Tech giant ASML has reported a quarterly record in orders of its chip-making equipment, boosting hopes for the sustainability of the artificial intelligence boom and countering fears of an investment bubble. The Dutch firm said on Wednesday that it booked orders worth 13.2 billion euros ($15.8bn) in the final quarter of 2025, more than half of which were for its most advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines. Net sales came to 9.7 billion euros in the October-December period, ASML said, taking sales for all of 2025 to 32.7 billion euros. Net profit for the year was 9.6 billion euros, up from 7.6 billion euros in 2024. ASML Chief Executive Officer Christophe Fouquet said the company's chip-making customers had conveyed a "notably more positive assessment" of the market situation in the medium term based on expectations of strong AI-related demand.

The struggling American chipmaker is betting that a new plant and fresh product line will help turn around its fortunes. After four years of construction, Intel said on Thursday that its Fab 52 semiconductor plant in Chandler, Arizona is now turning out its first chips. The company also shared more details about the long-awaited CPUs that it will be producing in the facility using Intel's brand new 18A process technology. The announcement comes just six weeks after the Trump administration acquired a 9.9 percent stake in Intel in exchange for $8.9 billion in stock. The fab opening, while long in the works, is the first major opportunity for the struggling American chip maker to convince the broader tech industry that it can produce some of the world's most advanced chips at scale--and that the White House's investment might pay off.

A small town in the Netherlands hosts the only factory that produces the only chip-making machines that generate a type of light found nowhere naturally on Earth: extreme ultraviolet, a light emitted by young stars in outer space. This light, known as EUV, is the only way to make one of the world's most valuable and important technologies at scale: cutting-edge semiconductor chips. The factory is forbidden from selling its EUV machines to China. Below we explain how the chips are made, why they have become the focus of the US-China trade wars, how Taiwan was drawn into the maelstrom, and what could come next. The answers take us from deep underground to outer space, from the dirtiest places in the world to the cleanest, from the hottest temperatures to the coldest, from man-made structures smaller than a virus to equipment so large it takes three planes to move, and finally, to a state in physics that is two opposites at the same time.

Whether the topic of the day is Chinese spy balloons or American AI breakthroughs, Washington and Beijing are increasingly seeing world events through the lens of a "tech war." This ever intensifying rivalry is usually framed as "America vs. China," but that misses a key point: America is not alone. America's greatest competitive advantage over China is not wealth or weapons, but the fact that America has a lot of close friends, and China has none. In fact, The only country that has signed a treaty to support China in the event of a war is North Korea, an impoverished pariah state that deliberately schedules nuclear tests and missile launches to embarrass China during high-profile diplomatic summits. Treaty or no, few would describe China and North Korea as friends.

Taipei, Taiwan – China is facing a steeper climb to overtake the United States and its allies in semiconductors as Washington ramps up measures to restrict Beijing's ability to produce advanced chips and secure dominance over the strategic technology. On Wednesday, Washington restricted the sale to China of select Nvidia and AMD advanced graphic processor units (GPUs) used in artificial intelligence applications and supercomputers. The move followed the US Commerce Department's announcement last month of a ban on exports to China of electronic design automation (EDA) software used in the production of next-generation chips. Meanwhile, Washington has been nudging East Asian partners Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan to form a "Chip 4" industry alliance to isolate China from the international tech ecosystem, and bolstered efforts to develop its homegrown industry with the passage of the CHIPS Act, offering $52bn in subsidies to firms that make chips on US soil. "The US is trying to reinforce its central role in the world's semiconductor ecosystem and ensure that China is unable to produce the most cutting edge chips," Chris Miller, author of the upcoming book Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, told Al Jazeera.

Event logs are widely used for anomaly detection and prediction in complex systems. Existing log-based anomaly detection methods usually consist of four main steps: log collection, log parsing, feature extraction, and anomaly detection, wherein the feature extraction step extracts useful features for anomaly detection by counting log events. For a complex system, such as a lithography machine consisting of a large number of subsystems, its log may contain thousands of different events, resulting in abounding extracted features. However, when anomaly detection is performed at the subsystem level, analyzing all features becomes expensive and unnecessary. To mitigate this problem, we develop a feature selection method for log-based anomaly detection and prediction, largely improving the effectiveness and efficiency.

Over the past 12 months, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rallied about 90% as global demand for chips surged through the pandemic. Stay-at-home trends boosted sales of new PCs, data centers installed more chips to keep pace with the surging usage of cloud and AI services, and new technologies -- including driverless cars, automated factories, and 5G networks and devices -- gobbled up more chips. That demand propelled the price of many leading chip stocks, including Qualcomm, Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), and NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), to historic highs. Taiwan's Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM), the world's largest contract chipmaker, also benefited from those surging orders. The global semiconductor market could still expand at a compound annual growth rate of 10% from 2021 to 2026, according to research firm EMR, as companies across a wide range of industries purchase more chips.