The world chip industry was shaken by an earthquake, Samsung reclaimed the throne from Apple
The world chip industry was shaken by an earthquake
The largest earthquake in Taiwan (China) in 25 years is disrupting the production activities of semiconductor companies on the island, negatively impacting the technology industry and the world economy.
The consequences are significant because Taiwan is an important link in advanced chip production – the “heart” of artificial intelligence, smartphones, to electric vehicles.
TSMC, the world’s largest manufacturer of advanced chips for customers such as Apple and Nvidia, had to suspend production and evacuate employees.
Its local rival United Microelectronics Corp also had to close some factories and evacuate some facilities in its Hsinchu and Tainan hubs.
Jan-Peter Kleinhans, director of the technology and geopolitics project at the Berlin-based research organization Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, called Taiwan “the most important collapse link” in the semiconductor industry.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the hottest technology field today. Both OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang have warned about the shortage of chips needed for AI training needs.
Currently, all orders from Nvidia – the leading graphics chip company in the field of AI, are manufactured by TSMC. Therefore, even short-term disruptions to Taiwan can have a significant impact.
Samsung reclaims the throne from Apple
According to the latest data, Samsung Electronics has regained the top position in the global smartphone market after losing the throne to Apple.
Research firm Counterpoint Research said that in February, the Korean electronics company sold 19.69 million smartphones, accounting for 20% of the global market share, beating Apple. “Apple” sold 17.41 million iPhones in the same period, accounting for 18% of the market share.
Analysts say Samsung’s comeback is based on strong sales in the US and Europe.
Kim Rok Ho, researcher at Hana Securities, said that this is encouraging and the Galaxy S24 received good feedback from these two markets.
For the whole year, for the first time in 13 years, Samsung lost the smartphone crown to Apple in 2023.
Internet speed sets new world record
According to TechSpotresearchers from Aston University (UK) have achieved a breakthrough in data transmission via fiber optic cable, with a data transmission speed of 301 Tb/s, 4.5 million times higher than the current one.
To put it into perspective, this speed helps download an average 70GB 4K movie in just two seconds.
This is the research result of a collaborative team from Aston AIPT Institute of Photonic Technology (UK), Japan’s National Institute of Information and Technology (NICT) and Nokia Bell Laboratory in the US.
The record network speed figure comes from the use of new wavelengths, never before applied in traditional fiber optic cable systems.
Facebook has been quietly selling user messages for a decade
For nearly 10 years, Facebook has quietly sold user messages to Netflix, helping the on-demand television viewing service understand customer habits and preferences.
The publicly available court documents belong to a class action lawsuit targeting the monopoly of Meta – Facebook’s parent company. The plaintiffs accused Netflix and Facebook of having a “special relationship” where the social media platform gave the streaming platform “private access” to user data.
In return, Netflix will provide reports twice a week on how users interact with the platform, such as favorite movies, number of times selecting movies from the recommendation list, etc.
According to the lawsuit, Facebook received hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue from Netflix as part of this relationship. In 2017 alone, Netflix spent more than 150 million USD to buy advertising on Facebook.
Notably, since April 2016, Facebook announced the launch of end-to-end encryption for messages on Messenger, but did not enable it by default. It will not be until August 2022 that this social network will make end-to-end encryption the default for global users.
However, the lawsuit accuses Facebook of still allowing certain partners, including Netflix, to read users’ private messages.
Meta has been involved in many scandals related to how it handles users’ private data and has had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.
