Reuters reports: The White House is warning the chip industry to diversify its supply chain in case Russia retaliates against threatened U.S. export curbs by blocking access to key materials, people familiar with the matter said.

The potential for retaliation has garnered more attention in recent days after Techcet, a market research group, published a report on February 1 highlighting the reliance of many semiconductor manufacturers on Russian and Ukrainian-sourced materials like neon, palladium and others. According to Techcet estimates, over 90 percent of U.S. semiconductor-grade neon supplies come from Ukraine, while 35 percent of U.S. palladium is sourced from Russia. Peter Harrell, who sits of the White House's National Security Council, and his staff have been in touch with members of the chip industry in recent days, learning about their exposure to Russian and Ukrainian chipmaking materials and urging them to find alternative sources, the people said.
A "senior official" told Reuters, "We understand that other sources of key products are available and stand ready to work with our companies to help them identify and diversify their supplies."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the story.

"When Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh were sophomores at Texas A&M University, they decided to get into the business of mining bitcoin on the oil fields of East Texas," reports CNBC: Whitehead, an engineer hailing from a family with a long history in oil and gas production, and Lohstroh, a finance major with a bitcoin obsession, ignored the skeptics, and sunk all the cash they had earned from their high school side gigs in lawn care and landscaping into Giga Energy Solutions, a company that mints bitcoin from stranded natural gas.

For years, oil and gas companies have struggled with the problem of what to do when they accidentally hit a natural gas formation while drilling for oil. Whereas oil can easily be trucked out to a remote destination, gas delivery requires a pipeline. If a drilling site is right next door to a pipeline, they chuck the gas in and take whatever cash the buyer on the other end is willing to pay that day. But if it's 20 miles from a pipeline, drillers often burn it off, or flare it. That is why you will typically see flames rising from oil fields. Beyond the environmental implications of flare gas, drillers are also, in effect, burning cash. To these two 23-year-old Aggie alums, it was a big problem with an obvious solution.

Giga places a shipping container full of thousands of bitcoin miners on an oil well, then diverts the natural gas into generators, which convert the gas into electricity that is then used to power the miners. The process reduces CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% compared to continued flaring, according to research from Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems. "Growing up, I always saw flares, just being in the oil and gas industry. I knew how wasteful it was," Whitehead told CNBC on the sidelines of the North American Prospect Expo summit in Houston, a flagship event for the industry. "It's a new way to not only lower emissions but to monetize gas." Whitehead tells CNBC they have signed deals with more than 20 oil and gas companies, four of which are publicly traded. Giga also says they're also in talks with sovereign wealth funds, and they are expanding, fast.

Giga's 11-person team is adding another six employees this month.... Giga tells CNBC that its revenue was more than $4 million in 2021, and it's on track to earn more than $20 million by the end of 2022. Whitehead says that some of their mining sites have helped to revitalize the local economy by creating jobs, such as field technicians and bitcoin pumpers, who go out to check the sites. In the small communities where they've set up a bitcoin mine, they are sometimes the largest source of revenue. "An area that was just a ghost town has now found ways to take their stranded energy that they were wasting and monetize it, and that's what gets me excited, because like that's what is helping the community overall," said Whitehead.

The Linux 5.18 kernel is adding support this spring for the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface to make better decisions about where to place given work among available CPU cores/threads, reports Phoronix.

This is significant because Intel's Alder Lake CPUs "are the first x86-64 processors to embrace a hybrid paradigm with two separate CPU architectures on the same die," explains Hot Hardware: These two separate CPU architectures have different strengths and capabilities. The Golden Cove "performance cores" (or P-cores) feature Intel's latest high-performance desktop CPU architecture, and they are blisteringly fast. Meanwhile, the Gracemont "efficiency cores" (or E-cores) are so small that four of them, along with 2MB of shared L2 cache, can nearly fit in the same space as a single Golden Cove core. They're slower than the Golden Cove cores, but also much more efficient, at least in theory.

