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Micron Technology, Inc. broke ground today on an advanced wafer fabrication facility located within the company's existing NAND manufacturing complex in Singapore. This new facility represents a planned investment of approximately US $24 billion (SG $31 billion) over 10 years and is designed to ultimately provide 700,000 square feet of cleanroom space. Wafer output is scheduled to begin in the second half of calendar 2028, helping Micron address growing market demand for NAND technology driven by the rapid expansion of AI and data-centric applications.

The groundbreaking ceremony for this facility, Singapore's first double-story wafer manufacturing fab, was marked by the attendance of Gan Kim Yong, deputy prime minister and minister for Trade and Industry of Singapore, Dr Beh Swan Gin, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Jermaine Loy, managing director of the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) and Jacqueline Poh, CEO of JTC Corporation.
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Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., a world leader in memory products and technology solutions, announces today its award-winning Kingston IronKey Keypad 200 series (KP200 and KP200C) hardware-encrypted USB flash drives have received NIST FIPS 140-3 Level 3 validation. This certification brings the KP200 series in line with IronKey D500S, which has already achieved this prestigious security standard, further reinforcing Kingston's commitment to providing robust, certified data protection solutions.

The KP200 series are keypad drives that are OS-independent and thus are usable on standard Windows, macOS platforms, as well as Linux, ChromeOS, even iOS and Android via USB-A or USB-C connector. These drives are ideal for users who need encrypted storage to protect software that can be loaded or unloaded from medical, scientific, industrial, and other machinery with USB interfaces. For Operational Technology (OT) infrastructure companies, NIST recommends enhanced USB drive security through its new Special Publication (SP) 1334 guidance.
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The perfect introduction to fast and furious matches! The SKILLER SGB15 set combines a stylish rubber dome keyboard with a precise gaming mouse. The keyboard has a full 3-block layout while the mouse is equipped with a 1,000 Hz polling rate and up to 4,200 DPI in six levels. And the crisp RGB illumination with cool effects will ensure that your new equipment is an eye-catching highlight, not only when gaming. Thanks to the full 3-block layout of the keyboard, you will always have full control in the game, while the rubber dome keys provide a pleasantly quiet typing experience.

With up to 4,200 DPI in six levels, the gaming mouse adapts to your gaming style, whether it's MOBA or first-person shooter. And for games which require precision and quick responses, there is, of course, a polling rate of 1,000 Hz on board. The stylish RGB illumination of the SKILLER SGB15 mouse and keyboard will provide your setup with stylish highlights. Various colors and effects can be selected according to your style and without the need of a software.
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NVIDIA's integration of AI systems now extends beyond GPUs with generic Arm CPUs. The company is introducing its high-performance "Vera" CPUs as a standalone product, marking its first entry as a competitor to Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server-grade CPUs. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang confirmed this new venture in an interview with Bloomberg, stating, "For the very first time, we're going to be offering Vera CPUs. Vera is such an incredible CPU. We're going to offer Vera CPUs as a standalone part of the infrastructure. You can now run your computing stack not only on NVIDIA GPUs but also on NVIDIA CPUs. Vera is completely revolutionary... Coreweave will have to act quickly if they want to be the first to implement Vera CPUs. We haven't announced any of our CPU design wins yet, but there will be many."

The "Vera" CPU is equipped with 88 custom Armv9.2 "Olympus" cores that utilize Spatial Multithreading technology, allowing it to handle 176 threads through physical resource partitioning. These custom cores support native FP8 processing, enabling some AI workloads to be executed directly on the CPU with 6x128-bit SVE2 implementation. The chip offers 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth and supports up to 1.5 TB of LPDDR5X memory, making it ideal for memory-intensive computing tasks. However, with the CPU now being offered as a standalone solution, it is unclear whether there will be any classic memory options like DDR5 RDIMMs, or if the CPU will rely solely on SOCAMM LPDDR5X. A second-generation Scalable Coherency Fabric provides 3.4 TB/s of bisection bandwidth, connecting the cores across a unified monolithic die and eliminating the latency issues common in chiplet architectures. Additionally, NVIDIA has integrated a second-generation NVLink Chip-to-Chip technology, delivering up to 1.8 TB/s of coherent bandwidth for external "Rubin" GPUs.

