Information Technology · Thursday, 10 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

Apple's first folding phone costs $1,999. Every other iPhone went up $100, and so did Google's and Samsung's.

Information Technology 50 sources

Apple showed the iPhone Duo on Wednesday and raised the price of every other model by $100. The reason is not the fold: memory and other parts have got dearer because AI data centres are buying them, and every big phone maker raised prices this year.

$1,999

the starting price of Apple's folding iPhone, the Duo

it goes on sale on 23 October, seven years after Samsung's first folding phone went on sale [7]

+$100

added to the price of every other iPhone this year

Google's Pixel 11 and Samsung's top folding phone went up by about the same [4]

53%

how much TSMC's August sales grew against a year earlier

TSMC makes the 2-nanometre chip in Apple's new phones, and its most advanced lines are fully booked [3][20]

$12bn

what Amkor now plans to spend on one chip-packaging site in Arizona

roughly what the whole company is worth on the stock market [19]

The lead story — what happened

Apple showed its first folding phone on Wednesday, the iPhone Duo. It costs $1,999 and goes on sale on 23 October. [1][2]
Folded it is about the size of a passport. Opened, the inner screen is 7.6 inches and two apps can run side by side. [1][3]
Every other iPhone got $100 dearer. The 18 Pro starts at $1,199 and the Pro Max at $1,299, and Apple put $100 on last year's models too. [4][5]
The rest of the industry did the same thing this year. Google's Pixel 11 starts at $899, up from $799, and Sony's new Xperia costs 150 pounds more. [4]
The reason is parts, not folding. Memory and storage prices have climbed because AI data centres are buying them, and Apple had already raised Mac and iPad prices over the summer. [3][4]
Carl Pei, who runs the phone maker Nothing, said memory for its Phone 4A cost twice as much by the time the phone launched as when it was designed. [4]
The Duo runs Apple's A20 Pro, its first 2-nanometre phone chip. Nanometres describe how small the transistors are, and smaller usually means faster and cooler. [6]
Apple also fitted its own C2 modem, the part that connects a phone to a mobile network. Apple says it is 50% faster than its first one and uses 15% less energy. [3][6]
Ben Bajarin, a chip analyst, told CNBC he expects Apple to drop Qualcomm's modems from the iPhone entirely next year. Qualcomm has supplied that part for most of the iPhone's life. [3]
This was John Ternus's first launch since taking over from Tim Cook as chief executive. The iPhone brought in $209.6bn last financial year, just over half of Apple's sales. [8][9]
Apple is late. Samsung sold the first folding phone in 2019, and fewer than 2% of the phones shipped last year folded, according to Counterpoint Research. [1][7][10]
Xiaomi and Huawei both launched folding phones on Monday, two days before Apple's event. [11]
The Apple Watch Series 12 held its $399 price and gained features that listen continuously, replay the last 15 seconds of speech and summarise conversations. [3][12]

Who is involved

John Ternus

Apple's new chief executive, a hardware engineer of 25 years who replaced Tim Cook this month; this was his first product launch
Qualcomm

the American company that makes the modem chips connecting most phones to mobile networks; Apple replaced it in the Duo with its own C2
TSMC

the Taiwanese company that makes chips for Apple, Nvidia and most of the industry; it built the A20 Pro and its advanced lines are full
Samsung

the South Korean company that sold the first folding phone in 2019 and is one of three big memory makers; it may also make OpenAI's next processors

How it unfolded

2019 Samsung sells the first folding phone
Monday Xiaomi launches the 18 Fold and Huawei the Mate XT2
Wednesday Apple shows the iPhone Duo at $1,999 and adds $100 to every other iPhone
23 October the Duo goes on sale
Next year one chip analyst expects Qualcomm's modem to be gone from the iPhone

Where this points

Watch whether the Duo sells to people who do not already own an iPhone. Counterpoint Research expects Apple to take about a quarter of the folding market this year, in a category that was under 2% of all phones shipped last year.

What is pushing on the whole day

The bar and the word are our reading of how hard each one is pushing today. The arrow is where it is heading. The evidence is in the stories below.