The idea is that background tasks and light workloads can be run on the E-cores, saving power, while latency-sensitive and compute-intensive tasks can be run on the faster P-cores. The benefits of this may not have been exactly as clear as Intel would have liked on Windows, but they were even less visible on Linux. That's because Linux isn't aware of the unusual configuration of Alder Lake CPUs.

Well, that's changing in Linux 5.18, slated for release this spring. Linux 5.18 is bringing support for the Intel Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface, or EHFI...

This is essentially the crux of Intel's "Thread Director," which is an intelligent, low-latency hardware-assisted scheduler.

Engineers at Drexel University have made a breakthrough they say takes [lithium-sulfur batteries] closer to commercial use, by leveraging a rare chemical phase of sulfur to prevent damaging chemical reactions. New Atlas reports: [T]here is one problem that scientists keep running into, which is the formation of chemical compounds called polysulfides. As the battery operates, these make their way into the electrolyte -- the solution that carries the charge back and forth between the anode and cathode -- where they trigger chemical reactions that compromise the battery's capacity and lifespan. Scientists have had some success swapping out the carbonate electrolyte for an ether electrolyte, which doesn't react with the polysulfides. But this poses other problems, as the ether electrolyte itself is highly volatile and contains components with low boiling points, meaning the battery could quickly fail or meltdown if warmed above room temperature.

The chemical engineers at Drexel University have been working on another solution and it starts with the design of a new cathode, which can work with the carbonate electrolytes already in commercial use. This cathode is made from carbon nanofibers and had already been shown to slow the movement of polysulfides in an ether electrolyte. But making it work with a carbonate electrolyte involved some experimentation. The scientists attempted to confine the sulfur in the carbon nanofiber mesh to prevent the dangerous chemical reactions using a technique called vapor disposition. This didn't quite have the desired effect, but as it turned out, actually crystallized the sulfur in an unexpected way and turned it into something called monoclinic gamma-phase sulfur, a slightly altered form of the element. This chemical phase of sulfur had only been produced at high temperatures in the lab or observed in oil wells in nature. Conveniently for the scientists, it is not reactive with the carbonate electrolyte, thereby removing the risk of polysulfide formation.

The cathode remained stable across a year of testing and 4,000 charge-discharge cycles, which the scientists say is equivalent to 10 years of regular use. The prototype battery the team made featuring this cathode offered triple the capacity of a standard lithium-ion battery, paving the way for more environmentally friendly batteries that allow electric vehicles to travel much farther on each charge. The research was published in the journal Communications Chemistry.

At least some nuclear power plants in the US contain counterfeit parts that could pose significant risks, an investigation by the inspector general's office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found. Those parts "present nuclear safety and security concerns that could have serious consequences," says the resulting report (PDF) published on February 9th. The Verge reports: The investigation was conducted after unnamed individuals alleged that "most, if not all," nuclear plants in the US have fake or faulty parts. The inspector general's office uncovered problems with counterfeit parts at a few different plants as part of its investigation. The report also says that the DOE had separately flagged 100 "incidents" involving counterfeit parts just last year. It's a problem that the US will have to crack down on if it moves forward with plans to include nuclear power in its transition to clean energy. Without greater oversight at the NRC, the report warns, the risk of counterfeit parts going unnoticed in the nation's nuclear power plants could rise.

As part of its inquiry, the inspector general's office looked for parts that are illegally altered to look like legitimate products, parts that are "intentionally misrepresented to deceive," and parts that don't meet product specifications. It sampled four power plants across the US and found evidence of counterfeit parts at one of those plants in the midwest. It also points to nuclear power plants in the Northeast, separate from those it sampled, where a "well-placed NRC principal" found that counterfeit parts were involved in two separate component failures.

