TSMC Now Making Apple Watch Chips in the US; DOJ Sues 6 Biggest US Landlords-Algorithmic Pricing; Nvidia- Chips Improving Faster Than Moore’s Law; Tesla US Sales Dropped 5% Last Year

As reported here and elsewhere, under the Biden Administration CHIPS Act, a number of chip plants have been built or are being built in the US. Now, bgr.com reports that the TSMC Arizona plant has started making another chip for Apple. Last year, they started making A16 Bionic chips, and now they are producing the S9 chips for the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2. Right now they are producing about 10,000 a month in the Arizona plant, but expect to up production to 24,000 a month by the next quarter. The 2 chips being made at the TSMC Arizona plant are 4 nanometer, but they plan to bring 3 nanometer tech to the facility, which would enable them to build the A17 Pro, the A18 family, the M3 and M4…and eventually Apple’s M5 chip. The Chips Act has provided subsidies, as right now, it is costing about 50% more to make them here than in Taiwan until they can produce enough volume to be competitive. As Joe Biden might say, this is a big effing deal.

The Department of Justice has sued 6 of the biggest US landlords over ‘algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters.’ According to arstechnica.com, one landlord, Cortland Management, has agreed to a settlement “that requires it to cooperate with the government, stop using its competitors’ sensitive data to set rents and stop using the same algorithm as its competitors without a corporate monitor.” The other defendants are Greystar, LivCor, Camden, Cushman, and Willow Bridge. The DOJ had previously sued RealPage, a software maker accused of helping landlords collectively set prices by giving them access to competitors’ nonpublic pricing and occupancy information. The original version of the lawsuit described actions by landlords but did not name any as defendants. “The amended complaint alleges that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other’s competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms,” the DOJ said. The phrase ‘price fixing’ came up in discussions between the landlords, according to the government’s amended complaint. It will be interesting to see if the change of administration causes the DOJ to back off. Even at that, the suit has been joined by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. 

Unless you are in the tech business or are a real tech nerd, you may not be all that familiar with Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law was coined by the co-founder of Intel Gordon Moore in 1965, and it basically says that the number of transistors on computer chips would roughly double every year, essentially doubling the performance of those chips. This prediction mostly panned out, and created rapid advances in capability and plummeting costs for decades. Now, TechCrunch.com says that Nividia CEO Jensen Huang claims that the performance of his company’s AI chips is growing faster than the historical rates set by Moore’s Law. He told a group at CES “We can build the architecture, the chip, the system, the libraries, and the algorithms all at the same time. If you do that, then you can move faster than Moore’s Law, because you can innovate across the entire stack.” Huang claims that Nvidia’s AI chips are 1,000 times better than what their chips were 10 years ago…a much faster pace than that laid down in Moore’s Law. He says there is no sign of it slowing down soon, either. 

While AI chips are getting faster at warp speed, that’s not the case with Tesla vehicle sales. Elecctrek.co reports that analyst TroyTeslike on X has been one of the most reliable at predicting Tesla quarterly delivery results. Tesla is easily the most opaque automaker when it comes to this metric. Teslike has crunched numbers and says Tesla’s US sales are down by 5% in 2024 compared to the previous year. They are also down about 10% in Europe, but up 8% in China. The drop in the US is tough, since Tesla worked at goosing sales with discounts and incentives…including price cuts and subsidized financing. Although adding the Cybertruck to the line picked up 30,000 more deliveries, the car maker was still down more than 34,000 units in 2024. Electrek.co noted ‘that it might be time for Tesla to start to consider that Elon Musk’s antics are badly hurting sales in the US.’

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