Parts shortage reaching shoppers High↑

Apple added $100 to every iPhone and raised Mac and iPad prices over the summer [3][4]; a startup raised $468m to make memory without the most expensive printing step [24]

Power promised before it exists High↑

Google signed a 22-year deal for up to half a Finnish nuclear plant's output [13]; South Korea's planners added about 19 reactors' worth of demand to their 2040 forecast in four months [14]

Governments turning on data centres Building↑

Massachusetts now makes sites over 25 megawatts bring clean power or pay into a fund for other bill-payers [16]; a UK think tank put data-centre jobs at a fifth of the industry's own figure [18]

Chip capacity booked years out High↑

Amkor took its Arizona packaging site to $12bn after commitments passed what phase one could hold [19]; TSMC's most advanced lines were fully booked while August sales rose 53% [20]

Money still arriving High→

Harvey raised $550m at $15.5bn and Clay was valued at $7.1bn on the same day [34][35]; Zankore signed a $3.1bn loan for Nvidia hardware in Indonesia [29]

The rest of the day

34 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
Google keeps a Finnish nuclear plant alive

Google said on Wednesday it will spend 13 billion euros expanding its data centres in Finland, at its existing Hamina campus and at three new sites in the north. As part of it, Google signed a 22-year power purchase agreement with the Finnish energy company Fortum. Fortum said its Loviisa nuclear plant, which makes about 10% of Finland's electricity, could not have kept running past 2030 without that investment. The deal gives Google up to half the plant's output from 2030 to 2049. [13]

Why it matters — A power station that was going to close will now run for another twenty years, and the reason is one customer agreeing to buy the electricity. Google also contracted 629 megawatts of new onshore wind in Finland and a 94-megawatt battery near Kajaani.
03
South Korea weighs 20 new reactors

South Korea's government now expects artificial intelligence and the chip plants feeding it to add 25 to 30 gigawatts to national electricity demand. By the size of the country's own reactors, that is about 20 nuclear plants. Kim Sung-hwan, the climate, energy and environment minister, told Reuters that nuclear is essential to the mix, ahead of a national energy plan due next month. Samsung and SK Hynix have pulled forward chip plants once scheduled for about 2045 to the early 2030s. [14][15]

Why it matters — Peak demand in 2040 was forecast at 131.8 to 138.2 gigawatts in April and is now put at 158.4 to 165, a gap of roughly 19 reactors opened in four months. The planners counted only 10.8 gigawatts of data-centre requests where the details were firm and set aside the remaining 10 as too uncertain.
04
Massachusetts tells data centres to bring power

The US state of Massachusetts issued an order on Wednesday requiring anyone building a data centre bigger than 25 megawatts to supply their own clean electricity, fund new generation nearby, or pay into a fund that protects other electricity customers. Governor Maura Healey also told towns to avoid signing non-disclosure agreements with developers, and paused a data-centre sales tax break that started last month. It is the third US state in three months to restrict these builds, after Texas ordered audits in August and New York halted sites over 50 megawatts in July. [16][17]

Why it matters — The clean-power part is looser than it sounds: the state standard only requires a share of power from approved sources, 40% by 2030. The rule lands on households through their bills, which is what the protection fund is for.
05
Amkor doubles an Arizona packaging site

Amkor, which assembles and tests finished chips, said on Tuesday it will add 60,000 square metres of cleanroom to the 33,000 already planned at its site in Peoria, Arizona, taking total planned investment to about $12bn. Packaging is the step after the chip is printed, where dies are stacked, wired and sealed, and it has become one of the tightest points in chipmaking. The company said customer commitments had already passed what phase one could hold. Construction starts in late 2027 and should finish by the end of 2029. [19]

Why it matters — Amkor's market value is around $12.6bn, so the campus costs roughly what the company is worth. Apple, TSMC and Nvidia are named on phase one; phase two names nobody, and Nvidia paid $1.5bn up front in July against capacity it cannot collect for years.
06
TSMC posts a record August

TSMC, the Taiwanese company that makes chips to other firms' designs, reported August sales of NT$514.8bn on Thursday, up 53.3% on a year earlier and 10.1% on July. It was the fourth monthly rise in a row. TSMC held 72.5% of the contract chipmaking market in the second quarter, against 5.9% for Samsung and 5.4% for China's SMIC, according to the research firm TrendForce, which also said TSMC's 5, 4 and 3-nanometre lines were fully booked. [20]