The NRC might be underestimating the prevalence of counterfeit parts, the report warns, because the regulatory agency doesn't have a robust system in place for tracking problematic parts. It only requires plants to report counterfeits in extraordinary circumstances, like if they lead to an emergency shutdown of a reactor. The report also notes that the NRC hasn't thoroughly investigated all counterfeit allegations. There were 55 nuclear power plants operating in the US as of September 2021, and the inspector general's office sampled just four for its report. NRC Public Affairs Officer Scott Burnell told The Verge in an email that "nothing in the report suggests an immediate safety concern. The NRC's office of the Executive Director for Operations is thoroughly reviewing the report and will direct the agency's program offices to take appropriate action."

A European wide 'supergrid' could cut almost a third from energy costs according to a new study from the UCD Energy Institute. TechXplore reports: Evaluating the capabilities of Europe's energy network, the study, commissioned by SuperNode, found that a pan-European transmission system would reduce energy costs by 32 percent compared to the current approach. The 32 percent cost reduction identified is borne primarily from the expansion of European power flows -- derestricting them to allow the location of renewable generation to be optimized, thereby significantly decreasing the total installed capacity. While this scenario proposes an increase in transmission capacity, the costs were found to be insignificant compared to the cost savings in generation investment over the same period.

This study was an extension of work carried out by SuperNod, based on their Energy Scenario for Europe 2050 modeling -- which aims to predict future energy trends across the continent. Its modelling work, validated and extended by the UCD study and facilitated through ConsultUCD, demonstrates the net benefit of large investment into the development of new transmission assets to ensure more efficient utilization of Europe's renewable resources; highlighting bottlenecks where investment is required, such as higher levels of grid storage. [...] Another key finding from the UCD study is that the existing transmission system is not fit for purpose for Europe's energy future. Without accelerated investment in infrastructure, Europe will face challenges with load shedding, generation curtailment and excessively high emissions. The failure to achieve decarbonisation targets will not just undermine international climate efforts but will adversely affect Europe's economies and ability to compete on a global scale, the report notes. The study has been broken into two parts (PDFs).

Intel's mysterious Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) mechanism for adding features to Xeon CPUs will be officially supported in Linux 5.18, the next major release of the operating system. Tom's Hardware reports: SDSi allows users to add features to their CPU after they've already purchased it. Formal SDSi support means that the technology is coming to Intel's Xeon processors that will be released rather shortly, implying Sapphire Rapids will be the first CPUs with SDSi. Intel started to roll out Linux patches to enable its SDSi functionality in the OS last September. By now, several sets of patches have been released and it looks like they will be added to Linux 5.18, which is due this Spring. Hans de Goede, a long-time Linux developer who works at Red Hat on a wide array of hardware enablement related projects, claims that SDSi will land in Linux 5.18 if no problems emerge, reports Phoronix. "Assuming no major issues are found, the plan definitely is to get this in before the 5.18 merge window," said de Goede.

Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a mechanism for activating additional silicon features in already produced and deployed server CPUs using the software. While formal support for the functionality is coming to Linux 5.18 and is set to be available this spring, Intel hasn't disclosed what exactly it plans to enable using its pay-as-you-go CPU upgrade model. We don't know how it works and what it enables, but we can make some educated guesses. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting this year, the federal government will begin doling out $5 billion to states over five years to build a nationwide network of fast chargers. The plan initially focuses on the Interstate Highway System, directing states to build one charging station every 50 miles. Those stations must be capable of charging at least four EVs simultaneously at 150 kW. Once states have completed the Interstate charging network, they'll be able to apply for grants to fill in gaps elsewhere. The Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, a new agency formed to help the Transportation and Energy Departments administer the program, will allow case-by-case exceptions to the 50-mile requirement if, for example, no grid connection is available nearby.

Funding for the initial Interstate portion of the program will be allocated using a formula that mimics how federal highway grants are distributed. Starting in fiscal year 2022, $615 million will be available to build charging stations, and $300 million will be allocated to set up the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. Ten percent of each year's funding will go toward filling gaps in the network. After the initial $5 billion program is launched, another $2.5 billion in discretionary grants will be available to build chargers in rural and underserved areas.

