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By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss NEW YORK (Reuters) -Bitcoin and ether tumbled on Tuesday as U.S.-China tension ramped up, wiping out a rally the day before that was fueled by President Donald Trump's conciliatory trade remarks. The U.S. and China on Tuesday began charging additional port fees on ocean shipping firms that move everything from holiday toys to crude oil, making the high seas a key front in the trade war between the world's two largest economies. In afternoon trading, bitcoin fell to as low as $110,023.78 and was last down 2.3% at $113,129. The world's largest cryptocurrency hit a record high above $126,000 on October 6. Ether, the second-biggest digital currency, slid to a trough of $3,900.80 and was last down 3.7% at $4,128.47. Last Friday, it dropped 12% from the day's high to a low of $3,436.29. Altcoins, a term for all cryptocurrencies other than market-leader bitcoin, bore the brunt of the move, with many falling 80% on some exchanges, analysts said. Exchanges amplified Friday's selloff by automatically forcing some leveraged investors to close their positions after their collateral fell below certain thresholds, analysts said. "As long as China's relationship with the U.S. is shaky and stocks too concentrated in tech, crypto will be struggling as it tends to enjoy good times when other established assets are holding up well," said Juan Perez, director of trading at Monex USA in Washington. "But when the fundamentals are not great, crypto struggles to find a base for its value whether it's bitcoin or ether." Tuesday's price action came days after the crypto market experienced the largest liquidations in history, with more than $19 billion wiped out across leveraged positions late on Friday. The crash came after Trump said he would impose 100% tariffs on Chinese imports, in response to China announcing a major expansion of its rare earths export controls. (Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Editing by Michelle Price and Lisa Shumaker)

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By Max A. Cherney SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Broadcom is launching a new networking chip on Tuesday that will help companies build artificial intelligence computing systems by stringing together hundreds of thousands of chips that crunch data, deepening its rivalry with Nvidia. The chip, called the Thor Ultra, enables computing infrastructure operators to deploy far more chips than they otherwise could, allowing them to build and run the large models used to power AI apps such as ChatGPT. The Thor Ultra will battle Nvidia's networking interface chips and aim to further entrench Broadcom's control of network communications inside data centers designed for AI applications. It comes after Broadcom on Monday unveiled a deal to roll out 10 gigawatts worth of custom chips for ChatGPT maker OpenAI beginning in the second half of 2026, challenging Nvidia's grip on the AI accelerator market. AI represents a big opportunity for Broadcom. Chief executive Hock Tan said late last year the market the company is going after for its various AI chips is in the range of $60 billion to $90 billion in 2027, divided between its networking chips and the data center processors it helps Alphabet's Google and OpenAI make. Broadcom reported AI revenue of $12.2 billion in fiscal 2024. In September, it announced a new, unnamed $10 billion customer for its custom data center AI chips. The Thor Ultra chip, part of Broadcom's growing catalog of networking chips, operates as a critical link between an AI system and the rest of the data center. The networking chips help data center operators move information around inside a facility. "In the distributed computing system, network plays an extremely important role in building these large clusters," Ram Velaga, a Broadcom senior vice president, told Reuters. "So I'm not surprised that anybody who's in the GPU business wants to make sure that they are participating in the networking." FOCUSING ON CHIP DESIGN While networking chips are crucial to the company's plans, the AI chips Broadcom helps design for large cloud computing companies such as Google are lucrative. Broadcom has worked on multiple generations of Google's Tensor processor, which Google began designing more than a decade ago. The Tensor chips have generated billions of dollars in revenue for Broadcom, according to analyst estimates. During a tour in September of Broadcom's San Jose network chip-testing labs where engineers work on current and forthcoming designs of its networking chips, company executives detailed measures taken to construct and test new networking processors. Towards that end, Broadcom's engineers doubled the bandwidth on Thor Ultra compared with the prior version. They put the chips through rigorous testing and evaluation from the earliest stages of production. To make a chip like the Thor Ultra or flagship series of Tomahawk networking switches, the engineers build an entire system around the chip. With the hardware system team, the engineers will discuss what kind of package the chip uses, how much power it will need and how much heat it will emit, Velaga said. Broadcom does not sell servers itself but offers the designs for components and systems it creates for testing to its customers in order to give them a reference point to construct the networking infrastructure around it. "For every dollar we invest in our silicon, there is at least $6 to $10 that our ecosystem partners are investing," Velaga said. "So a lot of our focus is on design, as if we are almost ready to take it to production." (Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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By Max A. Cherney (Reuters) -Intel announced on Tuesday a new artificial intelligence chip for the data center that it plans to launch next year, in a renewed push to break into the AI chip market. The new chip (GPU) will be optimized for energy efficiency and support a wide range of uses such as running AI applications, or inference, Intel Chief Technology Officer Sachin Katti said at the Open Compute Summit on Tuesday. "It emphasizes that focus that I talked about earlier, inference, optimized for AI, optimized, optimized for delivering the best token economics out there, the best performance per dollar out there," Katti said. The new chip, called Crescent Island, is the struggling U.S. chipmaker's latest attempt to capitalize on the frenzy in AI spending that has generated billions in revenue for AMD and Nvidia.  The company's plans trail behind competitors and represent the significant challenge Intel's executives and engineers face to capture a meaningful portion of the market for AI chips and systems. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has vowed to restart the company's stalled AI efforts after the company effectively mothballed projects such as the Gaudi line of chips and Falcon Shores processor.  Crescent Island will feature 160 gigabytes of a slower form of memory than the high bandwidth memory (HBM) that is found on AMD and Nvidia's data center AI chips. The chip will be based on a design that Intel has used for its consumer GPUs. Intel did not disclose which manufacturing process Crescent Island would use. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. MIX AND MATCH Since the generative AI boom with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, startups and large cloud operators have rushed to grab GPUs that help run AI workloads on data center servers. The demand explosion has led to a supply crunch and sky-high prices for chips designed or suited for AI applications. Katti said at the San Jose trade show that the company would release new data center AI chips every year, which would match the annual cadence set by AMD, Nvidia and several of the cloud computing companies that make their own chips. Nvidia has dominated the market to build large AI models such as the one used for ChatGPT. Tan has said the company plans to focus its design efforts on building chips useful for running those AI models – which work behind the scenes to make AI software operate. "Instead of trying to build for every workload out there, our focus is increasingly going to be on inference," Katti said. Intel has taken an open and modular approach in which customers can mix and match chips from different vendors, Katti said. Nvidia said last month it would invest $5 billion in Intel, taking a roughly 4% stake and becoming one of its largest shareholders as part of a partnership to co-develop future PC and data center chips. The deal is part of Intel's effort to ensure that Intel's central processors (CPUs) are installed in every AI system that gets sold, Katti said.  (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Max Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Stephen Coates)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)

