Intel has officially announced its participation in Elon Musk's "Terafab" project, which aims to reimagine chip manufacturing. Specifically, Intel Foundry plans to join this ambitious initiative, leveraging its significant manufacturing capabilities as one of the strategically important companies in the U.S. However, the specifics of Intel's involvement remain unclear, as it is not yet known how Intel will officially contribute to the Terafab project. The company has stated that since Terafab aims to produce 1 terawatt per year of compute power for AI and robots serving xAI, SpaceX, and Tesla. Intel will assist in designing silicon, manufacturing it, and providing some of the world's most advanced packaging technologies, such as EMIB. It is likely that some of Intel's facilities, which are currently being expanded, will become part of the network needed for the Terafab project, while the Terafab facility itself conducts custom work guided by Intel.

The goal of Terafab is to consolidate the entire chip manufacturing process under one roof. The plant is expected to integrate several stages of semiconductor production at a single site, including logic fabrication, memory, packaging, testing, and mask production. This setup is unusual, as these steps are typically spread across multiple specialized facilities and companies. The original idea behind Terafab is that consolidating these processes could accelerate development by enabling engineers to design, test, and revise chips with fewer delays, essentially allowing for rapid prototyping. This contrasts with the traditional, lengthy process of manufacturing chips at one site, packaging them at another, and testing them in-house. Elon Musk visited Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan over the past weekend securing a deal.

Semiconductor manufacturing is arguably one of the greatest marvels of the modern world, with only a few companies competing for the top spot. Recently, Elon Musk announced an ambitious project called "TERAFAB," which he plans to build on Tesla's campus in eastern Travis County, Austin, Texas. This initiative will be a joint effort involving Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Musk introduced this idea during a livestream on X as a practical solution to the growing gap between his companies' future chip needs and the current pace of global chip production. The project could become one of the most engineering-intensive tasks these companies have ever undertaken, with some estimates placing the capital expenditure at $20 billion.

As Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI require substantial computing power to support their expanding user base, relying solely on external suppliers is insufficient for the scale of growth Musk envisions. Tesla is known for utilizing TSMC, Samsung, and even some of Intel's manufacturing and packaging capabilities to support its chip production. However, with the creation of TERAFAB, these companies aim to gain more control over the entire chip development process. The plant is expected to integrate several stages of semiconductor production at one site, including logic fabrication, memory, packaging, testing, and mask production. This setup is unusual, as these steps are typically spread across multiple specialized facilities. Musk believes that consolidating these processes could accelerate development by enabling engineers to design, test, and revise chips with fewer delays.

Elon Musk's AI startup xAI is raising more money than first planned, bringing in backers including NVIDIA to lift its ongoing funding round to $20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports. The financing includes equity and debt in a special purpose vehicle (SPV) that will buy NVIDIA processors and rent them to xAI for use in its Colossus 2 project, the people said. That's the name of its largest data center site, located in Memphis. NVIDIA is putting in as much as $2 billion in the equity portion of the deal, a strategy by the chipmaker that helps speed up its customers' AI investments. However, NVIDIA representatives declined to comment while an xAI spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg. Musk posted on X in September that the company was "not raising any capital right now."

Musk's xAI financing would split between about $7.5 billion of equity and as much as $12.5 billion of debt in the SPV, the people said. The vehicle will be used to buy NVIDIA processors, and Musk's AI startup would then rent the chips out for five years, letting Wall Street financiers get their money back. The unique deal structure, backed by the GPUs rather than the company, could give tech firms a way to cut debt exposure. Earlier this week, OpenAI announced a deal to use AMD chips over multiple years, in addition to the announcement from late September that it will install at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for its next-generation AI infrastructure. Meta has signed several multibillion-dollar deals in recent months, including a $29 billion financing package for data centers while Oracle also raised a $38 billion debt package for its infrastructure.

First, it was the CPU; after came the GPU; then all parallel workloads started running on GPUs, integrated or hyperscale. Similarly, the large language models we use today have adapted to the parallel nature of data processing on the GPU. The scale at which AI workloads operate is much larger than most of us can comprehend, and today we are exploring the new computing unit that was established as a byproduct of the need for much faster systems: the AI token factory. The AI token factory is a system or a combination of systems that work in tandem for a single purpose—the maximum throughput of AI tokens per second.

When large-scale AI systems are designed for training runs and later inference, the amount of compute resources is extensive. For example, xAI's Colossus 1 system has 100,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, while the next-generation Colossus 2 will utilize over 550,000 NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 GPUs. This is an insane amount of compute all for a single purpose: training and inferencing next-generation AI models. The "currency" of these AI models is tokens, and pumping out as many tokens as possible is what gives these data centers their core specifications. This includes the final token/s throughput that they are able to achieve on any hardware. First, it was inferencing on CPUs, then GPUs, then entire systems like NVIDIA NVL72, and now the latest unit of computing is an entire AI token factory. The AI token factory is the final form of AI systems, designed from the ground up for maximum efficiency in token creation, with a primary focus on throughput.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced financial results for the second quarter of 2025. Second quarter revenue was a record $7.7 billion, gross margin was 40%, operating loss was $134 million, net income was $872 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.54. On a non-GAAP(*) basis, gross margin was 43%, operating income was $897 million, net income was $781 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.48. As previously announced, our second quarter results were impacted by the U.S. Government's export control on our AMD Instinct MI308 data center GPU products. For the quarter, these restrictions led to approximately $800 million in inventory and related charges. Excluding these charges, non-GAAP gross margin would have been approximately 54%.

"We delivered strong revenue growth in the second quarter led by record server and PC processor sales," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD Chair and CEO. "We are seeing robust demand across our computing and AI product portfolio and are well positioned to deliver significant growth in the second half of the year, driven by the ramp of our AMD Instinct MI350 series accelerators and ongoing EPYC and Ryzen processor share gains."

NVIDIA today announced that xAI's Colossus supercomputer cluster comprising 100,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs in Memphis, Tennessee, achieved this massive scale by using the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform, which is designed to deliver superior performance to multi-tenant, hyperscale AI factories using standards-based Ethernet, for its Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network.

Colossus, the world's largest AI supercomputer, is being used to train xAI's Grok family of large language models, with chatbots offered as a feature for X Premium subscribers. xAI is in the process of doubling the size of Colossus to a combined total of 200,000 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs.

Elon Musk's AI company xAI just scored big (according to Reuters), raising a massive $6 billion in new funding. This sky-high investment values xAI at a whopping $24 billion as investors go all-in on challengers to top AI players like OpenAI. Big-name funders like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia backed the funding round, according to xAI's blog post on Sunday. Before this, xAI was valued at $18 billion, Musk said on social app X.

The huge cash influx will help xAI launch its first products, build advanced tech, and turbocharge their research, the company stated. "More news coming soon," Musk teased cryptically after the funding announcement. It's an AI investment frenzy as tech giants like Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet pour fortunes into leading the red-hot generative AI race. With its new war chest, xAI is gearing up to make some serious waves.