As part of their plans submitted to the federal government, states will need to ensure that the charging stations will be reliable -- at least one charger per station needs to be working more than 97 percent of the time -- and that they will limit their impact on the electric grid. States are also directed to design stations so they can be easily expanded and upgraded as demand grows and charging rates increase. The new program also encourages states to site chargers near travel centers, convenience stores, visitor centers, or restaurants. To get credit for their Interstate build-out, states will have to install chargers that use the Combined Charging System, also known as CCS. [...] The new program also prioritizes domestic production of chargers, which has already spurred some manufacturers to begin setting up operations in the US. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg says the agency is looking at how people will pay for charging. "Part of this program is going to be a shared standard. If we're going to use taxpayers' dollars to help private actors put in charging stations, then of course we need to make sure the citizen is getting good value out of it. There may be any number of network benefits through loyalty programs. That's fine," he said, "but we've got to make sure... everybody can benefit."

Western Digital said on Wednesday certain materials at two of its manufacturing units in Japan, operated by joint-venture partner Kioxia Holdings, were contaminated and will result in reduced availability of flash storage devices. From a report: According to the company's current assessment, there would be a shortage of at least 6.5 exabytes in flash storage availability. One exabyte equals one billion gigabytes. Western Digital is working closely with Kioxia to implement necessary measures that will restore the facilities to normal operational status as quickly as possible.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Recently, two computer scientists had an idea: if computers use energy to perform calculations, could stored data be a form of stored energy? Why not use computing as a way to store energy? What if information could be a battery, man? As it turns out, the idea isn't as far-fetched as it may sound. The "information battery" concept, fleshed out in a recent paper (PDF), would perform certain computations in advance when power is cheap -- like when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing -- and cache the results for later. The process could help data centers replace up to 30 percent of their energy use with surplus renewable power.

The beauty of the system is that it requires no specialized hardware and imposes very little overhead. "Information Batteries are designed to work with existing data centers," write authors Jennifer Switzer, a doctoral student at UC San Diego, and Barath Raghavan, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. "Some very limited processing power is reserved for the IB [information battery] manager, which manages the scheduling of both real-time computational tasks and precomputation. A cluster of machines or VMs is designated for precomputation. The IB cache, which stores the results of these precomputations, is kept local for quick retrieval. No additional infrastructure is needed."

In the model Switzer and Raghavan created to test the concept, the IB manager queried grid operators every five minutes -- the smallest time interval the operators offered -- to check the price of power to inform its predictions. When prices dipped below a set threshold, the manager green-lit a batch of computations and cached them for later. The system was pretty effective at reducing the need for expensive "grid power," as the authors call it, even when the pre-computation engine did a relatively poor job of predicting which tasks would be needed in the near future. At just 30 percent accuracy, the manager could begin to make the most of the so-called "opportunity power" that is created when there is excess wind or solar power. In a typical large data center, workloads can be predicted around 90 minutes in advance with about 90 percent accuracy, the authors write. With a more conservative prediction window of 60 minutes, "such a data center could store 150 MWh, significantly more than most grid-scale battery-based storage projects," they say. An equivalent grid-scale battery would cost around $50 million, they note.

According to tech reporter and Apple leaker Mark Gurman, Apple is preparing to launch four M2 Macs throughout 2022. MacWorld reports: The first models will likely arrive later in the year, with the redesigned MacBook Air leading the way, followed by a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, 24-inch iMac, and entry-level Mac mini. A DigiTimes report on Tuesday said the 13-inch MacBook Pro may launch at Apple's spring event to usher in the new chip. Like 2021, Apple will be releasing Macs with several different chips in 2022. The M2 will be a successor to the M1, likely with the same 8-core design (four performance cores and four efficiency cores), and the M1 Pro and M1 Max will make their way into more high-end Macs. The first of those, the 27-inch iMac, could arrive at Apple's spring event, with a Mac mini coming later in the year. [...] There's also a new Mac Pro due in 2022 as the culmination of the Apple silicon transition. That would mean every Mac line is due for a refresh this year and nearly every model, with only the recently released 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro escaping without a refresh.

