Daily: UAE in DC; Inside Lip-bu Tan's mind; SoftBank and OpenAI build data centre in Japan
5 min read.
Highlights
UAE in DC on chip controls. UAE’s national security advisor and member of the ruling royal family, will visit Washington D.C.. He will request a relaxation of chip export controls, which restrict the UAE’s access high-end AI chips.
Inside CEO Lip-bu Tan’s mind. There are lots of pieces on Intel’s new CEO, but I inserted one by the WSJ “inside the mind of Intel’s new CEO.” Lip-bu Tan is likely to reset the company culture, “cutting expenses, moving quickly and trying to turn Intel back into an engineering-first company.”
The article also notes that Tan has a long history as a venture capitalist who has invested in Asia, including many Chinese tech startups.
SoftBank and OpenAI data centre in Japan. SoftBank and OpenAI will build a data centre in Japan, which will be one of the country’s largest. They will purchase and build an old TV factory from Sharp in Osaka for ~US$700 million.
Thanks for reading.
1. Policy and Geopolitics
1.1
Bloomberg (03/14): UAE Official to Press US on Ability to Buy More Nvidia AI Chips
A top UAE official plans to visit Washington to press for easier access to American technology and discuss investment in the US, according to people familiar with the matter, seeking to sway the Trump administration on export controls governing the advanced semiconductors needed to power artificial intelligence.
Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who’s the UAE’s national security adviser and brother of the country’s president.
Top of mind for the United Arab Emirates is its ability to buy cutting-edge chips from the likes of Nvidia Corp. But the US has limited exports of advanced chips to the UAE since 2023 and a fresh set of regulations is slated to cap the total computing power for most countries. Trump’s team is currently reviewing whether to proceed with the Biden-era rules as envisioned — or adjust them.
1.2
TechCrunch (03/13): Singapore grants bail for Nvidia chip smugglers in alleged $390M fraud
A judge in Singapore granted bail to three men suspected of deceiving suppliers of server computers that may contain Nvidia chips affected by U.S. export rules that bar the sale of them to certain countries, as a route to halting them being sold to organizations in China.
The move comes nearly two weeks after the three men in the city-state were charged with smuggling Nvidia chips and committing fraud against Dell and Super Micro by falsely stating where the servers would be located.
Singapore prosecutors said the fraud case involved servers provided by Singaporean companies and then moved to Malaysia, with transactions totaling about $390 million, per a report by Reuters. It is unclear what the final destination would be for those servers.
2. Economy, Finance, and Business
2.1
WSJ (03/14): Inside the Mind of Intel’s New CEO: ‘Disrupt and Leapfrog’
How Tan, age 65, will use his assets to resurrect Intel is on the minds of all industry watchers. Intel has gone from being one of Silicon Valley’s biggest innovators to a relic struggling to compete with superstar Nvidia and others in the age of artificial intelligence. Its stock has lost two-thirds of its value in four short years as Intel sat out the AI boom.
Resetting Intel’s culture
Tan has likely no more than a year to turn the company around, said people close to the company. His decades of investing in startups and running companies—he founded a multinational venture firm and was CEO of chip design company Cadence Design Systems for 13 years—provide indications of how Tan will tackle this task in the early days: by cutting expenses, moving quickly and trying to turn Intel back into an engineering-first company.
The China connection
Before he rose in the semiconductor industry, Tan was known as one of the first Silicon Valley venture capitalists to invest in Asia. Tan is founder and chairman of Walden International, a prolific investor in Chinese technology startups.
2.2
TrendForce (03/14): China’s YMTC Reportedly Joins NAND Price Hike, Set to Increase Over 10% in April
NAND prices are clearly on the rise, with U.S. and South Korean memory giants set to increase prices in April. Now, China’s largest NAND manufacturer YMTC may follow suit. According to Chinese media outlet MyDrivers, the company plans to raise NAND prices next month.
The report indicates that YMTC’s retail brand, Zhitai, plans to raise its channel procurement price in April. While the exact increase is unknown, it could exceed 10%, the report adds.
2.3
TrendForce (03/14): Tencent Reportedly Makes Massive NVIDIA H20 Chip Purchase for WeChat’s DeepSeek Integration
Chinese tech giant Tencent has reportedly purchased a batch of new chips from NVIDIA. The report indicates that Tencent’s large-scale procurement of H20 chips is primarily to support the integration of DeepSeek into WeChat.
NVIDIA’s H20 AI chip was specifically developed for the Chinese market to comply with U.S. export restrictions. Sources indicate that Tencent’s order is worth billions of RMB. To meet Tencent’s demand, NVIDIA’s H20 chips have reportedly faced a short-term supply shortage, as the report notes.
3. Technology
3.1
Bloomberg (03/14): AI Companies Embrace Efficient Models That Run on Fewer Chips
Nearly two months after the viral success of China’s DeepSeek prompted a reckoning over how much tech companies spend to develop artificial intelligence systems, some leading AI firms are embracing a less-is-more approach.
On Thursday, Toronto-based Cohere Inc. is set to announce a new model called Command A that can carry out complicated business tasks while running on just two of Nvidia Corp.’s AI-focused A100 or H100 chips. That’s significantly less than the number of chips required for some large models — and also less than what DeepSeek’s system is thought to need.
A day earlier, Alphabet Inc.’s Google unveiled a new series of its Gemma AI models that it said can run on a single Nvidia H100 chip. Both companies said their models rivaled or outperformed DeepSeek’s most recent AI system on certain tasks.
3.2
Reuters (03/14): SoftBank, OpenAI to build AI data centre in Japan, Nikkei reports
SoftBank plans to transform a former Sharp LCD panel plant in Japan into a data centre for operating artificial intelligence agents developed in collaboration with U.S.-based ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, according to a Nikkei report on Friday.
The Japanese telecom giant intends to purchase the facility and part of the land at Sharp’s closed TV LCD factory in Osaka for about 100 billion yen ($677.05 million).
The centre is expected to start operations in 2026 and will be one of the largest in Japan, boasting a power capacity of 150 megawatts.
3.3
TrendForce (03/14): Samsung Reportedly Teams Up with Apple for Next-Gen LPW DRAM, Eyes 2028 Mass Production
As Samsung advances HBM3E validation with key clients like NVIDIA, it is also targeting the next-gen mobile DRAM market. According to The Bell, the company is developing Low Power Wide I/O (LPW) DRAM with multiple partners, including Apple, to meet the growing demand for on-device AI.
The Bell indicates that Samsung expects LPW DRAM mass production to begin in 2028. Besides Apple, the memory giant is also working with other SoC customers on LPW DRAM development, with its own Mobile eXperience (MX) division among the partners, as noted in the report.
-