CHIPS Act funding The U.S. Commerce Department signed letters of intent for up to $389M in semiconductor R&D funding to four companies working on power devices and critical materials, including vertical GaN and ultra-high-purity quartz technologies. Under the proposed agreements, the government will receive minority, nonvoting equity stakes as a condition of the awards. Company Award R&D Focus Helion Up to $175M High-voltage power semiconductors for fusion systems. Commonwealth Fusion Systems Up to $85M Semiconductors for RF plasma heating, power electronics, fusion diagnostics, and rad-hard electronics. Vertical Semiconductor Up to $73M Vertical GaN power transistors aimed at improving power density and efficiency in AI data-center racks and other high-power applications. Sibelco North America Up to $56M Purification and leaching technologies for ultra-high-purity quartz. Manufacturing capacity Nvidia expanded capacity agreements across its manufacturing supply chain , including deals with: Amkor to expand advanced packaging capacity in S. Korea, bringing the companies’ combined Arizona and S. Korea agreements to $3B. The expansion targets more than a fourfold increase in interposer wafer capacity by the end of 2028. SPIL to expand optical-engine assembly capacity for CPO in Taiwan; Samsung Electro-Mechanics to expand ABF package substrate production in S. Korea; KYEC to build new semiconductor testing facilities in the U.S., with a $1.1B advance; IBIDEN to expand package substrate capacity in Japan; Unimicron to increase package substrate production in Taiwan. Advanced packaging and inspection UMC and AP Memory announced a technology and manufacturing collaboration to develop silicon-capacitor power-delivery solutions for AI and HPC systems, using UMC’s deep-trench-capacitor technology to move capacitance from the board into the interposer, substrate, or landside of advanced packages. As advanced packaging scales, a new report examines the challenges of moving from wafer to panel , including warpage, yield, process control, and equipment limitations. Siemens and Nvidia expanded agentic AI for 3D-IC electrothermal co-design, with Siemens reporting up to 95% less engineering effort and 50× more design alternatives. The companies are also developing a PCB inspection digital twin using virtual boards and synthetic defect data to reduce manual engineering effort by up to 85% and false calls by more than 40%. Fig.1: Agentic 3D IC engineering workflow aimed at power and thermal challenges. Source: Siemens AI data center power delivery Infineon and Nvidia expanded their collaboration on 800 VDC power architectures for AI data centers, focusing on GaN-based intermediate bus converters (IBCs) designed to improve power efficiency and density for high-power AI systems. Explore the shift to 800 VDC power delivery in AI data centers and the safety and reliability challenges posed by higher-voltage architectures. Standards Advanced Photonics Coalition released its first portfolio of five specifications and recommended practices for silicon photonics and co-packaged optics . Accellera released Functional Safety Language Standard 1.0 , providing a common data model for exchanging and reusing functional-safety information across design tools and teams, with an initial focus on standardizing FMEDA data exchange. China Samsung Electronics and SK hynix reportedly are upgrading their China NAND fabs to produce more advanced memory, with Samsung targeting 286-layer V9 NAND production in Xi’an and SK hynix moving toward 240-layer or higher NAND in Dalian, despite U.S. restrictions on chipmaking equipment exports, according to Reuters. ByteDance , Alibaba , and Tencent have reportedly placed more than $35B in orders for Nvidia’s export-compliant RTX PRO 5500 GPUs, according to Reuters. China’s access to AI computing power could nearly double to 8.8M Nvidia H100 equivalents by the end of 2027, IFP estimates, although tighter chip export controls and