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Part of Ubisoft's recently announced organizational reshuffle, which saw a slew of game projects cancelled, included a commitment to save at least €200 million in fixed costs over the five years following the news. According to VideoGamesChronicle, the early stages of this plan include laying off nearly 18% of its staff, or 200 workers, at its Paris head office. Apparently, the news broke via an internal staff email, which explained that Ubisoft had entered into a voluntary mutual termination agreement with the French union representing its employees.

The voracity of this information was confirmed by an Ubisoft spokesperson, who said that "Ubisoft International has initiated discussions regarding a potential Rupture Conventionnelle Collective (RCC), a voluntary mutual termination agreement that could involve up to 200 positions at its headquarters in France." The spokesperson goes on to clarify that this only affects French teams working under Ubisoft International, and that it would have "no impact on other French entities or Ubisoft teams worldwide." While the reshuffle resulted in the cancellation of a number of games across multiple IPs, there were a number of projects that survived the culling, including Beyond Good and Evil 2.
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As previously reported, Rockstar and Take-Two are taking every precaution to avoid leaks of the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, with the pair having already fired staff allegedly associated with leaking confidential information. According to a new leak published by Polish news site, PPE, video game vendors are claiming that GTA VI will be a digital-only launch. In 2026, it's almost expected for games to be digital-only on PC, but this will apparently be true for both the console and PC versions of the game. Supposedly, the digital-only launch strategy is to avoid the possibility of leaks via retail employees. It should be noted, though, that GTA VI will eventually become available in physical form, but there will be a short delay between the digital-only launch and the physical launch.

In order for games, and other physical products to be available at launch, retailers have to have stock ready ahead of time, and it's not uncommon for retail workers or even store owners to sneak an early look at the game and, for example, post a picture or even footage of the packaging, or even of the gameplay itself, to the internet. Presumably, the thinking is that, by staggering the physical release, retailers won't have access to the game ahead of launch, so they won't be able to leak anything. The retailer claims to not know when the physical release will happen, but unless Take-Two really wants to make physical game buyers hurt for their chance to get at the game, it seems likely that the delay between the digital and physical releases won't be much longer than a few weeks, at most. After numerous delays, GTA VI is currently expected to launch on November 19, 2026, so it wouldn't be surprising to see the physical edition launch before Christmas.

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Highguard, the debut free-to-play PvP "raid shooter" from Wildlight Entertainment, recently surprise launched across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation, after much hype, owing to the new studio's veteran leadership. However, that hype was seemingly misplaced, as, despite peaking at over 95,000 concurrent players little over an hour after launch, Highguard has already earned itself a "Mostly Negative" review rating on Steam. According to SteamDB, 78.2%, or 8,383 players left negative reviews on Steam, with only 2,333 of the 10,716 total reviews praising the game. So far, the studio behind the game has not made any comments about initial performance or player sentiment, but it looks like it might be another case similar to that of Splitgate: Arena Reloaded, which is now effectively on life support, despite its predecessor's loyal player-base and a very recent launch.

Most of the criticism of the game seems to be centered around a lack of direction—the developers seemingly trying too hard to appeal to everyone instead of making a focused experience—poor map and interaction design, discordant pacing and mechanics, and lackluster performance. Some players also took issue with the fact that it was essentially a 3v3 shooter with a sizeable map and tedious mining and looting that don't seem to fit in with the game's stated goal of fast-paced gunplay. Many of these sentiments were echoed by players on r/PS5 on Reddit, where players also expressed frustration about the game's poor image quality, or "fuzziness" and with what seems like a never-ending flood of MOBAs and shooters.

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Sony looks to be planning a State of Play event in February 2026, according to notable insider, NateTheHate2 on X. The leaker goes on to say in a reply that the State of Play is scheduled for the first half of February, specifically the 12th, although he didn't expand on what he expects to launch or show up at the event. The confirmation of the State of Play has expectedly led to a lot of speculation over what may be announced. For one, many are expecting word on that Horizon MMO that was previously leaked.

The list of 2026 launches that Sony has officially acknowledged is also quite large, including Marvel's Wolverine, Dune: Awakening, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and Saros, which is currently already available for pre-order—just to name a few. It's likely that there will be some additional gameplay or showcase of these games, as well as the upcoming Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls 4v4 fighting game. It has also been previously leaked that Rockstar is working on a next-gen Red Dead Redemption 2, and there has been no shortage of speculation about that revisit potentially showing up at the February State of Play.

