ChainCatcher news, according to CNBC, the U.S. Department of Commerce is conducting a national security investigation into the import of semiconductor technology and related downstream products. Official documents call for public comments on the investigation, further confirming that the chip and electronics supply chain will not be excluded from President Donald Trump's tariff plan, although Trump stated on Friday that many of these products are not subject to his "reciprocal tariffs."As part of the investigation, the U.S. Department of Commerce will examine the "feasibility of increasing domestic semiconductor capacity" to reduce reliance on imports, as well as whether additional trade measures, including tariffs, are "necessary to protect national security." The investigation covers a wide range of items, including chip components like silicon wafers, chip manufacturing equipment, and "downstream products containing semiconductors." Semiconductors play a role in nearly all types of modern electronic products, so this investigation has significant implications for Trump's global trade war aimed at boosting U.S. manufacturing.Despite granting exemptions for a range of electronic products, Trump and some of his officials indicated over the weekend that this exemption is only temporary and is part of a separate tariff plan for the industry.

ChainCatcher news, White House officials said that Trump stated that automobiles, steel, pharmaceuticals, chips, and other specific materials will be subject to specific tariffs to ensure that tariffs are implemented fairly and effectively. Trump will soon release a Section 232 study on semiconductors.Previously, a White House spokesperson stated that Trump made it clear that the United States cannot rely on China for critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones, and laptops.

ChainCatcher news, according to NPR, sources revealed that the Trump administration may suspend the original plan to restrict the export of Nvidia H20 chips to our country. The H20 is the most advanced AI chip that American companies can legally sell to China. Previously, the Chinese tech company DeepSeek used the H20 to develop an AI chatbot, prompting U.S. lawmakers to call for stricter export controls.

ChainCatcher news, according to Jinshi reports, the chip company Rapidus, supported by the Japanese government, began testing the production of next-generation chips on Tuesday, marking a key early step for Japan in independently manufacturing artificial intelligence components.It is reported that Rapidus plans to adopt a 2-nanometer process for mass production of semiconductors by 2027, which will theoretically match TSMC in chip manufacturing capabilities. The company's CEO stated, "Developing 2nm technology and mass production is very difficult, and there will be more experiments in the future. We will gradually reduce the error rate step by step to gain the trust of our customers."

ChainCatcher news, due to the surge in demand for Nvidia's AI-specific chips, Nvidia's quarterly revenue has significantly increased, exceeding Wall Street expectations. The company's revenue for Q4 of fiscal year 2025 grew by 78% year-on-year to $39.3 billion, surpassing the market expectation of around $38 billion. Nvidia (NVDA.O) reported a net profit of $22.091 billion for Q4 of fiscal year 2025, while the market expected $19.611 billion, compared to $12.285 billion in the same period last year.Nvidia stated that it expects revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 to be $43 billion, roughly in line with Wall Street's expectation of about $42 billion. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted that the demand for Blackwell is astonishing, as inference AI has added another layer of expansion law—more training computation makes models smarter, and more long-term thinking computation makes answers smarter. Nvidia's stock price rose over 3.5% in after-hours trading.

ChainCatcher news, according to FT, Trump is considering imposing tariffs of about 25% on cars, drugs, and chips imported to the United States. When discussing chips and drugs, Trump stated, "Tariffs will reach or exceed 25%, and they will increase significantly this year." Tariffs may be further increased later this year, with the aim of giving businesses "a little opportunity" to move operations back to the U.S.It added that the final details of the car tariffs may be announced on April 2, having previously stated that the tariffs would take effect on that date.

ChainCatcher news, according to a post by swarms on platform X, the team only holds 2% of the tokens, which is a mistake that allows the price to be manipulated by malicious holders and exchanges.swarms is launching a proposal aimed at increasing the team's token holdings to 10%, which will be achieved by establishing a DAO, and then allowing token holders to join and invest in the tokens.

ChainCatcher news, according to TechCrunch, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated in his CES speech that the performance improvement rate of the company's AI chips has surpassed Moore's Law.He pointed out that NVIDIA's latest data center superchip GB200 NVL72 is 30-40 times faster in AI inference tasks compared to the previous generation H100, and the overall chip performance has improved by 1000 times over the past decade.Jensen Huang emphasized that by synchronizing innovations at the levels of architecture, chips, systems, libraries, and algorithms, NVIDIA is able to achieve progress beyond Moore's Law. He also predicted that as chip performance continues to improve, the costs of high-computation-demand AI inference models, such as OpenAI's o3 model, will gradually decrease.

