LIVE · WED, JUL 08, 2026 --:--:-- ET

Issue Nº 78 COST TOTAL $14703.26 ARTICLES TODAY 6 TOKENS TOTAL 9.36B

Running the wire

Chips Rapidus targets 2027 2nm mass production with single-wafer processing; Japan bets national semiconductor revival on one Hokkaido fab Funding EdVisorly closes $13.3M Series A for college transfer AI automation Market Together AI launches Provisioned Throughput: reserved capacity for open models at 90% below Claude Opus list Chips NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra matches closed-model performance at 10x lower cost via LangChain harness tuning Chips Budget smartphone sales collapse 22% as memory costs hit 64% of BOM amid HBM supply crunch Chips DeepSeek developing in-house inference chip to cut Nvidia, Huawei reliance Chips SiPearl Rhea CPU enters bring-up; Europe's first HPC processor on track for end-2026 Market Waymo Begins Driverless Operations in San Diego, Las Vegas, Tampa, Denver Market Oregon utility raises data center rates 29.7% under POWER Act; residential bills cut 1.3% Funding Gradium voice AI startup extends seed to $100M+ with $30M NVIDIA-backed tranche Funding SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation; JPMorganChase deploys SN50 for on-prem AI inference Funding Blue Origin closes first outside funding round at $130B valuation; raises $10B led by Coatue Breaking OpenAI releases GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, Luna publicly after ending government preview limits Market Anthropic revenue hits $30B ARR, overtakes OpenAI at $25B; enterprise focus drives efficiency gap Market SK Hynix launches $28B Nasdaq IPO; HBM supplier pricing Friday as second-largest offering ever Breaking Meta launches Muse Image, native AI image model to reduce third-party dependence Funding SK Hynix launches $28B Nasdaq IPO; second-largest after SpaceX, proceeds to fund South Korea fab expansion Chips South Korea's $880B fab megacluster faces critical power shortage: needs 15–16 GW, has only 1.9 GW local supply Market Samsung chip profit surges but stock tumbles 8% as AI demand concerns override earnings beat Market SpaceX Colossus lands $26B in multi-year GPU contracts from Google, Anthropic; TSMC ships first US-made Blackwell Chips Rapidus targets 2027 2nm mass production with single-wafer processing; Japan bets national semiconductor revival on one Hokkaido fab Funding EdVisorly closes $13.3M Series A for college transfer AI automation Market Together AI launches Provisioned Throughput: reserved capacity for open models at 90% below Claude Opus list Chips NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra matches closed-model performance at 10x lower cost via LangChain harness tuning Chips Budget smartphone sales collapse 22% as memory costs hit 64% of BOM amid HBM supply crunch Chips DeepSeek developing in-house inference chip to cut Nvidia, Huawei reliance Chips SiPearl Rhea CPU enters bring-up; Europe's first HPC processor on track for end-2026 Market Waymo Begins Driverless Operations in San Diego, Las Vegas, Tampa, Denver Market Oregon utility raises data center rates 29.7% under POWER Act; residential bills cut 1.3% Funding Gradium voice AI startup extends seed to $100M+ with $30M NVIDIA-backed tranche Funding SambaNova raises $1B at $11B valuation; JPMorganChase deploys SN50 for on-prem AI inference Funding Blue Origin closes first outside funding round at $130B valuation; raises $10B led by Coatue Breaking OpenAI releases GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, Luna publicly after ending government preview limits Market Anthropic revenue hits $30B ARR, overtakes OpenAI at $25B; enterprise focus drives efficiency gap Market SK Hynix launches $28B Nasdaq IPO; HBM supplier pricing Friday as second-largest offering ever Breaking Meta launches Muse Image, native AI image model to reduce third-party dependence Funding SK Hynix launches $28B Nasdaq IPO; second-largest after SpaceX, proceeds to fund South Korea fab expansion Chips South Korea's $880B fab megacluster faces critical power shortage: needs 15–16 GW, has only 1.9 GW local supply Market Samsung chip profit surges but stock tumbles 8% as AI demand concerns override earnings beat Market SpaceX Colossus lands $26B in multi-year GPU contracts from Google, Anthropic; TSMC ships first US-made Blackwell

Chips Wednesday, July 8, 2026 at 03:04 PM

SiPearl Rhea CPU enters bring-up; Europe's first HPC processor on track for end-2026

SiPearl has received first silicon samples of its Rhea HPC CPU from TSMC and entered the 12-week bring-up process, with the company confirming the first samples work exactly as designed and require no respins. General availability is targeted for end of 2026. The Rhea1 CPU features 80 Arm Neoverse V1 cores with 1 MB L2 per core, 80 MB system-level cache, 61 billion transistors on TSMC's N6 process, and a unique hybrid memory subsystem: four HBM2E interfaces with 64 GB on-package capacity, plus four DDR5 interfaces supporting up to 2 TB of DRAM per socket.

The chip represents Europe's first sovereign HPC CPU and opens the door to addressing geopolitical supply-chain concerns. SiPearl has embedded five development teams across France (Maisons-Laffitte, Massy, Grenoble, Sofia Antipolis) and Spain (Barcelona), with a Bologna team in formation. The company aims to shorten future development cycles to 18 months. After bring-up, test silicon will be available to EU collaborative projects and partners at end of the process before commercial GA.

For architects, SiPearl's success signals a viable third path for HPC workloads beyond US-centric chip designs. The Rhea1 is already drawing interest from sovereign AI programs and European cloud providers seeking alternatives to American hardware amid export-control tensions. While the Neoverse V1 cores arrive late to market, the hybrid memory subsystem and on-premises deployment model position it for differentiated adoption in regulated sectors and European supercomputers. SiPearl expects to tape out Rhea2 (its second-generation processor without on-package HBM) in 2027, making Rhea1 a limited-run beachhead.

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