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The intriguing "GFX13" identifier has turned up again, after many months of silence. Late last Friday (January 23), Kepler_L2 highlighted a public-facing LLVM Project update that defines initial support of Team Red's "gfx1310 target." One team member comment points to this new property being identical—as a temporary arrangement—to the RDNA 4 generation's "GFX12" and "GFX1250" IDs. Prior to 2026, a bunch of AMD patch notes mentioned early "GFX13" commitments, alongside next-gen "RDNA 5" or "UDNA" graphics architectures.

It is believed that last week's LLVM 23 compiler release only refers to "RDNA 5," leading to speculation about a forthcoming theoretical "Radeon RX 10000" discrete graphics card family. This next wave is not expected to launch any time soon; industry observers posit a vague mid-2027 launch window—maybe coinciding with unleashings of next-gen home consoles, although present-day market conditions could spoil Microsoft and Sony's best laid plans. Phoronix's founder and Editor-in-Chief, Michael Larabel, is looking forward to the August/September arrival of AMD's LLVM 23.1 stable release—by that time "GFX13" support could have advanced to another stage of development, thus providing further insights.

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Lots of games offer intense, competitive, squad-based action, but I can't think of any besides Highguard where I can sling spells and bullets from the back of a majestic, galloping bear as I charge in to destroy an enemy fortress. Highguard turned a lot of heads with its flashy reveal at the end of the Game Awards last month, but many were left wanting to know more about this mysterious debut from Wildlight Entertainment, a new studio of Apex Legends, Titanfall, and Call of Duty veterans.

The developers are first to admit that the intervening month has been quiet, but are confident that the game they've toiled over in secret for four years will speak for itself on release today. I spent a whole day playing the game and interviewing its lead developers and studio founders last week, and I am here to tell you exactly what we're all about to play with Highguard.
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Last week, AMD revealed further (post-CES) Ryzen 7 9850X3D details—namely an officially confirmed $499 MSRP, and January 29 launch date. This 8-core 3D V-Cache-augmented gaming desktop processor's arrival has not been timed to perfection; as evidenced by a leaked Team Red marketing slide. The ongoing computer memory supply crisis has caused many "rethinks" at affected manufacturers, with a handful of key players dipping back into older product lines. Extraordinary circumstances have led to the resurgence of DDR4 memory products—currently, this older—still viable—standard has experienced price hikes, albeit not to the extent of newer DDR5 sticks. In China, AMD and involved hardware partners have taken the unusual step of bundling the brand-new Ryzen 7 9850X3D OEM(?) model with a 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5 kit, and a CPU air cooler.

Photos of a boxed retail example were uploaded to JustBuy's Bilibili blog, showing a likely region-exclusive package that is advertised as including Team Red's newest member of "Granite Ridge" processor family, V-Color Manta XFinity+ OLED DDR5 memory, and a white Cooler Master HYPER 612 APEX Pro tower cooler. The exact specifications of V-Color's bundled-in kit were not visible, or described by the JoyBuy previewer—apparently this partnership-produced combo was unveiled during a recent Cooler Master event in China. In a joking assumption, UNIKO's Hardware proposed lowly 4800 CL58 credentials—clearly riffing on the AMD marketing team's reported claim that "DDR5-6000 to DDR5-4800 memory yields less than a 1% drop of FPS." Several PC hardware news outlets have assumed that V-Color has supplied Manta XFinity+ OLED DDR5-6000 CL26 kits, leading to a total price estimate of sub-$1100 for the snazzy Cooler Master ($79.99) x AMD ($499 MSRP) x V-Color (~$509) box and contents.

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NVIDIA and CoreWeave, Inc. today announced an expansion of their long-standing complementary relationship to enable CoreWeave to accelerate the buildout of more than 5 gigawatts of AI factories by 2030 to advance AI adoption at global scale. In addition, NVIDIA has invested $2 billion in CoreWeave Class A common stock at a purchase price of $87.20 per share. The investment reflects NVIDIA's confidence in CoreWeave's business, team and growth strategy as a cloud platform built on NVIDIA infrastructure.