A California newspaper covers "pleas" to the state's governor to delay the closure of a nuclear power plant: On Thursday, Dr. Steven Chu, former U.S. Secretary of Energy under the Obama administration and a Nobel laureate, and more than 79 scientists, academics and entrepreneurs sent a letter to [California governor] Newsom urging him to find a way to keep the plant open because of the necessary carbon-free, clean electricity it provides to the state's electricity grid. Diablo Canyon currently provides about 18,000 gigawatt-hours of clean electricity annually, comprising of about 10% of the state's electricity portfolio....

The letter was sent by the nonprofit foundation Save Clean Energy, which was organized primarily to protest the closure of the nuclear power plant.... The letter details how Diablo Canyon is critical to the state's clean energy goals, which the state is legally mandated to meet, and how it seems unlikely the state will be able to meet those goals with the plant's current scheduled decommissioning beginning in November 2024, when the first of its two Nuclear Regulatory Licenses expires.... The movement to keep Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open has recently gained new traction after a Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology report released in November claimed operating the plant for 10 years beyond its expected closure would significantly help the state meet its clean energy goals.

In a statement sent to The Tribune in December, a spokesperson for Newsom indicated the governor has no intention of delaying the closure of Diablo Canyon. "California has the technology to achieve California's clean energy goals without compromising our energy needs. The pathway is through diverse renewable energy sources, expanded energy storage and grid climate resiliency," Newsom spokesperson Erin Mellon wrote in an email to The Tribune. "Our retail energy providers are already in the process of procuring new energy projects to replace the energy produced by Diablo Canyon."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader gordm for sharing the link

Toshiba will spend roughly 100 billion yen ($873 million) to build a power semiconductor fabrication facility in Japan, with production expected to begin by March 2025, Nikkei has learned. From the report: The new plant will be built on the grounds of Kaga Toshiba Electronics, a chipmaking subsidiary in Ishikawa Prefecture. Toshiba aims to meet the rise in demand for power chips -- used in automobiles, servers and industrial equipment -- that save energy and contribute to lower carbon emissions. All of the production equipment will be compatible with large 300 mm wafers. Compared with a 200 mm wafer conventionally used for power chips, one 300 mm wafer can produce more chips and boost production efficiency. Kaga Toshiba is also installing a 300 mm wafer production line at one of its existing buildings. The line is expected to begin operation between October 2022 and March 2023. Toshiba's investment for these endeavors totals around 130 billion yen. The 300 mm production lines to be installed in the old and new buildings will more than double the Japanese group's power-chip production capacity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Most companies still haven't shifted their entire NVMe SSD lineups to use PCI Express 4.0, but PCIe 5.0 SSDs for PCs are already on the horizon. Storage company Silicon Motion said in a recent earnings call that it expects its PCIe 5.0-capable SSD controllers for consumer SSDs will be available sometime in 2024, opening the door to a wide variety of high-performance drives from different manufacturers. SSD manufacturer ADATA teased some PCIe 5.0 SSDs at CES last month (albeit without an expected release date), boasting of read speeds up to 14GB/s and write speeds of up to 12GB/s using a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller. Current high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs like Samsung's 980 Pro top out at roughly half those speeds.