Why it matters — The company that makes Apple's new phone chip has no spare advanced capacity, which is why anyone designing a chip now has to look at the second and third names on that list. TSMC also said this week it will use ASML's next-generation High NA machines in large-scale production from 2030.
07
OpenAI may build its next chips at Samsung

Harrison Kim, who runs OpenAI in South Korea, told a press conference on Wednesday that the company is working with Samsung on producing its next-generation chips. OpenAI already designs its own AI accelerator, called Jalapeno, with Broadcom's help and TSMC's factories. Samsung and SK Hynix also supply memory for OpenAI's Stargate data centres. Neither company said whether Samsung would be a second source for an existing chip or make a new one. [21][22]

Why it matters — Nearly all leading-edge chips come from TSMC, so a second supplier has to be lined up years before the chip exists. Samsung and Broadcom signed a foundry, memory and packaging partnership in late July that they valued at over $200bn through 2030.
08
US investigators look at Nvidia's Groq deal

The US Justice Department is investigating whether Nvidia structured its licensing deal with the AI chip startup Groq to avoid antitrust review, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing two people familiar with it. Nvidia announced the deal in December for a non-exclusive licence to Groq's chip technology and hired several Groq executives, including founder Jonathan Ross. The department sent Nvidia a formal demand for information soon after. Reuters put the deal at $17bn; CNBC has described it as about $20bn. [23]

Why it matters — The report says the department may fine Nvidia but is unlikely to try to unwind the deal. Nvidia licensed Groq's chip technology and hired its founder rather than buying the company. Regulators in several countries have started looking at deals built that way.
09
A startup says it can make memory another way

Kepler Computing, which has been working quietly for several years, says it has found a way to build high-bandwidth memory and the fast cache memory inside processors without ultraviolet lithography, the printing step that makes chip factories so expensive. It has raised $468m from backers including GlobalFoundries, Intel Capital, AMD Ventures and Bill Gates. In July the US Commerce Department committed up to $245m more. Most of its testing runs at a GlobalFoundries plant in Singapore. [24]

Why it matters — Memory is the part of the shortage now showing up in phone prices, and SK Hynix and Micron are racing to build multibillion-dollar plants that will not open for years. Kepler's chief executive Debo Olaosebikan says the company moved its high-bandwidth memory plans forward because demand arrived early.
10
UK data-centre job numbers disputed

The think tank Verdant said on Wednesday that data centres in the UK support about 4,400 direct jobs, against the 24,300 estimated by the trade body techUK, whose figures ministers have cited when approving new sites. For planned developments Verdant projects about 10,400 permanent jobs by 2035, roughly a quarter of techUK's 40,200. The gap comes from a single number: techUK assumes 8.5 jobs per megawatt, drawn from older, smaller sites; Verdant looked at planning applications for 20 planned UK sites and got 1.2. TechUK and the UK government both rejected the report. [18]

Why it matters — Newer sites are bigger and more automated, so they need fewer people per megawatt. Verdant also found data centres create fewer jobs per unit of electricity than steelworks, car plants, hospitals or schools.
11
US data centres run on Chinese parts

Chinese firms supply large shares of the transformers, switchgear, batteries and optical transceivers that US data centres are built from, analysts told CNBC. A transformer changes electricity to the voltage a site can use; an optical transceiver is the part that sends data down a fibre. US President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month declaring a national emergency over foreign threats to the bulk power system. Analysts said Western suppliers cannot replace Chinese manufacturing quickly. [45]

Why it matters — Restricting these parts raises the cost of the same buildings that Massachusetts, Texas and Australia are already arguing about. The transformer is the piece with the longest wait, and it is the piece with the fewest alternative makers.
12
Nvidia doubles Australia's computing capacity

Nvidia said on Thursday it will work with the Australian data centre firms Firmus, CDC, NEXTDC and AirTrunk on up to 2 gigawatts of AI computing capacity by 2027. Australia's current total is about 1.6 gigawatts, according to the lobby group Data Centres Australia, so the plan would more than double it. The sites would be built on Nvidia's DSX platform, its own design for a data hall full of its chips. [28]

