[TSMC's N2 Process Capacity Sufficient but DRAM Shortage, Apple iPhone 18 Stockpiling Faces Pressure]

The China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) released data showing that from July 1 to 31, retail sales of new energy passenger vehicles in China totaled 970,000 units, down 2% YoY and down 4% MoM, with year-to-date cumulative retail sales reaching 5.675 million units, down 12% YoY; from July 1 to 31, wholesale of new energy passenger vehicles by producers reached 1.463 million units, up 24% YoY but down 1% MoM, with year-to-date cumulative wholesale reaching 8.251 million units, up 8% YoY. From July 1 to 31, the retail penetration rate of the national new energy market was 64.4%; the wholesale penetration rate of new energy passenger vehicles by producers was 65.3%.

Samsung unveiled the V10 Bonding V-NAND (BV-NAND) prototype and the industry’s first conceptual models of zHBM and zNAND-O architectures at the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) conference held in Santa Clara, California, US. The BV-NAND chip features over 400 layers and adopts a novel wafer bonding architecture to enhance memory density and performance. Compared with the previous-generation V9 NAND, it delivers approximately 58% higher memory density, along with significant improvements in read, write, and I/O performance, meeting the demands of AI systems for higher-capacity, more energy-efficient memory solutions. For the zHBM and zNAND-O architectures, Samsung achieves greater data capacity in a smaller footprint by vertically stacking memory cells. Unlike conventional HBM, which is packaged side-by-side with AI processors, zHBM stacks memory vertically on top of the AI accelerator, thereby shortening data transfer distances, increasing bandwidth, and boosting energy efficiency. Samsung stated that its wafer bonding technology is expected to deliver more than 10 times the memory density of conventional HBM5, improve energy efficiency by 3 times, and reduce thermal resistance by more than half.

Tesla (TSLA.O) announced that the "Terafab" project has officially landed in Grimes County, Texas. Jointly initiated earlier this year by SpaceX and Tesla, the project is the world’s largest chip manufacturing plan, aiming to bridge the massive gap between current global chip supply capabilities and future computing demand. In fact, the predecessor of Terafab broke ground in April at the north campus of the Texas Gigafactory—a new R&D wafer fab. Now the project has been officially upgraded and sited in Grimes County, where it will be developed into an advanced semiconductor wafer fab. SpaceX and Tesla’s combined chip demand is expected to exceed 1 terawatt (TW) of computing capacity, a scale that far surpasses current global supply capability. We deeply appreciate our existing chip suppliers and encourage them to expand their capacity wherever possible, but the widening supply-demand gap in the future is the core reason behind the existence of the Terafab project. Terafab aims to manufacture new computing capacity at unprecedented scale and speed. The project plans to build a vertically integrated factory with over 100 million square feet of manufacturing space, covering fabrication, packaging, and testing of advanced logic and memory chips. Consolidating these processes in a single facility facilitates rapid iterative improvements and accelerates the deployment of new computing capacity.