U.S. stock futures rose on Friday, September 25, as AI‑related chip makers lifted the Nasdaq 100 futures 0.61% while the Dow and S&P 500 futures each gained 0.31%. Advanced Micro Devices, Marvell, Cerebras and Intel posted roughly 2% pre‑market gains, and Akamai Technologies surged 21% after announcing an $11.6 billion cloud services contract with Anthropic. Meta’s shares were flat but poised for a fifth straight weekly rise, buoyed by interest in its Muse AI agent. Brent crude stayed above $100 [...]

Advanced Micro Devices briefly entered the $1 trillion market‑cap club in September, with shares surging nearly 10% to a record $616. The rally lifted AMD’s valuation above $1 trillion and coincided with double‑digit gains for Intel and Arm, pushing the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index up more than 4 %. Reuters attributed the move to investor confidence that AMD can capture a larger slice of AI‑driven computing demand, given its portfolio of CPUs and data‑center accelerators. The broader chip sector benefited as [...]

At SEMICON West 2026, TRUMPF unveiled an ultrashort‑pulse laser that can fabricate micro‑scale cooling structures directly into AI chip stacks, a first for industrial production. The laser’s high power and beam‑shaping precision allow rapid, five‑fold faster processing than traditional etching while maintaining surface quality, enabling integration of cooling channels in hard materials like silicon carbide and diamond. This capability addresses the heat‑dissipation bottleneck of next‑generation AI processors, supporting advanced packaging and high‑density computing. [...]

India’s push to become a semiconductor manufacturing hub is confronting a hidden hurdle: the sophisticated process‑critical infrastructure needed to keep advanced fabs operational. At SEMICON 2026, Eric Stuiver, Group Sector Director Electronics at Deerns, explained that beyond conventional HVAC and clean‑room design, facilities require specialised gas and chemical delivery, vibration control, ultra‑pure water systems, power‑quality management and integrated contamination controls. Deerns adopts a process‑led methodology, designing utilities by working backwards from the semiconductor process rather than applying generic [...]

EdgeCortix, a Japanese fabless semiconductor firm, announced RAIDEN, a scalable AI chiplet platform designed for “Physical AI” workloads that run at the edge rather than in data centers. The architecture can be configured as a single‑die (X1), two‑die (X2) or four‑die (X4) system, all sharing the company’s DNA‑X accelerator and MERA software stack. At full X4 scale, RAIDEN delivers up to 3.36 PFLOPS of FP4 compute, 256 GB of memory, 548 GB/s memory bandwidth, 1.54 TB/s die‑to‑die bandwidth and up to [...]

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH), the market’s largest chip fund with about $71 billion in assets, allocates 21.7 % of its portfolio to Nvidia, a weighting that has become a drag as the AI‑focused stock lagged broader sector gains. Over the past twelve months SMH’s return was 87.3 % versus Nvidia’s 26.6 % and a sector‑wide rally that favored memory, equipment and analog manufacturers. In contrast, the Invesco Semiconductors ETF (PSI) uses a modified equal‑weight approach across roughly 33 holdings, limiting [...]

Advanced Chip and Circuit Materials, Inc. announced a U.S. expansion of its Celeritas dielectric material production to support AI hardware. New laminate capacity of 20 million square feet per year will begin in January 2027, while prepreg and build‑up capacity will reach 87 million square feet per year by November 2026, with further increases planned in late 2027. The expansion covers four segments—ultra‑high‑speed skew‑free, low‑/negative‑expansion laminates, IC substrate/core materials, and build‑up materials—using halogen‑free, PFAS‑free components that bypass the conventional copper‑clad laminate [...]