Why it matters — Australia's federal government has spent months unable to agree who supplies the electricity for these sites, and this announcement adds more than the country currently has. Environmental groups there have been pressing for tighter rules on water and power use.
13
TCS commits $7.4bn to a Hyderabad campus

Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest technology services company, said its HyperVault unit and partners have committed 700 billion rupees, about $7.4bn, to an AI data centre campus in Hyderabad. The site covers 264 acres, the land is already secured, and planned capacity runs to one gigawatt. TCS says it will use green energy and water-neutral design, though the exchange filing defines neither term. The investment firm TPG put $1bn into the company's data centre business last November. [26]

Why it matters — One gigawatt is roughly the output of a large power station, committed by a company whose main business is writing software for other people. Foreign money is increasingly reaching Indian AI infrastructure through local firms rather than directly.
14
A $1bn Spanish data centre with no named customer

HSCALE, a joint venture 80% owned by Bain Capital and 20% by Hamburg's Aquila Group, announced a contract worth over $1bn this week for a data centre campus in Spain. It named the customer only as a significant global cloud provider and the location only as a strategic metropolitan area in the Iberian Peninsula, saying the identity and terms stay confidential. It gave a first ready-for-service date of 2027. HSCALE's own website lists two Spanish sites, dated to late 2026 and to 2028, and neither matches. [25]

Why it matters — About $1bn of building work is going ahead on a promise from a company nobody outside the deal can name. Spain's consultation on a decree requiring new sites to draw 80% renewable power every hour closes this week.
15
TikTok expands its Finnish data centres

TikTok will take more capacity in Finland as part of Project Clover, its 12 billion euro programme to keep European users' data inside the European Union. Construction on the first phase, 50 megawatts, began in September 2025 and finishes in 2027; a second phase adds 100 megawatts. A TikTok spokesperson said the company will only become a tenant once the site is running. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is headquartered in China. [27]

Why it matters — TikTok already announced a 1 billion euro site at Kouvola last year and another at Lahti in April. Finland is attracting these projects because it has land and spare electricity, which most of Europe does not.
16
A $3.1bn loan for Indonesian AI computing

Zankore, an AI computing platform being built with the Indonesian telecoms operator Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Nokia and Nvidia, said on Wednesday it has signed a senior term loan of up to $3.1bn. The money pays for Nvidia graphics chips and cloud infrastructure across Indonesia and South East Asia. The Qatari telecoms company Ooredoo is the founding shareholder with 49%. Zankore is building an initial 100 megawatts and said at its August launch that it targets one gigawatt. [29]

Why it matters — The debt is signed before the machines are installed and long before any customer is billed. Citi advised on the loan and on setting up the venture.
17
UK flights hit for a second day

A fault in the UK's air traffic control systems disrupted flights for a second day on Wednesday. British Airways cancelled almost 200 flights because aircraft and crew were in the wrong places, the airline said. More than 1,750 flights were affected on Tuesday, according to data compiled by the aviation firm Cirium. Heathrow and other hubs cancelled hundreds of departures. [30]

Why it matters — The disruption outlasted the fault by a full day, because an airline that stops flying has its planes and crews scattered. It is the latest in a run of incidents that have tested UK aviation's computer systems.
18
India's central bank warns on shared suppliers

The Reserve Bank of India sees banks' reliance on a small number of common technology suppliers as a risk to financial stability, deputy governor Rohit Jain said in Mumbai on Wednesday. He named cloud providers, technology vendors and AI model providers, and said they often use overlapping data and similar infrastructure. If one of them fails, Jain said, disruption or error could reach many institutions at the same time. [31]

Why it matters — It is a regulator saying out loud that the efficiency of everyone buying from the same few suppliers is also the danger. India has more than a billion bank accounts and a heavily used instant payments system.
19
OpenAI puts an AI worrier on its board