By Max A. Cherney (Reuters) -Intel announced on Tuesday a new artificial intelligence chip for the data center that it plans to launch next year, in a renewed push to break into the AI chip market. The new chip (GPU) will be optimized for energy efficiency and support a wide range of uses such as running AI applications, or inference, Intel Chief Technology Officer Sachin Katti said at the Open Compute Summit on Tuesday. "It emphasizes that focus that I talked about earlier, inference, optimized for AI, optimized, optimized for delivering the best token economics out there, the best performance per dollar out there," Katti said. The new chip, called Crescent Island, is the struggling U.S. chipmaker's latest attempt to capitalize on the frenzy in AI spending that has generated billions in revenue for AMD and Nvidia.  The company's plans trail behind competitors and represent the significant challenge Intel's executives and engineers face to capture a meaningful portion of the market for AI chips and systems. Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has vowed to restart the company's stalled AI efforts after the company effectively mothballed projects such as the Gaudi line of chips and Falcon Shores processor.  Crescent Island will feature 160 gigabytes of a slower form of memory than the high bandwidth memory (HBM) that is found on AMD and Nvidia's data center AI chips. The chip will be based on a design that Intel has used for its consumer GPUs. Intel did not disclose which manufacturing process Crescent Island would use. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. MIX AND MATCH Since the generative AI boom with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, startups and large cloud operators have rushed to grab GPUs that help run AI workloads on data center servers. The demand explosion has led to a supply crunch and sky-high prices for chips designed or suited for AI applications. Katti said at the San Jose trade show that the company would release new data center AI chips every year, which would match the annual cadence set by AMD, Nvidia and several of the cloud computing companies that make their own chips. Nvidia has dominated the market to build large AI models such as the one used for ChatGPT. Tan has said the company plans to focus its design efforts on building chips useful for running those AI models – which work behind the scenes to make AI software operate. "Instead of trying to build for every workload out there, our focus is increasingly going to be on inference," Katti said. Intel has taken an open and modular approach in which customers can mix and match chips from different vendors, Katti said. Nvidia said last month it would invest $5 billion in Intel, taking a roughly 4% stake and becoming one of its largest shareholders as part of a partnership to co-develop future PC and data center chips. The deal is part of Intel's effort to ensure that Intel's central processors (CPUs) are installed in every AI system that gets sold, Katti said.  (Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Max Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Stephen Coates)

(The article has been published through a syndicated feed. Except for the headline, the content has been published verbatim. Liability lies with original publisher.)