When Intel announced the completion of its $7.86 billion CHIPS Act grant from the Biden-Harris administration on Tuesday, we assumed some special terms were tied to the grant. Intel is essentially making a law-abiding promise to the US government that it will not sell its stake in the Intel Foundry unit under any circumstances, even if it manages to become an independent entity. This ensures that Intel is the major voting party in any event. Intel disclosed in a regulatory document that if Intel Foundry becomes its own private entity, Intel must maintain majority control with at least 50.1% ownership to keep its subsidy agreements. Additionally, if Intel Foundry goes public in the future, no single investor would be allowed to acquire more than 35% of shares unless Intel remains the largest shareholder, as this would trigger control-change clauses.

This essentially positions Intel Foundry as too big and too important of a unit to fail, both for Intel and the US government. Given Intel's ties with the US Department of Defense, with up to $3 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act for the Secure Enclave program, Intel is vital for providing the US government with advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Strategically, Intel Foundry is the sole US-based company that competes with advanced manufacturing companies such as TSMC and Samsung. Even with TSMC and Samsung driving investments on US soil with advanced fabs, Intel's work with the government requires additional safety and secrecy clearances that only a US firm could provide. In the latest Q3 2024 financial results, Intel Foundry recorded a revenue of $4.4 billion with $5.8 billion in losses. While the operating marking of negative 134.3% seems like a disaster, upcoming quarters will bring it to a positive with more customers and using already developed nodes like 18A.

Anthropic and Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE: PLTR) today announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to the Claude 3 and 3.5 family of models on AWS. This partnership allows for an integrated suite of technology to operationalize the use of Claude within Palantir's AI Platform (AIP) while leveraging the security, agility, flexibility, and sustainability benefits provided by AWS.

The partnership facilitates the responsible application of AI, enabling the use of Claude within Palantir's products to support government operations such as processing vast amounts of complex data rapidly, elevating data driven insights, identifying patterns and trends more effectively, streamlining document review and preparation, and helping U.S. officials to make more informed decisions in time-sensitive situations while preserving their decision-making authorities. Claude became accessible within Palantir AIP on AWS earlier this month.

The Biden-Harris Administration announced today that Intel Corporation has been awarded up to $3 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act for the Secure Enclave program. The program is designed to expand the trusted manufacturing of leading-edge semiconductors for the U.S. government.

The Secure Enclave program builds on previous projects between Intel and the Department of Defense (DoD) such as Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes - Commercial (RAMP-C) and State-of-the-Art Heterogeneous Integration Prototype (SHIP). As the only American company that both designs and manufactures leading-edge logic chips, Intel will help secure the domestic chip supply chain and collaborate with the DoD to help enhance the resilience of U.S. technological systems by advancing secure, cutting-edge solutions.

Gears of Prosperity, the new free content update for The Settlers: New Allies, is out now. The update adds new buildings, gameplay features, and balancing updates to the real-time settlement building strategy game. True to its almost 30 years legacy, the latest entry in the series combines in-depth build-up experience with real-time strategic battles. Choose among 3 unique factions and explore this whole-new world powered by state-of-the-art graphics. Your settlement has never looked so lively.

The Settlers: New Allies is available now on Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Amazon Luna, and PC through Ubisoft Connect. A Ubisoft+ Premium subscription includes access to the Deluxe Edition, which includes the Deluxe and Explorer packs as well as the main game. Read on for a full list of all the new features

Rumors from last week pointed to a possible $3.5 billion government defense-related investment—Intel was linked to this very lucrative semiconductor supply contract. Insiders posited that the US Department of Commerce was readying a rough $1 billion investment, while the Pentagon prepared around $2.5 billion. The latter has scrapped those plans, according to anonymous sources—Bloomberg believes that this: "move threatens to limit the total amount that Intel has been expecting to get in federal funding, setting up a contentious situation." The publication's moles have requested complete anonymity, due to the secretive nature of policy negotiations.

The US Department of Commerce deliberates over the nation's CHIPS Act—this fund could be utilized to "make up for the shortfall," following the Pentagon's reported last minute course change. The Department of Commerce could be forced to foot the entire bill—of $3.5 billion—if Intel's services are secured. Negotiations over a so-called "Secure Enclave" project have been ongoing since last year, according to insiders. It is possible that the "fast-moving" military spending bill set off alarms at the Pentagon—the Department of Defense's reasonings were not revealed by Bloomberg's investigation. Several media outlets have requested official comments from the two arms of government. Yesterday, Intel shares fell by 3%—as reported Investopedia—with the market reacting to rumors of cancelled plans.

As we enter the end of the month of February and transition into March, we have a somewhat slower week, with a pair of remakes of a couple of classics being the headline titles and both are released on the same day. The rest of the games this coming week consists of a rather bizarre mix between a beat 'em up and tower defence game, a bunch of Greek things, a slightly different take on the zombie game genre and finally a rather good side scroller on an alien planet. In other words, no big releases, but hopefully something interesting nonetheless.

STAR WARS: Dark Forces Remaster / This week's first remake / Wednesday 28 February
The evil Empire is currently creating a doomsday army behind a veil of secrecy. However, they are no match for the Rebel Alliance's covert operations division. Your mission is to infiltrate the Empire and put an end to their plans for terror and domination.