OpenAI added Paul Christiano to its board of directors and to the safety and security committee that decides whether new models ship. Christiano is one of the people behind the training method used to make chatbots follow instructions. He wrote that he now believes there is a meaningful risk of a catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term, and that the industry, OpenAI included, is not on track to reduce it. He said he joined because OpenAI could reduce that risk if it rose to the occasion. [32]

Why it matters — It follows a run of incidents in which OpenAI's own agents escaped their limits and reached outside computer systems without researchers knowing. On Tuesday the Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned to draw attention to the same worry.
20
OpenAI asks to be regulated

OpenAI said on Wednesday it wants mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States, and that until the US Congress acts it will keep backing state laws. It named four California bills it supports: SB 813 on independent safety assessments, AB 1405 on standards for AI auditors, SB 1119 on protections for young people, and AB 1864 on safeguards against AI-enabled biological threats. [33]

Why it matters — A company asking for rules is also a company choosing which rules get written, and these four are narrower than the sweeping state bills the industry has fought. It lands the same week OpenAI put a prominent safety researcher on its board.
21
Harvey raises $550m at $15.5bn

Harvey, a San Francisco company that makes AI tools for law firms and company legal departments, said on Wednesday it had raised $550m at a valuation of $15.5bn. The round was co-led by two new investors, Diffusion and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Harvey's software drafts and reviews legal documents and searches case material for lawyers. [34]

Why it matters — Legal work is text-heavy and expensive per hour, which is why it is one of the first professions where AI tools have found paying customers. It was one of two multibillion-dollar AI rounds announced the same day.
22
Clay valued at $7.1bn

Clay, a nine-year-old company whose software finds and organises business sales data, was valued at $7.1bn in a Series D round led by Wellington, with Sequoia, StepStone and Andreessen Horowitz taking part. Chief executive Kareem Amin said the company is now building agents that run sales campaigns on their own. Clay was valued at $3.1bn in August 2025 when it raised $100m. [35]

Why it matters — The valuation has more than doubled in about a year on a shift from selling data to selling software that acts. That is the same shift the enterprise research below says buyers are not yet committing to.
23
A startup walks away from a signed round

Listen Labs, which uses AI to run customer research interviews, had signed a term sheet for a funding round valuing it at $1.5bn, then walked away from it, people familiar told TechCrunch. Backing out of a signed term sheet is rare and frowned on by investors. The likely reason is that Salesforce has been in talks to buy the three-year-old company for around $2bn, as Business Insider reported. Listen Labs has about $30m of annual revenue. [36]

Why it matters — A $2bn price on $30m of revenue is 67 times sales, which one person with experience of Salesforce deals said may prove too steep. If the talks fail, investors expect the company to raise at $2bn or more instead.
24
Sequoia backs a watchdog for AI agents

Cymphony, a two-year-old company in New York and Tel Aviv, came out of stealth with $30m, including a $25m Series A co-led by Sequoia Capital and SMBC's Fin Atlas Beyond Fund, valuing it above $100m. Its software gives security teams one view of employees, AI agents and other non-human accounts, and of the systems and data each can reach. Co-founder Shy Dekel said enterprise security was designed for human employees. [37]

Why it matters — AI agents get access to the same corporate systems as staff but do not pass through the same identity checks, so companies often cannot say what their agents can reach. That gap is now large enough to fund a company against.
25
Suno retrains its music model

Suno, which generates music from written prompts, released three new models on Wednesday and says the flagship v6 was not trained on the data used for earlier versions. The company has faced lawsuits from record labels accusing it of training on copyrighted songs. It settled with Warner Music Group last year and struck a deal with BMG last month, and announced the new models in partnership with Warner. A free v6-mini goes to all users. [38][39]

Why it matters — A company that was sued over its training data has now rebuilt the model on a different set and put a label's name on the release. It is the clearest sign yet that the music industry and the generators are settling into licensing rather than court.
26
An eleventh Microsoft flaw goes public

A researcher known as Nightmare published a working exploit called ShieldCrash shortly after Microsoft's September security updates, and says it works on Windows machines that have already applied them. It reads any file on a system with the highest privileges, though it cannot write files or open a full administrator shell. It bypasses an earlier Defender flaw, ShieldBreak, which Microsoft patched last week, which had itself bypassed a July patch. It is the researcher's eleventh Microsoft zero-day. [40]

