Apple has held “exploratory” talks about manufacturing processors for its devices in the US, Bloomberg reports. The move seems to reflect Apple’s need to secure additional chip supplies to meet growing demand for its products, but could also represent a contingency plan to reduce the company’s reliance on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC’s) advanced manufacturing facilities in Taiwan.
I doubt this means Apple doesn’t want to work with TSMC, nor does it mean TSMC is cooling on Apple. I suspect company management is far more concerned about what might happen in the event China attacks TSMC’s home nation.
Contingency planning
That concern seems legitimate in the context of unravelling of international relations and a recently-disclosed warning the CIA gave to tech leaders back in 2023. Executives from Apple, AMD, and Qualcomm were all warned that China might attack Taiwan. Such an attack would comprise a huge threat to the entire tech industry. Speaking at the World Econ
EU officials have agreed to water down certain aspects of the AI Act, including delaying the implementation of rules covering a number of high-risk applications until December 2027, instead of the originally set deadline of August 2026, according to the latest update of EU lawmakers watering down AI rules. This agreement comes after many companies argued the EU was bogging itself down in unnecessary regulation, leaving the EU behind competitors in the US and Asia. The deal was reached after 9 hours of talks, which is fairly standard for negotiations in Brussels. It still needs to be ratified by EU […]
Echoing concerns from other security experts, Orange Cyberdefense (OC) recently warned that employees have become the biggest security threat faced by business.
Now, in the latest illustration of its ongoing security response, Apple is putting new protections in place in macOS 26.4 that should help – but employee education remains critical as hackers turn to complex, multi-stage, social engineering attacks to infest systems with malware.
Your people are your weakness
The data tells its own story. OC explains: Employees account for 57% of all security incidents and 45% of these incidents come when workers bypass or ignore security policies by, for example, using unapproved tools.
Attackers are actively searching for and exploiting those kinds of policy workarounds, seeking weaknesses in commonly used, but unapproved, tools. Users really should educate themselves.
While companies can put some mitigations in place using device management and policy controls to constrain app use and down
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is in talks to raise its first venture capital round at a valuation that has climbed from $20 billion to $45 billion in weeks, according to the Financial Times and Bloomberg. The round is expected to be led by China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, with cloud giants Tencent and Alibaba […]
Samsung reached a $1 trillion market valuation on Wednesday after shares surged more than 10%, making it only the second Asian company to cross the threshold after TSMC. The milestone follows a first-quarter earnings report showing profits eight times higher than a year earlier, driven overwhelmingly by AI-related chip demand. At the centre of the […]
Insider Brief Sony Semiconductor Solutions and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufaccturing Company announced a plan to form a strategic partnership focused on developing and manufacturing next-generation image sensors, with the companies highlighting future applications in robotics, automotive systems and physical AI. According to a joint press release, the companies signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to create […]
AirPods Pro 3 | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Apple's rumored AirPods with cameras are nearing a stage where the company will test early mass production, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports. Currently, Apple testers are "actively using" prototypes that are in the design validation test stage, which is one step before the production validation test stage.
The AirPods' cameras "aren't designed" to snap photos or video but instead can take in "visual information in low resolution" that users can query Siri about, like asking the AI assistant what they should cook with the ingredients they have in front of them, according to Gurman. They may also use the cameras to help with things like turn-b …
Read the full story at The Verge.
Insider Brief Spirit AI and Bosch China announced a strategic partnership focused on bringing embodied AI systems into industrial environments, combining Spirit AI’s robotics foundation models with Bosch’s manufacturing and automation infrastructure. According to the companies, the partnership is aimed at accelerating deployment of what Spirit AI describes as a “universal brain” for robots — […]
