said.

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CoreWeave CEO responds to data center delays as stock plunges. Core Scientific shares fall

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CoreWeave CEO responds to data center delays as stock plunges. Core Scientific shares fall

CoreWeave CEO responds to data center delay as stock falls

CoreWeave shares sank 13% on Tuesday after CEO Mike Intrator addressed delays at a third-party data center developer that hit full-year guidance in its latest earnings report.

“Quite frankly, every single part of this quarter went exactly as we planned, except for one delay at a singular data center,” Intrator told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday.

He then clarified that a “singular data center provider” is more accurate.

“Some people might think it’s one complex, but when I go over the numbers, we’re talking about multiple places,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said. “And it just so happens that the places are all connected to an outfit called Core Scientific that you tried to buy.”

Cramer noted delays at complexes in Texas, Oklahoma and North Carolina.

Intrator said the companies have been working together on infrastructure for a long time a would continue work to bring it online. He did not directly confirm that Core Scientific is the third-party provider.

CoreWeave tried to acquire Core Scientific for $9 billion earlier this year. Core Scientific shareholders voted against the proposed deal. Core Scientific shares sank 7% Tuesday.

During CoreWeave’s quarterly earnings call on Monday, JPMorgan Securities analyst Mark Murphy asked if the delay was related to Core Scientific, but Intrator declined to name the company. At another point in the call, the CEO suggested that just one data center, not multiple sites, were affected.

“There was a problem at one data center that’s impacting us, but there are 41 data centers in our portfolio,” Intrator said.

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At a different point in the call, CoreWeave’s CFO Nitin Agrawal said the delays stem from “a single provider, data center provider partner.”

When reached for comment about how many sites were affected, CoreWeave did not provide a number and pointed to Intrator’s statements on the earnings call and during his “Squawk on the Street” interview.

CoreWeave, which provides infrastructure for artificial intelligence companies, reported third-quarter results on Monday that showed $1.36 billion in revenue for the period, up 134% from $583.9 million a year ago. But CoreWeave now sees 2025 revenue coming in between $5.05 billion and $5.15 billion, below the average analyst estimate of $5.29 billion.

Intrator told CNBC on Tuesday that CoreWeave has teams of employees working with contractors and Core Scientific at those sites “every single day” to get things back on track.

“It became apparent to us in Q3 that there were delays at the facility,” Intrator said. “CoreWeave responded by deploying our own boots on the ground to ensure that everything was being done in order to move those facilities along as quickly as possible.”

Intrator told analysts on Monday that the delays would not affect its backlog or get the full value from contracts.

Core Scientific did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CoreWeave has been on a deal-making blitz as big tech companies and AI startups race to build out their computing infrastructure.

The company announced in September that it agreed to provide Meta with $14.2 billion of AI cloud infrastructure, just days after expanding its contract with OpenAI to $22.4 billion.

CoreWeave slides after earnings: Here's what to know

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