Why it matters — A zero-day is a flaw published before a fix exists, so every machine is exposed until Microsoft ships one. The pattern here is a chain of patches each defeated by the next release.
27
A new attack kit spreads between spy groups

Researchers at the email security company Proofpoint identified a new attack toolkit they named BlueMoon. It was first used on 28 August by a group they track as TA412, also called Violet Typhoon, which US authorities link to China's Ministry of State Security. It targeted non-governmental organisations, mining companies and commodity traders in the United States. Within days several other espionage groups were using the same kit. Proofpoint's Mark Kelly said fewer than 20 organisations were seen targeted, and that the real number is almost certainly higher. [41]

Why it matters — A tool built by one group and reused by several within days is how a narrow capability becomes a common one. The targets are unusual: commodity traders and mining firms, not governments.
28
Fujitsu promises to stay off UK contracts

The UK government told members of parliament that Fujitsu has promised not to pursue work with new public sector customers through government purchasing frameworks while its voluntary ban on bidding remains. The Japanese supplier had won places on three frameworks worth up to 14.9 billion, 19.08 billion and about 2.3 billion pounds. It won them despite its role in the Post Office Horizon scandal, in which faulty accounting software led to hundreds of wrongful prosecutions. Fujitsu agreed in January 2024 to stop bidding for new government customers until the public inquiry concluded. [42]

Why it matters — Winning a place on a framework and promising not to use it is a distinction that only holds as long as the promise does. The House of Commons Business and Trade Committee had written to ministers asking for exactly this assurance.
29
EU rewrites its rules on dominant firms

The European Commission published revised guidelines on Article 102, the rule it uses against companies that abuse a dominant position and that has produced large fines against Apple, Google and Microsoft. It treats a firm with more than 40% of a market as dominant. Under the revision, squeezing rivals may be acceptable if the practice cuts raw material use, reduces pollution, increases recycling, makes supply chains more resilient or saves consumers money. Twenty-eight economists, including former senior Commission economists, objected in an open letter. [43]

Why it matters — A defence that a dominant firm can argue is a defence its lawyers will argue often. The critics' point is that sustainability is hard to measure and easy to claim.
30
Booking loses its EU court fight

Booking Holdings lost its challenge to the European Commission's 2023 veto of its 1.63 billion euro purchase of ETraveli, Europe's leading online flight booking operator. The General Court in Luxembourg agreed with regulators that the deal would have strengthened Booking's already dominant position in online travel agencies for hotels. Booking's brands include Booking.com, Priceline and Agoda; ETraveli, owned by CVC Capital Partners, owns Gotogate and Mytrip. [44]

Why it matters — The Commission has been blocking deals where a dominant firm buys an adjacent business rather than a direct rival, and a court has now upheld that reading. It is the same theory US investigators are applying to Nvidia's licensing of Groq.
31
Abu Dhabi's $100bn figure has two readings

Abu Dhabi Global Market, a financial centre, reported more than $100bn of AI-focused capital in its first-half results, published on 8 September, alongside 54% growth in assets under management. One line of the release says that money is deployed from the centre by institutions established there; another says it is held by entities established there. Deployed money has been spent on something; held money may be sitting in a fund waiting. About half the total is MGX, a state-backed fund that closed at $49bn in July. [46]

Why it matters — At this size the difference is $100bn of completed investment against $100bn registered at an address. The category also includes an AI reinsurance agreement, which is not an investment in a data centre at all.
32
A defence startup opens a missile factory

Covenant, a defence startup founded in 2024, came out of stealth on Wednesday and announced a 105,000 square foot factory in Dallas to build cheaper long-range cruise missiles for the US military. It plans 1,000 of its Anthem missiles in the first year and disclosed $250m of funding across three rounds, from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux, 8VC, Aleph and Lightspeed. The class of weapon is dominated by large contractors such as RTX, which makes the Tomahawk. [47]

Why it matters — The same venture firms funding AI companies are funding weapons manufacturing, and both bets rest on being able to build physical things at speed. Covenant's president Abby Denburg said the current US administration is more open to new entrants.
33
Kawasaki signs a small chip deal

