AI hardware news: chips, optics and the compute supply chain
Track AI chips, memory, lithography, semiconductor equipment, optics, advanced packaging, PCBs, servers, power, cooling and edge devices. Explore specifications, supply and demand, with original sources and publication times.
AMD announced an expanded long-term strategic partnership with Microsoft, which will deploy the AMD Helios Rackscale Solution at scale on Azure for frontier model inference, its own AI customers, and Azure AI services.
Why it matters: The official announcement specifies the concrete vehicle and product composition of the partnership, helping readers understand how the two companies divide roles in AI infrastructure and the pace of deployment.
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TrendForce analysis indicates that large-scale AI data center (AIDC) deployments in 2026 are pushing energy storage from an optional add-on to critical infrastructure. North America urgently needs storage to secure 24/7 power given gas generation's 40-50% share and tight supply of large gas turbines; China has made compute-power coordination part of new infrastructure, making 4-8 hour long-duration storage standard for compute hubs. AIDC storage is deployed on both the data center side and the power generation side, and NVIDIA's 800V DC architecture white paper proposes facility-level and rack-level two-tier storage schemes.
At the 2026 VLSI Symposium, Intel Foundry announced that Intel 18A-P has entered risk production, delivering 9% higher performance at the same power or 18% lower power at the same performance compared with Intel 18A, and is fully design-rule compatible with Intel 18A to reuse existing IP.
On June 9, 2026, Arista Networks launched the 7060XE7 series of 1.6T network platforms, positioned as a rack-scale AI infrastructure foundation. Built on 224G SerDes, the platforms deliver 100 Tbps of bandwidth, and LPO optical modules can cut interconnect power consumption by about 60%.
Intel announced a series of AI innovations at Computex 2026, spanning from chips to system-level solutions. Intel is working with SambaNova and Foxconn to build rack-scale AI inference infrastructure based on Xeon processors and the SambaNova SN-50 RDU.
Arista announced the launch of XPO high density liquid cooled pluggable optics. The original page body failed to load, so details such as specifications and availability cannot yet be verified.