HPC News Bytes – 20260706

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
Welcome to HPC News Bytes, a weekly show about important news in the world of supercomputing, AI, quantum computing and other advanced technologies.

**Doug Black** (0:14)
Hi everyone, welcome to HPC News Bytes. I'm Doug Black, and with me of course is Shahin Khan.
Chip making is an enormously complex process, as we all know, that requires on-site integration and tuning and constant supervision. There's been no product that just stamps out chips.
Well, not surprisingly, people have been thinking about that, and Fab2, a semiconductor startup co-founded by chip architect Jim Keller, wants to address a part of that need. Originally formed four years ago as Atomic Semi in San Francisco, Keller's startup just expanded into Texas and rebranded itself as Fab2, as in Fab Fab, as in a fab whose product is the production of a complete fab. It sounds like a great idea because we all know the world needs more chips and that means more fabs. But the complexity of a fab is a function of how high end the fab is. For something like EUV lithography, the complexity demands the 18-wheeler-sized EUV equipment that only ASML produces. Clearly, that's not the market that Fab2 and Jim Keller are aiming at.

**Shahin Khan** (1:29)
Yes, generating EUV light, super flat mirrors, specialty optics, alignment, cleaning, etc. will keep it complex for a while. But if you set your sites way lower, say 300 nanometer chips versus 3 nanometer chips, and if you don't need high volume production, then you can pursue it. Fab2 uses electron beam lithography, which is easier and slower, and it targets small batch and low-end chips, say for prototyping, education, special needs, etc.
Now, high-end chips also need super advanced packaging before they can be used. Interposers and substrates, hybrid bonding, power delivery and cooling, maybe HBM integration, etc.,
which need other specialized tool chains from other companies. Chips coming out of a Fab2 style fab would also need work before they can be used. But Fab2 is aiming to make the chip making part of the process more turnkey than it was before. But they're kicking off distributed low-volume chip making. And what they are doing was also super complex at some point in the past. So who knows where that leads.

**Doug Black** (2:44)
At the recent Computex 2026 show, the publication Serve the Home spotted a server based on Arm's upcoming AGI CPU.
The system is by ASRock, the Taiwanese system company, that had revenues of about 1.5 billion last year and operates in some 90 countries. Arm announced earlier this year that it was going to expand beyond licensing and start offering its own chips. Provocatively named AGI chip as an artificial general intelligence is its first in-house server CPU, with Meta reported as an early major customer. The ASRock RAC system is a 1U chassis with one AGI processor. The chip is a TSMC 3 nanometer CPU with 136 Arm Neoverse V3 cores, 12 channel DDR5 memory, 96 lanes of PCIe Gen 6 and CXL 3 support.

**Shahin Khan** (3:46)
It's a nice system. The big news continues to be how the dynamics will work out, as Arm directly enters the server CPU market. It strengthens Arm offerings, but it also creates tension with Arm licensees who might see new competition from upstream. It's a big long-term realignment of the market.
The AGI design seems optimized for dense rack and stack cloud scale deployments. These days, that means running agentic AI inference workloads where CPUs are emerging as having a more, well, central role again.

**Doug Black** (4:21)
The register reports that a Florida startup called Ampera is working on a 3D printed nuclear microreactor module. It would be in the 15 to 30 megawatt range and may have the potential to run for up to 30 years without refueling.
It is described as a 3D printed solid state thorium based reactor with a silicon carbide core and pressure vessel. The unit would be subcritical, which means the core does not sustain the nuclear chain reaction by itself. An external neutron source or neutron driver would be used to control the reaction.

**Shahin Khan** (5:01)
Modular nuclear reactors have been part of proposed methods of generating energy for AI data centers, military applications and off-grid locations.
Several approaches are making progress. This one is a nice milestone, but of course far from a licensed commercial reactor actually producing electricity. At this stage, the claims are pretty ambitious.
Thorium, subcritical operation, silicon carbide 3D printing, no refueling for decades and data center deployment. Every piece needs validation, licensing, safety assurance, and customer acceptance. But the direction towards smaller, denser, more deployable power system is very appealing.

**Doug Black** (5:43)
Then we have news from a clean energy source, hydrogen fuel cell technology, which has not been a big part of the conversation about finding sustainable sources of electricity for energy strapped data centers. News came out last week that Bloom Energy, a leader in the fuel cell field, won a $5 billion deal with the Brookfield Investment Company, expanding their partnership to finance power projects for AI infrastructure. Rogers reported that Bloom has already deployed its fuel cell technology to data centers via partnerships with American Electric Power, Equinix, and Oracle.