The CHIPS Act moved from legislation to checks: Washington offered TSMC up to $6.6 billion to expand its Arizona fabs, including a third plant and a commitment to bring 2-nanometer production to U.S. soil. Google, meanwhile, joined the custom-silicon club at Cloud Next, unveiling Axion — its first Arm-based server CPU — as every hyperscaler races to own its own compute stack. And Apple sent threat notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries warning of 'mercenary spyware' attacks, a reminder that the most sophisticated threats to mobile devices are bought, not built.
AT&T opened April cleaning up after a dataset covering 73 million current and former customers surfaced on a cybercrime forum — forcing millions of account passcodes to be reset and kicking off a breach saga that would shadow the carrier all year. Intel gave Wall Street its first honest look at the cost of rebuilding American chipmaking, disclosing a $7 billion operating loss in its foundry business. And Taiwan's strongest earthquake in 25 years rattled the island that fabricates most of the world's advanced chips — TSMC evacuated fabs, then restarted with minimal damage, a near-miss reminder of how concentrated the silicon supply chain remains.