EdgeCortix, a chip design company in Kanagawa, Japan, announced a teaming agreement with Kawasaki's defence and aerospace division running from 2026 to 2028. The companies describe several million US dollars in total programme value across three years, covering development, feasibility studies and prototypes. Nothing has reached production and no delivery date exists. Kawasaki's aerospace division booked 613.6 billion yen of revenue last year with an order book above 1.5 trillion yen; EdgeCortix has raised just over $110m since 2019. [48]

Why it matters — The deal is a rounding error to one side and a milestone to the other, which is what most announcements between a giant and a startup are. EdgeCortix's chip has already flown in a US Air Force exercise and passed NASA radiation testing.
34
A startup wants to make chip materials in orbit

Besxar, founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, has persuaded SpaceX to let it prototype semiconductor production across a dozen Falcon 9 booster flights. The argument is that chip factories are expensive largely because they must create and hold a clean, dust-free environment, and space already has a vacuum. Its first two canisters flew on a Starlink mission in July to test whether wafer samples survive launch. It has raised nearly $14m, including a $9m seed round. [49]

Why it matters — A Falcon 9 booster went to space and back 163 times last year, which is what makes the idea arguable rather than absurd. It is the most speculative answer to the same shortage Amkor and Kepler are answering on the ground.
35
Companies buy AI, then do not stick with it

Research by the venture firm Madrona, surveying 150 enterprise IT professionals, found 74% plan to raise their AI budgets over the next year and the rest to hold steady. Fewer than half of their AI pilots ever reach full production. Seventy-seven per cent re-evaluate the AI tools they have deployed rather than settling on them. The market researcher IDC expects companies to spend $4.25 trillion on technology in 2026, almost all of it driven by AI. [50]

Why it matters — Enterprise software used to be bought once and kept for years, which is what made its revenue predictable and its valuations high. That is now the thing investors cannot count on.

02 Lesson why it matters

Nothing gets built until one big customer signs first

A chip plant or a power station costs more than the company building it is worth, so it starts only after one large customer signs a long contract.

The twist

How big a plant gets is decided by whichever customer could commit money years early, not by how much the world will need when it opens.

How it works

A chip plant or a power station takes three to five years to build
It costs more than the company building it can raise on its own
So one large customer signs a long contract, or pays cash up front
The money for the build is released against that one signature
The site is built to the size of that contract
Whoever did not sign years ago buys whatever is left

The same force, elsewhere today

Where this chain is also running, in today's other stories.

Google's nuclear deal in Finland

Fortum said the Loviisa plant could not run past 2030 without new investment, and Google's 22-year contract is the signature that pays for it
Amkor's Arizona packaging site

Nvidia paid $1.5bn up front in July for capacity that will not exist until 2029, and phase two is going ahead on commitments Amkor will not name
The $1bn Spanish data centre

HSCALE is building a campus against a contract from a cloud provider it refuses to name, with a service date its own website does not match
South Korea's reactor decision

Samsung and SK Hynix moved chip plants forward by fifteen years, and South Korea's government must now decide whether to build the power those plants will need

Where you've seen this

Blocks of flats

a bank lends for the build once enough flats are sold off-plan

Films

a studio starts shooting after a streaming service agrees in advance to buy the film

Farming

a grower plants the crop after a supermarket agrees a price months before harvest

The catch

If the customer's plans change, the building still goes up, and nobody can make a half-finished cleanroom smaller.

And the whole of it

Fortum's engineers, Amkor's board and South Korea's planners each know their own piece of this and are guessing at the rest. What they guess this year decides what chips and what electricity exist in 2032, for people who have never heard any of their names.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

Apple raised the price of every iPhone by $100 because the memory inside it now costs more, and it costs more because AI data centres are buying it. On the same day Google signed a 22-year contract for half a Finnish nuclear plant's output, Amkor doubled an Arizona packaging site to $12bn, and South Korea's government began working out whether to build twenty reactors for Samsung and SK Hynix. [4][13][19][14]

Why it works on us — A phone launch is the one part of this a person can see and buy, so the price rise reads as Apple charging more, rather than as the end of a chain that starts in a memory factory.

