The biggest number came from Omdia, which says global semiconductor revenue passed $425 billion in the second quarter, up 31.4% on the first. That’s a sequential record for the second quarter running. Memory ICs made up more than half of the total, and Omdia expects Q3 to clear $500 billion. Its PC team tells the other half of the story: US shipments grew 1% in Q2 because retailers bought ahead of memory-driven price rises, and the second half is forecast down 18.4%.
Cornelis Networks, the old Intel Omni-Path business, raised $205 million and moved into scale-up networking with an Active Compute Fabric and a Qualcomm collaboration. That takes it from linking racks to linking chips inside them, which is NVLink territory. Lower in the stack, Lorentz Solution and NVIDIA presented automated 3D EM extraction for silicon photonics and 3DIC designs at TSMC OIP. It’s a narrow release. It also shows how much new sign-off tooling 3D stacking needs. Ciena, meanwhile, launched a venture arm for AI networking, the one real strategic move among a pile of AI Infra Summit showcase notices.
Temporal raised $550 million at a $12.55 billion valuation. Its durable-execution software keeps long-running processes alive through failures, which is exactly what AI agents keep breaking. Data center developer Vantage secured a $2 billion credit facility, more evidence that buildout money is shifting toward debt. The odd one is Volato, a private aviation company that completed a merger with Alignment Engine and now pitches itself as an AI data center play. Treat that one with care.
Anthropic’s push into wealth management arrived as three linked releases. Charles Schwab will bring Claude to independent registered investment advisors, Orion signed on as a launch partner, and Wealth.com is plugging estate and tax planning into it. Schwab matters most here, because it custodies assets for a large share of independent RIAs.
In quantum, corporate money keeps finding non-superconducting approaches. Mitsubishi Electric invested in OptQC, a startup building optical quantum computer hardware. Infleqtion advanced its fault-tolerant software work with NVIDIA CUDA-Q Logical. IonQ is leaning on research credibility, with nine peer-reviewed papers at IEEE Quantum Week.
On the factory floor, Stratasys says its additive manufacturing systems will roll out across more than 20 GM plants. For 3D printing, a fleet-wide deployment at a major carmaker is rare. Universal Robots unveiled Gen 7, a platform built around physical AI deployment.
In aviation, Textron Aviation and autonomy specialist Merlin introduced a Cessna SkyCourier UX concept. The SkyCourier is already a utility cargo workhorse, so an autonomy-focused variant is a logical first target. Ouster added native color lidar to its REV8 OS1 Max for high-altitude drone mapping and claims double the accuracy and precision.
In the Gulf, Expo 2030 Riyadh signed a SAR 3.2 billion joint venture with Mohammed Al Habib Real Estate to build the Expo Village. The release went out in eight languages, a fair measure of how hard Riyadh is selling the event. Motorola Solutions won a $139 million statewide public safety contract in Louisiana. In Canada, NMG is targeting a final investment decision on its Bécancour battery materials plant within months.
Apple’s next macOS name, meanwhile, didn’t come from Apple. It came from Jamf, in a release about same-day support for macOS Golden Gate 27 and iOS 27.
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