AI Chip Race and Hardware Bottlenecks

CHIPS Act backs $874M in AI chip R&D; OpenAI building own hardware; Google plans 12-15M TPU v9 by 2028; AMD reveals MI455X/MI430X; BrainChip AKD1500 design-ready; MediaTek $5B financing; Amazon Trainium3 offers 40% price-performance gain; Etched secures SK Hynix backing at $10.3B; NXP in talks to acquire Ambarella; Acrab's Agent Box (5nm, 700 TOPS) emerges; DeepSeek V4-Flash challenges server-side dogma; Jensen Huang argues structural boom; China Fangqing $1.5B; Kioxia GP1 SSDs; Andes RISC-V edge AI; DeepX $2.2B; EDA AI startups (ChipAgents $134M); Nvidia CUDA moat challenged; Synopsys/AMD/Microsoft agentic chip design achieves 25-40% debug reduction; Cadence launches AuraStack AI for PCB design.