TSMC Raising Chip Prices for ’27; AI Building Websites-Bots Reading Them; Battery Startup Claims Higher Performance and Energy Capacity; Apps Aimed at US Troops Made by Russians and Chinese

It has already been rumored that Apple will be bumping prices due to increased wholesale prices to them for chips. Most rumors have a $50 to $100 increase on items such as the upcoming iPhones. Now, Apple’s primary chipmaker TSMC says they plan to raise prices by up to 10% starting in 2027. Macrumors.com reports that some manufacturers that buy their chips may only get a 5% bump…and Apple being their biggest customer may be able to keep their own prices from going up again in 2027. All this is due to the insatiable demand of AI data centers gobbling up memory chips, processing chips, and most everything else that goest into consumer electronics. 

You may have seen pitches urging you to use AI agents to build out websites, and to do mundane searches on the web for you. Well guess what? According to gizmodo.com, almost 50 of traffic on the internet is now non-human…that’s from a report put out by Cloudflare that came out earlier this month. If you think that’s a freaky statistic, hold my beer….a study earlier this year found that over 35% of new websites are AI generated, and over HALF are being read by AI and not humans. What a world! You have no doubt used the little AI summary when you have done a Google search…apparently that feature has seriously reduced the traffic to the actual websites below the AI summary. As is the case with some other instances of AI, a lot of the times the summary at the top is dead wrong. Scroll down and check the actual websites…especially if looking at something important like a medial issue. The Mayo Clinic is much more likely to have correct info than ‘Dr Google.’

A startup called Sila is producing next-generation battery materials. They have caught interest of more investors, and just raised another $300 million on top of the $1.3 billion they raised 2 year ago. Geekwire.com notes that they have developed a silicon-carbon material that replaces graphite as the anodes in lithium-ion batteries. The batteries deliver better performance and significantly higher energy capacity than current batteries. With the added cash, they hope to deliver batteries enough to supply 20,000 to 50,000 TVs. The next gen batteries could also be a big plus to drones, hardware deployed to space, robotics, and wearables. 

Researchers at Purdue, West Point, and Florida International University have found that one app in 8 marketed to US troops contains software made in China, Russia, or other foreign states. Wired.com reports that one app used by military personnel to rate living conditions on their own bases include code from Huawei, the Chinese telecom that US regulators flagged as a national security threat in 2020. Two others were built by Russian companies and incorporate the Russian ad service Yandex. The researchers looked at over 220 apps and 64% contained third party code, with 40% collecting and sharing more data than they disclosed in Google and Apple app store listings. The Pentagon has declined comment.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.