Is The CHIPS Act Crushed? || Tech Field Day News Rundown: March 12, 2025

We’ve spoken at length about the CHIPS Act for the past year or so and you know that we’ve been big proponents of bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the US. The latest news from the federal governement isn’t so rosy though. According to reports, the current administration is trying to find ways to prevent the funding for the act from being disbursed. Options floated include firing the staff at NIST responsible for sending out the money as well as clawing back the funding for “non-performance” which is the only way for the money to be returned to the government. The news comes as the administration is contemplating tariffs on TSMC even after the announcement of $100 billion in US funding.

3:26 – VAST Data Business Update

A few weeks back, VAST Data introduced an Event Broker to ingest real-time events, replacing a Kafka cluster. They also added block storage support, making their platform truly unified. Today they’re adding a whole raft of additional features to build a real-time RAG pipeline with proper access control.

9:03 – X Knocked Offline by Dark Storm DDOS

If you had trouble getting onto X/Twitter this week you’re not alone. The social media site experienced issues throughout the day on Monday. The anonymous-aligned hacking group Dark Storm took credit for the distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack that forced the servers offline. According to reports the attackers were even able to bypass the initial efforts to move X services to Cloudlfare to blunt the onslaught of packets. The group also took to their Telegram channel to refute attempts to link their attack to nation states.

13:16 – ASML Opening Chinese Facility

Chip toolmaker ASML is planning on opening a new recycling center in Beijing. This comes amid rising tensions between China and the US regarding sharing of chipmaking tools and intellectual property. ASML says that the facility is designed to refurbish equipment returned from customers and will not be manufacturing net new hardware. The US has been pressuring companies like ASML to abide by an export restriction list to prevent advanced semiconductor technology from showing up in China. ASML is the only supplier of very advanced lithography equipment and is being courted by both sides.

18:18 – Druva Powering Enhanced Azure Data Security

Druva has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft to help bring more data security options to Azure cloud users. Druva has a suite a cloud-focused tools to help protect data including global deduplication, unifed security views across all platforms, and scalability to help manage growing workloads. The Druva Data Security Cloud will soon be availble in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace to help provide ease of installation for customers looking to increase data security.

21:55 – Cerebras Opening New AI Accelerator Datacenters

Tech Field Day presenter Cerebras is starting to deploy more of their AI accelerators in new data centers across the US and France. The latest CS-3 offering from the company has over 4 trillion transistors, 900,000 cores, and 44 GB of SRAM. The largest installation of the CS-3 clusters will be in Minneapolis, which will have 512 of them joined together for an aggregate of 64 exaflops of compute power. Two of the sites in Oklahoma City and Montreal will be owned and operated by Cerebras while the rest will be operated in concert with G42 Cloud.

28:20 – Is The CHIPS Act Crushed?

We’ve spoken at length about the CHIPS Act for the past year or so and you know that we’ve been big proponents of bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the US. The latest news from the federal government isn’t so rosy though. According to reports, the current administration is trying to find ways to prevent the funding for the act from being disbursed. Options floated include firing the staff at NIST responsible for sending out the money as well as clawing back the funding for “non-performance” which is the only way for the money to be returned to the government. The news comes as the administration is contemplating tariffs on TSMC even after the announcement of $100 billion in US funding.