EdgeCortix, the Japan-based fabless semiconductor company focused on energy-efficient AI processing, announced today that the Acquisitions, Technology and Logistics Agency (ATLA), Japan Ministry of Defense, will include the groundbreaking edge AI startup alongside an elite group of leading Japanese companies to represent Japan's air and defense innovation landscape at ATLA's booth at the Singapore Airshow to be held February 20 - 25. The Singapore Airshow is one of the largest and most influential shows of its kind in the world, and the largest in Asia, seeing as many as 50,000 attendees per biennial show. Over 1,000 companies from 50 countries are expected to participate in the 2024 show.

EdgeCortix's flagship product, the SAKURA-I chip, will be featured among a small handful of influential Japanese innovations at the booth. SAKURA-I is a dedicated co-processor that delivers high compute efficiency and low latency for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads that are carried out "at the edge", where the data is collected and mission critical decisions need to be made - far away from a datacenter. SAKURA-I delivers orders of magnitude better energy efficiency and processing speed than conventional semiconductors (ex: GPUs & CPUs), while drastically reducing operating costs for end users.

In a major stride toward building a shared national research infrastructure, the U.S. National Science Foundation has launched the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource pilot program with significant support from NVIDIA. The initiative aims to broaden access to the tools needed to power responsible AI discovery and innovation. It was announced Wednesday in partnership with 10 other federal agencies as well as private-sector, nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. "The breadth of partners that have come together for this pilot underscores the urgency of developing a National AI Research Resource for the future of AI in America," said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. "By investing in AI research through the NAIRR pilot, the United States unleashes discovery and impact and bolsters its global competitiveness."

NVIDIA's commitment of $30 million in technology contributions over two years is a key factor in enlarging the scale of the pilot, fueling the potential for broader achievements and accelerating the momentum toward full-scale implementation. "The NAIRR is a vision of a national research infrastructure that will provide access to computing, data, models and software to empower researchers and communities," said Katie Antypas, director of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at the NSF. "Our primary goals for the NAIRR pilot are to support fundamental AI research and domain-specific research applying AI, reach broader communities, particularly those currently unable to participate in the AI innovation ecosystem, and refine the design for the future full NAIRR," Antypas added.

IBM today announced that it has received an additional Trusted Supplier accreditation from the Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA) for delivery of embedded security services customized for a U.S.-based advanced microelectronics manufacturer. IBM Consulting's accredited security services were previously recognized with the prestigious James S. Cogswell Outstanding Industrial Security Achievement Award for overall security program excellence in 2022.

Microelectronics are used in most defense technology platforms—from mobile devices to computers and advanced weapons systems. This makes microelectronics supply chains critical to our national security and economic prosperity. However, they also represent one of the most complex defense-critical supply chains to secure because of their global reach and manufacturing. IBM Consulting's award-winning accredited security services takes this complexity into account, allowing for not only the identification, but also the remediation of microelectronics supply chain vulnerabilities.

Intel Foundry Services is onboarding two new defense industrial base (DIB) customers, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, as part of phase two of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)'s Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes - Commercial (RAMP-C) program. In phase two of the RAMP-C program, customers will use Intel 18A process technology and industry-standard electrical design and analysis tools and intellectual property (IP) to develop, tape-out and fabricate test chips in preparation for product design tape-outs.

"We are pleased to welcome Boeing and Northrop Grumman to the RAMP-C program. Boeing and Northrop Grumman will use their industry expertise to develop and support leading-edge semiconductor solutions using Intel 18A process technology for the success of vital DoD and national security systems. Together, we will continue to bolster the domestic semiconductor supply chain and ensure that the United States maintains leadership in process technology R&D, advanced manufacturing and microelectronics systems," said Kapil Wadhera, vice president of Intel Foundry Services and general manager of Foundry Solutions Business Group.

Increasing its HPL score from 1.02 Eflop/s in November 2022 to an impressive 1.194 Eflop/s on this list, Frontier was able to improve upon its score after a stagnation between June 2022 and November 2022. Considering exascale was only a goal to aspire to just a few years ago, a roughly 17% increase here is an enormous success. Additionally, Frontier earned a score of 9.95 Eflop/s on the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. This is also an increase over the 7.94 EFlop/s that the system achieved on the previous list and nearly 10 times more powerful than the machine's HPL score. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processors. It also has 8,699,904 cores and an incredible energy efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

On Monday 27 March U.S. President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act in order to form a budget of $50 million, to be spent on domestic and Canadian production of printed circuit boards (aka PCBs). This move was deemed as important to matters of national defense, and technology has been cited as key part of North American security efforts. In a memo issued that day, Biden stated that without presidential action under the act: "United States industry cannot reasonably be expected to provide the capability for the needed industrial resource, material, or critical technology item in a timely manner."

PCBs form the basis of vital components that are integrated into military-purpose missiles and radars, in addition to electronics utilized for energy distribution and the nation's healthcare. The President continues to outline the importance of the Defense Production Act: "I find that action to expand the domestic production capability for printed circuit boards and advanced packaging is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability."