NYC just banned student-facing generative AI across grades 2-K through 8th for the 2026-27 school year, barring tools and companion chatbots for nearly 600,000 public school kids. High schoolers get limited pilots and mandatory AI literacy classes, but young learners must stick to screens-off basics. Why it matters: It marks the nation's broadest classroom AI ban yet, signaling major pushback against tech giants targeting early education.
AMD just unveiled its 6th Gen EPYC 9006 server CPUs built on TSMC's 2nm Zen 6 architecture, packing up to 256 cores and 512 threads per socket. AMD claims the chips deliver a 174% geomean performance leap over Intel Xeon 6980P in agentic AI pipelines like orchestration and database retrieval.
The Trump administration is in talks to take an equity stake in OpenAI, exploring models where the public becomes a financial partner in AI growth. The shares could seed OpenAI's proposed Public Wealth Fund to distribute returns directly to citizens, echoing last year's Intel deal while reigniting concerns over corporate-government fusion.
Perplexity just announced a hybrid local-server inference orchestrator for its Personal Computer tool. Instead of making you choose between local privacy and cloud horsepower, the system automatically routes sensitive tasks like finances to on-device silicon while offloading heavy lifting to frontier server models. The Intel-partnered feature rolls out this July.
Microsoft just launched new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop for Business models powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors. The laptops support on-device AI tasks like real-time transcription and local image generation, offer up to 23 hours of battery life, and introduce a key-activated integrated privacy screen. Snapdragon X2 models arrive later this year.
Intel just partnered with Elon Musk's Terafab project to manufacture advanced AI chips for Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. The ambitious initiative plans two specialized fabrication facilities in Austin to deliver 1 terawatt of annual compute capacity for robotics and data centers. The deal could provide a crucial lifeline for Intel's turnaround while cementing Musk's custom silicon ambitions.
Intel just announced plans to produce graphics processing units (GPUs), venturing straight into Nvidia’s dominant territory. CEO Lip-Bu Tan revealed the move at the Cisco AI Summit, emphasizing the effort will be tailored around customer demand. Intel has already recruited veteran engineers like former Qualcomm executive Eric Demers to help drive the turnaround effort.
Microsoft just made Windows ML generally available, letting developers deploy local ONNX models directly across AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm chips. Windows now automatically handles execution providers in the background, shaving hundreds of megabytes off app bundle sizes. It brings real-time, privacy-first local AI to Windows 11 24H2 PCs.
NVIDIA and Intel just announced a landmark partnership to co-develop custom data center and PC processors using NVLink. Intel will manufacture custom x86 CPUs for NVIDIA's AI platforms and build PC chips integrating RTX GPU chiplets, backed by a $5 billion equity investment from NVIDIA. The deal tightly marries the dominant x86 ecosystem with NVIDIA's AI compute engine.
Intel's new CEO Lip-Bu Tan reportedly conceded to employees that the company has fallen out of the top 10 semiconductor makers and that it is "too late" to catch Nvidia in AI model training. Facing massive losses and layoffs, Intel plans to abandon the training race and redirect its focus to edge AI on PCs and autonomous agents.
Intel just detailed AutoRound, a post-training quantization tool designed for LLMs and vision-language models. By optimizing weight rounding and clipping ranges together, it boosts relative accuracy at INT2 by up to 2.1x over popular baselines. Quantizing a 72B model takes just 37 minutes, with direct exports to GPTQ, AWQ, and GGUF.
Microsoft just rolled out its exclusive Copilot Plus PC features to Intel and AMD devices via the latest Windows 11 update. The update brings real-time Live Captions, Paint Cocreator, and Photos AI editing beyond Qualcomm chips. The widely discussed Recall feature, however, still lacks a general rollout date.
TSMC just committed at least $100 billion to expand its US semiconductor manufacturing footprint, funding two new factories in Phoenix alongside its existing three. CEO C.C. Wei confirmed the new sites will build advanced AI chips. It is a massive bet to onshore supply chains ahead of planned semiconductor tariffs.
Qualcomm just expanded its Snapdragon X lineup with a cheaper Arm laptop chip, bringing Copilot Plus PCs down to around $600. It features an eight-core Oryon CPU and a 45 TOPS NPU to keep all of Microsoft's on-device AI features intact. Why it matters: Qualcomm is aggressively taking Windows on Arm mainstream to squeeze Intel where it hurts.
Intel just unveiled a massive PC chip refresh at CES 2025, led by its Core Ultra 200 series across desktop and mobile. The new silicon features dedicated NPUs, AI-based power management, and up to 3.3x faster local Llama 3 8B performance on the 285H. Systems begin shipping later this month.
Qualcomm just approached Intel about a potential takeover, according to the Wall Street Journal. Intel has been reeling from costly setbacks and slow AI progress, having recently announced $10 billion in cost cuts and over 15,000 layoffs. The megadeal would upend the chip market, though severe antitrust scrutiny makes completion far from guaranteed.
Intel just announced plans to spin off its AI-focused foundry business into an independent subsidiary with its own board, clearing the way for outside capital. The stock jumped over 6% following the news. Intel hopes this move and its upcoming 18A process will help turn around steep losses and mount a challenge to Nvidia.
Intel, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and AMD just formed the UALink Promoter Group to establish an open standard for interconnecting AI accelerator chips in data centers. UALink 1.0 will connect up to 1,024 GPUs in a computing pod. Notably missing are Nvidia and AWS, as tech giants push to break Nvidia's grip on AI hardware.
The International Olympic Committee just unveiled its Olympic AI Agenda, laying out plans to use AI across judging, talent scouting, and broadcasting. Demos featured algorithms analyzing diving mechanics in under 0.1 seconds and Intel using phones to scout young athletes in Senegal, with initial rollouts planned for Paris 2024.
Intel just unveiled Hala Point, the world’s largest neuromorphic computer packing 1.15 billion artificial neurons across 1,152 Loihi 2 chips into a microwave-sized chassis. By storing and processing data simultaneously like a real brain, it solves optimization problems with 100 times less energy than conventional machines. While not built to train LLMs from scratch, it opens a promising path for ultra-efficient continual learning once software catches up.