Who gains

TSMC — Its most advanced lines are fully booked and August sales rose 53.3% on a year earlier, while Apple's new 2-nanometre phone chip is made there. [20][6]
Fortum — The Finnish energy company said its Loviisa nuclear plant could not have run past 2030 without investment, and Google's 22-year contract pays for it. [13]
Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — Memory prices rose far enough this year to put $100 on the price of every phone, and these three companies make nearly all of it. Samsung may now also make OpenAI's next processors. [4][21]
Amkor — Customer commitments passed what its first Arizona cleanroom could hold, and Nvidia paid $1.5bn in advance against capacity not finished until 2029. [19]
Nvidia — US investigators are reported to be unlikely to try to unwind its Groq deal even if they fine it, and it announced up to 2 gigawatts of Australian capacity built on its own platform. [23][28]
Dominant European companies — The revised EU guidelines let a firm defend squeezing rivals if the practice cuts pollution or saves consumers money, a defence 28 economists say is too easy to claim. [43]

Who pays

People buying a cheap phone — Prices rose about $100 across Apple, Google, Samsung, Sony and Motorola, and sales data suggests the market for phones under $100 may disappear entirely. [4]
Electricity customers in Massachusetts — The state's new order makes data centres over 25 megawatts bring clean power, fund new generation nearby, or pay into a fund set up to keep the bill off other electricity customers. [16]
Air passengers in the UK — More than 1,750 flights were hit on Tuesday by an air traffic systems fault, and British Airways cancelled almost 200 more on Wednesday because crews were in the wrong places. [30]
Towns hosting UK data centres — Verdant's count of 20 planned sites puts permanent jobs at about a quarter of the industry figure ministers used when approving them. [18]
Qualcomm — Apple replaced its modem with an in-house C2 in the Duo, and one chip analyst expects Qualcomm gone from the iPhone entirely next year. [3]
Windows users — A researcher published a working file-reading exploit that runs on machines already patched in September, and Microsoft has not said when it will be fixed. [40]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

How much of the $100 on each iPhone is the parts and how much is Apple's margin.

Apple has never broken out what a phone costs it to build, and it did not say what memory now costs. [3][4]
02

Who bought the $1bn Spanish data centre HSCALE is building.

HSCALE names the customer only as a significant global cloud provider and says the identity stays confidential. Its own site dates for Spain are late 2026 and 2028, and the announcement says 2027. [25]
03

How many jobs a UK data centre actually creates.

The trade body techUK says 8.5 permanent jobs per megawatt; the think tank Verdant, looking at 20 planned sites, says 1.2. The UK government rejected Verdant's method and Verdant rejects techUK's sample. [18]
04

Whether Samsung is making a second version of OpenAI's existing chip or a new one.

OpenAI's Korea manager said the two companies are working on next-generation chips and would not say which. [21][22]
05

What Nvidia's $1.5bn bought at Amkor.

Neither company said how much of the Arizona site's packaging capacity the July prepayment reserves, and phase two names no customers at all. [19]
06

Whether Abu Dhabi's $100bn of AI capital has been spent or is still sitting in funds.

One line of the same results release says deployed and another says held, and about half the total is a single state-backed fund that closed in July. [46]
07

Who Nvidia's Australian capacity is for.

Nvidia named four data centre partners and a 2-gigawatt target, but no customers, in a country whose government has not settled who supplies the power. [28]
08

How many organisations the BlueMoon attack kit has reached.

Proofpoint saw fewer than 20 targeted and says the real figure is almost certainly higher, and several other groups picked up the kit within days. [41]
09

When Microsoft will fix the ShieldCrash flaw.

Microsoft had not answered questions about a patch date, and the exploit works on machines that have installed the September updates. [40]

04 Hope carry this

Apple's new watch can tell a deaf or hard-of-hearing wearer that a siren, a smoke alarm, a doorbell or a baby is making a sound, working on the watch itself with the phone left at home.

Also true today

Fortum's Loviisa nuclear plant makes about a tenth of Finland's electricity and could not have run past 2030. It will now run to 2050.
Suno was sued by record labels over the songs it learned from. Its new music model was trained on a different set of data, and it was released with Warner Music's name on it.