News from manufacturers

Intel Advances Responsible Business Practices and AI-Driven Growth in 2025–2026 Corporate Responsibility Report

Intel published its 2025–2026 Corporate Responsibility Report, detailing progress in people, sustainability, and technology amid rising AI computing demand. The report covers operational performance and long-term execution across its value chain.

Hands Free, AIs Forward: NVIDIA XR AI Brings Agents to AR Glasses

NVIDIA has released the public beta of XR AI, a framework for developing multimodal AI agents tailored for augmented reality glasses and extended reality devices.

Coherent Breaks Ground on Expanded Texas Facility, Scaling AI’s Optical Backbone

Coherent has broken ground on an expanded manufacturing facility in Sherman, Texas, to scale production of indium phosphide wafers used in optical interconnects for AI infrastructure. The company received a $50 million CHIPS Act grant for the expansion, which is expected to support over 550 direct jobs at full capacity. NVIDIA and Coherent have a multiyear strategic partnership involving a $2 billion investment and a multibillion-dollar purchase commitment.

“When we get to full capacity, this site will support more than 550 direct jobs — and thousands of jobs, direct and indirect.” — NVIDIA

Intel Foundry Details Process Milestones and Future Innovation at VLSI Symposium

Intel Foundry announced at the 2026 VLSI Symposium that Intel 18A-P, a performance-enhanced version of its Intel 18A process, has entered risk production as scheduled.

“Intel 18A‑P, the first performance enhancement in the Intel 18A family, has entered risk production, meeting the timeline first shared with customers and partners last year.” — Intel

HPE AI Factory With NVIDIA Expands for the Era of Agents

NVIDIA and HPE are expanding their AI factory collaboration with the introduction of the NVIDIA Vera CPU, available with HPE Private Cloud AI in 2027. The NVIDIA Agent Toolkit is also now available with HPE Private Cloud AI, and NVIDIA Confidential Computing extends across HPE AI Factory solutions. Additionally, the HPE ProLiant Compute DL380a has achieved certification for NVIDIA Confidential Computing.

“The HPE ProLiant Compute DL394 Gen12 with the NVIDIA Vera CPU will be available in 2027 with HPE Private Cloud AI” — NVIDIA

Fastest, Largest, Strongest: NVIDIA Blackwell Sweeps MLPerf Training 6.0

NVIDIA's Blackwell platform achieved the fastest training times across all seven benchmarks in MLPerf Training 6.0, including new mixture-of-experts workloads. The GB300 NVL72 system delivered up to 1.6x faster training than the GB200 NVL72. NVIDIA submitted results at scales up to 8,192 GPUs, the largest Blackwell-based submission in MLPerf Training to date.

“GB300 NVL72 delivered up to 1.6x faster training than GB200 NVL72 at the same scale.” — NVIDIA

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NVIDIA Blackwell Leads on First Agentic AI Infrastructure Benchmark

Artificial Analysis released AgentPerf, the first benchmark for agentic AI workloads. NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra NVL72 platform achieved leading performance, running up to 20x more agents per megawatt than the Hopper-based HGX H200 system. The benchmark measures concurrent agentic tasks per accelerator and per megawatt.

“NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 delivers the highest performance in the benchmark, running up to 20x more agents per megawatt than the NVIDIA HGX H200 system.” — NVIDIA

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Save Big and Play Bigger: GeForce NOW Summer Sale Brings Major Membership Savings

NVIDIA's GeForce NOW summer sale offers discounts on 12-month memberships, with $35 off Performance and $70 off Ultimate tiers. The service streams games via cloud servers, eliminating local hardware requirements. Guild Wars 3 will be available on GeForce NOW at launch.

“Guild Wars 3 is coming to GeForce NOW, bringing its next-generation massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) experience to the cloud at launch.” — NVIDIA

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For Robotaxis, Safety Must Be Built In, Not Bolted On

NVIDIA announced new robotaxi collaborations at GTC Taipei, including partnerships with Uber, Autobrains, Foxconn, VinFast, and HUMAIN. The company introduced the Halos Operating System, a safety-certified platform for autonomous vehicles, which includes Halos Core (compliant with ISO 26262 ASIL D) and Halos SDK for standardized interfaces.

“Halos Core is the next generation of NVIDIA DriveOS and certified to automotive safety standards.” — NVIDIA

NVIDIA Accelerates Google DeepMind’s DiffusionGemma for Local AI

Google DeepMind released DiffusionGemma, an open model that generates multiple words in parallel for faster text generation. NVIDIA optimized it to run on GeForce RTX, RTX PRO, and DGX Spark systems, achieving up to 4x faster performance than autoregressive models at batch size 1. The model is open weights under Apache 2.0 and runs locally on RTX and DGX Spark.

“DiffusionGemma delivers 1,000 tokens/sec at batch size 1 on a single NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU, 150 tokens/sec on NVIDIA DGX Spark and fastest local inference on NVIDIA DGX Station — roughly 4x faster than an equivalent autoregressive mod” — NVIDIA

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