Semiconductor giants Intel and TSMC are reportedly teaming up.
The two firms are said to have reached a tentative agreement to create a joint venture that will operate Intel’s chipmaking facilities, according to The Information. TSMC will have a 20% stake in the new venture.
Instead of funding its stake with capital, TSMC will share some of its chipmaking practices with Intel employees and train them, added The Information.
The Trump administration reportedly kindled the discussions in an effort to boost Intel’s turnaround efforts. Intel executives are worried about mass layoffs.
The development comes less than a month after investor and entrepreneur Lip-Bu Tan was appointed CEO of Intel. At the time, it was reported that Tan was looking to make sweeping changes at the company.
TSMC declined to comment. TechCrunch reached out to Intel for comment.
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Cognition, the startup behind the viral AI programming tool Devin, has introduced a new low-cost plan to incentivize signups.
When Cognition released Devin last year, the tool quickly blew up on social media for its ability to perform certain software development tasks autonomously. But it soon became apparent that Devin struggled with more complex coding work. Nevertheless, the tool garnered praise from AI founders including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, which substantially raised Cognition’s profile.
Devin became generally available for teams at the eye-watering price of $500 per month. On Thursday — conspicuously weeks after the company reportedly raised hundreds of millions of dollars in fresh capital — Cognition introduced an entry-level option that costs $20, then transitions to a pay-as-you-go plan.
The pay-as-you-go plan could end up being quite costly, depending on how one uses Devin. The initial $20 nets you around 9 ACUs, Cognition’s jargon for computing credits. (ACUs cost $2.25 on the $20 plan, a hike from the $2 they cost on the $500-per-month subscription.) Cognition says that 15 minutes of “active Devin work” is equivalent to about 1 ACU; 9 ACUs only nets around 2.25 hours of work, by that metric — not much when you’re dealing with massive codebases.
But Cognition claims that Devin today — Devin 2.0 — is much improved compared to the December release. Similar to GitHub’s Copilot tool, Devin can now help generate plans for coding projects, as well as answer questions about code with citations and create “wikis” for code with documentation.
Silas Alberti, a member of Devin’s development team, also told TechCrunch that the tool now “gets twice as much work done as before.”
Those claims are best taken with a grain of salt. Even the best code-generating AI today tends to introduce security vulnerabilities and bugs, studies have found, owing to weaknesses in areas like the ability to understand programming logic. One recent evaluation of Devin found that it completed just three out of 20 tasks successfully.
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Microsoft has pulled back on data center projects around the world, Bloomberg reports, suggesting that the company is wary of expanding its cloud computing infrastructure too rapidly.
Microsoft has halted talks for or delayed development sites of data centers in the U.K., Australia, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Illinois, per Bloomberg. A spokesperson told the publication that Microsoft makes its plans years in advance and that the changes demonstrate “the flexibility of [its] strategy.”
As recently as February, Microsoft reiterated earlier plans to allocate more than $80 billion of its cash to capital expenditures in 2025, primarily AI data centers. As Bloomberg points out in its piece, it’s hard to know how much of the company’s recent pullback reflects its expectations of diminished demand versus temporary construction challenges, such as shortages of power and building materials.
Microsoft previously said that it would shift its data center expansion focus for 2025 from new construction to fitting existing facilities with servers and other computing equipment.
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