Microsoft's next-gen Xbox console could cost a lot more than anyone hoped. A new Fortune profile of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma says the Project Helix console has internally been projected to cost consumers between $1,200 and $1,800, unless Microsoft decides to subsidize it. For reference, the current Xbox Series X with a disc drive sells for $799.99, and that is after the recent price hikes. The report also says Sharma plans to release a next-gen handheld by the 2027 holiday season, followed by the console in time for the 2028 holidays. Apparently, Helix engineering deadlines have been moved up by at least several months, according to people familiar with the matter, which is putting extra pressure on development teams.

The handheld has also caused some friction inside Microsoft. Windows leaders reportedly wanted it to run a trimmed-down version of Windows Home, while Sharma's team wanted its own software for better gaming performance. It got heated enough that a senior Xbox executive reportedly threatened to scrap the handheld rather than ship the Windows build, though Xbox now seems to be steering the OS. Sharma, for her part, says the teams still work together, noting, "We can't build Helix on our own." Microsoft hasn't confirmed any pricing, and a subsidy could bring the final number down a bit. However, Fortune puts Xbox's profit margin at around 3%, which probably doesn't leave much room for one. Elsewhere, memory makers expect supply to get even tighter in 2027 and 2028, while rival Sony also struggles with rising costs, so a cheap next-gen console looks unlikely from either side.

Lenovo climbed 43 places to #153 on Fortune's annual Global 500 List, making it the highest ranking in the company's history and one of the most significant advances in recent years. The recognition underscores Lenovo's position as one of the world's 500 largest companies by revenue and concludes the strongest year in its history, with record revenue of US$83 billion and adjusted net income growing 42% year-on-year to US$2 billion.

The results demonstrate Lenovo's continued progress in delivering its Hybrid AI vision, positioning itself at the forefront of the AI inferencing and democratization era. AI-related revenue doubled year-on-year and accounted for 33% of group revenue for the full financial year, highlighting AI as the leading growth engine across Lenovo's businesses.

On February 1, ASUS announced that it has been included in Fortune's list of the 2024 World's Most Admired Companies, the ninth time it has achieved this honor. ASUS was recognized for its extraordinary achievements in areas such as global competitiveness, social responsibility, product service quality, and more. "We are honored to be recognized by Fortune Magazine once again," said Jonney Shih, Chairman of ASUS. "The reputation we have achieved is testament to our Design Thinking approach and our commitment to leveraging collective wisdom to bring users seamless and joyful digital experiences."

ASUS continues to relentlessly pursue incredible technological innovation, maintaining global leadership in motherboards, computers, monitors, graphics cards, and routers. Through collaborations with strategic partners, ASUS has strengthened its presence in the gaming, commercial, and industrial markets. Fueled by artificial intelligence, ASUS has also rapidly advanced its AI applications, integrating cloud services, efficient computing power, and big-data platforms, as well as expanding into diverse fields such as smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart manufacturing, smart education, smart cloud, and smart retail. Leveraging its impressive suite of services, ASUS is firmly establishing itself as a comprehensive AI enterprise.

Ace investor Warren Buffett held a US $4 billion stake in TSMC as of January, and has reportedly sold all of it over a period between February to April, 2023. The sale has triggered alarm bells in some circles over the possible reasons someone like Buffett—who wrote the book on long-term strategic investments—would liquidate their holdings. The ongoing slump in the semiconductor industry, and economic recession in the West, seem to cut it as valid reasons. Fortune Magazine has a more grim theory.

Fortune writes that the possibility of a cross-straits conflict between Taiwan and China is at an all-time high, and this could have been a consideration for Buffett to sell his TSMC stake. It is assessed that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan now—with global chip supply chains not yet having attained "resilience"—would minimize economic reprisals on China from the West. The other side of the story could be that the economic slump, in combination with semiconductor manufacturing facing its biggest technological challenges as it approaches the 20-angstrom realm, may have soured TSMC's long-term prospects for Buffett.

Intel is reportedly in talks with TSMC to secure foundry allocation to meet its product roadmap execution. The company is sending an executive delegation to meet with TSMC later this month, to secure foundry capacity for the N3 (3 nm) silicon fabrication node, and ensure that Intel's allocation isn't affected by other customers such as Apple. As part of its IDM 2.0 strategy, Intel has decided to build its products essentially as multi-chip modules with each block of IP built on a silicon fabrication node most optimal to it, so the company maximizes cutting-edge foundry nodes only on the technology that benefits from it the most. N3 will play a vital role with logic/compute tiles in products bound for 2023, as N3 hits critical volume in the first half of the year.

In related news, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger speaking at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, stressed on the importance for American chip designers to seek out semiconductor manufacturing in America, and cautioned against investing in Taiwan (without naming TSMC). This comes in the wake of geopolitical uncertainty in the region. In response to this statement issued to DigiTimes, TSMC CEO Mark Liu downplayed the matter, and said that Gelsinger's statement wasn't worth responding to, and that he doesn't slander industry colleagues. TSMC and Samsung have each announced multi-billion Dollar foundry investments in the US, in attempts to make the global semiconductor supply chains resilient to any security situation that may emerge in East Asia.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) today announced Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA and a trailblazer in building accelerated computing platforms, is the 2021 recipient of the industry's highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award. SIA presents the Noyce Award annually in recognition of a leader who has made outstanding contributions to the semiconductor industry in technology or public policy. Huang will accept the award at the SIA Awards Dinner on Nov. 18, 2021.

"Jensen Huang's extraordinary vision and tireless execution have greatly strengthened our industry, revolutionized computing, and advanced artificial intelligence," said John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO. "Jensen's accomplishments have fueled countless innovations—from gaming to scientific computing to self-driving cars—and he continues to advance technologies that will transform our industry and the world. We're pleased to recognize Jensen with the 2021 Robert N. Noyce Award for his many achievements in advancing semiconductor technology."

NVIDIA has recently announced the company's first standalone Grace CPU that will come out as a product in 2023. NVIDIA has designed Grace on Arm ISA, likely ARM v9, to represent a new way that data centers are built and deliver a whole new level of HPC and AI performance. However, the CPU competition in a data center space is considered one of the hardest markets to enter. Usually, the market is a duopoly between Intel and AMD, which supply x86 processors to server vendors. In the past few years, there have been few Arm CPUs that managed to enter the data canter space, however, NVIDIA is aiming to deliver much more performance and grab a bigger piece of the market.

As a self-proclaimed leader in AI, Intel is facing hard competition from NVIDIA in the coming years. In an interview with Fortune, Intel's new CEO Pat Gelsinger has talked about NVIDIA and how the company sees the competition between the two. Mr. Gelsinger is claiming that Intel is a leader in CPUs that feature AI acceleration built in the chip and that they are not playing defense, but rather offense against NVIDIA. You can check out the whole quote from the interview below.

AMD's resurgence is a well threaded story already. Missteps with their Bulldozer architecture, spinning-off of their manufacturing division off to a separate entity (Global Foundries), the investment in semi-custom solutions and the launch of Zen are well documented throughout numerous articles on this publication. As such, and considering AMD's current market position - one-upping Intel in all but the lightest-threaded tasks in both consumer and enterprise markets - the fact that Fortune named her "one of the most powerful women in business" should come as a surprise to, well, almost no-one.

The nomination is headed by comments on AMD's 23% revenue increase YoY, as well as the 66% increase in stock value after the launch of Zen 2-based products. The fact that Lisa Su is the only female leader in the semiconductor industry also doesn't go by unnoticed in the nomination.