"AI is entering its next frontier and driving the largest infrastructure buildout in human history," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "CoreWeave's deep AI factory expertise, platform software and unmatched execution velocity are recognized across the industry. Together, we're racing to meet extraordinary demand for NVIDIA AI factories—the foundation of the AI industrial revolution."
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If you're wondering where the big "Battlemage" GPUs are, they are reportedly being shipped, but primarily for the professional visualization sector and AI builders. According to a leak from VideoCardz, Intel's upcoming Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 GPUs are part of this release, using the long-rumored BMG-G31 GPU die that Intel has prepared for the higher-end GPUs. Starting with the higher-end Arc Pro B70, Intel plans a BMG-G31 configuration with 32 Xe2 cores and 32 GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus. This will equal to about 4,096 FP32 cores in its full configuration, which is exactly twice the core count of the Arc Pro B60, and twice its memory capacity on a single-GPU version. For its smaller sibling Arc Pro B65, Intel has cut BMG-G31 die to support 2,560 FP32 cores, with 20 Xe2 cores in total. This is the same core configuration as the Arc Pro B60, but this card comes with 32 GB of GDDR6 memory out of the box, 8 GB higher than the Arc Pro B60.

Intel will launch both GPUs in the first quarter of this year. With January almost over, a February or March release seems likely. For local AI LLM development and workstations needing more computational power, Intel is gradually entering this market to address the gap left by AMD and NVIDIA, offering high memory capacities and a good price/performance ratio. However, the situation is different for gaming GPUs. According to VideoCardz, Intel's board partners have received the BMG-G31 dies for testing and integration into customized designs, but only for the Pro SKU. No gaming chips have been shipped. Intel is reportedly delaying the larger Arc B770 gaming GPU to focus on the Pro-Viz segment. As a result, no near-term launch is planned for the gaming version, leaving the release of the B770 uncertain.

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Lately and supposedly, the Samsung Foundry has "stabilized" yields of its cutting-edge 2 nm GAA node process (SF2); enough to qualify as being "mass production"-worthy. Despite rumors of a yield rate hovering around the 50% mark, the South Korean semiconductor specialist seems to be proceeding with high-volume manufacturing of Exynos 2600 application processors. This next-gen smartphone chip is expected to become the foundry service's SF2 "proof of concept," as finalized silicon gets released within upcoming Galaxy S26 and S26+ devices. A fresh Chosun Daily article cites recent research done by KB Securities—with head analyst, Kim Dong-won, projecting a return to profit—in 2027—for the Samsung's chip making business. Prior to the early success of SF2, the megacorp's foundry division has been "recording trillions of won in losses since 2022," but new deals could lead to much better fortunes in the next financial year. KB Securities reckons that "performance is expected to turn a profit next year from a loss of 7 trillion won last year, thanks to an increase in operating rates following the expansion of Tesla AI chip supply."

One industry insider commented on present-day goings-on with company leadership: "they are accelerating order intake with the goal of turning a profit next year. In addition to the stabilization of yields in advanced processes below [URL="https://www.techpowerup.com/328680/samsungs-second-gen-3-nm-gaa-process-shows-20-yields-missing-production-goals"]3 nm (

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Intel apparently has no plans to compete with the high-power iGPUs in AMD's Strix Halo APUs. This is according to Intel's Tom Petersen, who recently spoke to Club386 about the potential for a Panther Lake Halo, as it were, explaining that there are many factors currently preventing Intel from going down that route. While Intel's Arc B390 iGPU currently appears to only be outmatched by AMD's Radeon 8060S in the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and similar, it seems as though that's where Intel will stop for now, with Petersen reportedly saying that that sort of performance segment is "primarily discrete," and that those looking for that sort of performance "would be better served by a small, discrete GPU that's going to be provided by third parties."

He goes on to explain that AMD's Strix Halo APUs aren't as efficient, stating that "AMD's current product is not that competitive either, on a power or a performance-per-watt basis," and that Intel is "focused on integrated graphics performance, primarily for gaming." Much like AMD, Intel produces both integrated and discrete graphics solutions, with the latest Arc GPU rumors pointing to a workstation-grade Battlemage BMG-G31 GPU, which is supposed to arrive later this year in the form of the Arc Pro B70 GPU with 32 GB of VRAM. Currently, the Intel Arc B580 is Intel's most powerful gaming GPU, and that delivers markedly better performance than the AMD Radeon 8060S, depending on the specific workload.

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