ChainCatcher news, a technology industry organization urged the Biden administration on Tuesday not to issue regulations limiting global access to artificial intelligence (AI) chips as the president's term comes to an end, warning that such restrictions would jeopardize the United States' leadership in the AI field.The Information Technology Industry Council, representing companies like Amazon (AMZN.O), Microsoft, and Meta, stated that this regulation would impose arbitrary restrictions on the ability of U.S. companies to sell computing systems overseas and would hand the global market over to competitors. The regulation could be issued as early as Friday. In a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, the council's CEO Jason Oxman criticized the U.S. government for "insisting" on releasing the rule in the final days of Biden's term. (Jin Shi)

ChainCatcher news, billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya stated in an online meeting that approximately 8000 Google quantum chips could crack SHA-256.Previously, Chamath Palihapitiya posted on X: "Quantum computing will pose a risk to v1 encryption methods, but the timeline is very unclear and not in the near term."

ChainCatcher news, according to Onchain Lens monitoring, influencer Haliey Welch launched the meme coin HAWK, with internal addresses purchasing 97% of the supply. One newly created wallet bought HAWK for 4,195 SOL and then sold it for 11,616 SOL, making a profit of 1.66 million dollars.The influencer became famous for the catchphrase "hawk tuah" and has over 400,000 followers on the X platform.

ChainCatcher news, the Web3 industry research and analysis platform Web3Caff Research recently released an in-depth report on the ZKP hardware acceleration project Cysic. Web3Caff Research researcher Bob pointed out in the report that zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) have a history of nearly 40 years and are widely used in privacy protection and layer two scaling in blockchain. However, due to high computational resource consumption and slow verification speeds, user growth is limited. Therefore, hardware acceleration has become a key solution. FPGA and GPU have already implemented multiple ZKP products, while the more performant ASIC is considered the "Mount Everest" of the industry due to high costs and uncertainties. Currently, Cysic, as the only team developing ZKP ASIC, has the potential to unlock a market worth billions.The report further points out that ZKP is one of the core technologies of Web3, and ZKP hardware acceleration is still in its infancy. Compared to Cysic, both the current industry methods of operating open-source code libraries to accelerate GPUs and building FPGA clusters are still in the early trial-and-error stage. Cysic provides a user-friendly ZKP acceleration solution and is currently the only product open for testing and pushing to the market, with its testnet having entered Phase 2. Its performance is claimed to be 5 to 10 times faster than GPU acceleration, with plans to launch the mainnet by the end of 2024. Additionally, Cysic's ZK-ASIC hardware products are highly anticipated, with two models expected to be launched in 2025, targeting both enterprise (B-end) and consumer (C-end) markets. Although there are doubts about ZK-ASIC within the industry, from a long-term development perspective, introducing ASIC to establish a ZKP "mining" model could be a key step in promoting ecological development.

ChainCatcher message, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng posted a security alert on X, "If you are using a Macbook with an Intel chip, please update as soon as possible! Stay safe!"It is reported that Apple has confirmed that the macOS system has been subjected to zero-day attacks and has urgently released major security updates for macOS and iOS to fix two vulnerabilities that have already been widely exploited.Apple confirmed in the announcement that these vulnerabilities are being widely exploited on Intel-based macOS systems and urged users across the ecosystem to urgently apply iOS 18.1.1, macOS Sequoia 15.1.1, and the older iOS 17.7.2.

ChainCatcher news, according to The Information, the U.S. Department of Commerce initiated an investigation into TSMC earlier this month to confirm whether it provided chips to Huawei. Subsequently, TSMC stopped supplying chips to the AI company Sophgo, which is affiliated with Bitmain.According to two informed sources, TSMC has cut off chip supplies to the relevant companies. Since 2020, Huawei has been banned from purchasing chips made with U.S. technology, including those produced by TSMC. TSMC stated that it uses U.S. technology in its chip manufacturing process and will comply with U.S. laws.Earlier reports indicated that semiconductor research firm TechInsights claimed that after dismantling Huawei's current high-end AI accelerator chip Ascend 910B, it found that this chip might have been manufactured by TSMC, which also suggests that TSMC may have violated U.S. export controls.

ChainCatcher news, according to Jinshi reports, market news: Nvidia is in preliminary talks with India to jointly develop artificial intelligence chips.

ChainCatcher news, according to market news: The United States is considering restricting Nvidia and AMD from selling AI chips to certain countries. (Jin Shi)