Other reports have suggested that these PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs are coming later in 2022, but according to the call transcript, that only applies to the latest version of Silicon Motion's PCIe 5.0 controller for enterprise SSDs -- the products that end up in servers and data centers, not what typically ends up in the PC on your desk or lap. Early PCIe 4.0 SSDs for consumer PCs were also demonstrated at CES a couple of years before they became products that you could actually buy. For 2022 and 2023, Silicon Motion will continue to focus on those PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Budget SSDs like Western Digital's WD Black SN770 SE are only beginning to transition to PCIe 4.0, and according to reviews like this one from Tom's Hardware, their controllers and flash memory aren't yet fast enough to benefit much from the extra bandwidth. Silicon Motion also says that PCIe 4.0 SSDs have only become common in pre-built PCs within the last year because of "extensive verification and testing" requirements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had engineered a new rubber-like solid substance that has surprising qualities. It can absorb and release very large quantities of energy. And it is programmable. Taken together, this new material holds great promise for a very wide array of applications, from enabling robots to have more power without using additional energy, to new helmets and protective materials that can dissipate energy much more quickly.

"Imagine a rubber band," says Alfred Crosby, professor of polymer science and engineering at UMass Amherst and the paper's senior author. "You pull it back, and when you let it go, it flies across the room. Now imagine a super rubber band. When you stretch it past a certain point, you activate extra energy stored in the material. When you let this rubber band go, it flies for a mile." This hypothetical rubber band is made out of a new metamaterial -- a substance engineered to have a property not found in naturally occurring materials -- that combines an elastic, rubber-like substance with tiny magnets embedded in it. This new "elasto-magnetic" material takes advantage of a physical property known as a phase shift to greatly amplify the amount of energy the material can release or absorb.

A phase shift occurs when a material moves from one state to another: think of water turning into steam or liquid concrete hardening into a sidewalk. Whenever a material shifts its phase, energy is either released or absorbed. And phase shifts aren't just limited to changes between liquid, solid and gaseous states -- a shift can occur from one solid phase to another. A phase shift that releases energy can be harnessed as a power source, but getting enough energy has always been the difficult part. "To amplify energy release or absorption, you have to engineer a new structure at the molecular or even atomic level," says Crosby. However, this is challenging to do and even more difficult to do in a predictable way. But by using metamaterials, Crosby says that "we have overcome these challenges, and have not only made new materials, but also developed the design algorithms that allow these materials to be programmed with specific responses, making them predictable."

In a tech world still hindered by component shortages, choices have to be made. And in the world of laptops, it seems that choice is Windows-based devices over those running Chrome OS. From a report: IDC on Monday released early data from its latest Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. It pointed to a sharp 63.6 percent decline in Chromebook shipments, which the IDC defines as "shipments to distribution channels or end users, in Q4 2021 (4.8 million shipments) compared to Q4 2020 with (13.1 million shipments)." In addition to market saturation, supply issues also hurt Chromebook shipments, as the industry still struggles with a deficit of PC components, from CPUs to integrated circuits for Wi-Fi modules and power management. "Supply has also been unusually tight for Chromebooks as component shortages have led vendors to prioritize Windows machines due to their higher price tags, further suppressing Chromebook shipments on a global scale," Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC's Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers, said in a statement accompanying Monday's announcement.

Backblaze, a cloud storage service that's been running hundreds of thousands of storage drives to keep an eye on reliability, has issued its latest report. ZDNet summarizes the major findings: Over 2021, Backblaze added 40,460 hard drives to its pool of drives, making a total of 206,928 drives in total. Of thee, 3,760 are boot drives and 203,168 are data drives. There's a lot of information in the report to look at, but there are two standout parts from the report:

- The oldest drive is the most reliable: 6TB Seagate drives (model: ST6000DX000) have an average age of 80.4 months (almost seven years) yet incredibly these also have the lowest annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.11 percent.
- Newer drives are also doing really well: 16TB WDC drives (model: WUH721816ALE6L0) and 16TB Toshiba drives (model: MG08ACA16TE) were both added in 2021, and have an AFR of 0.14 and 0.91 percent, respectively.

Backblaze had also been experiencing problems with the 14TB Seagate drives (model: ST14000NM0138) in its Dell storage servers. It seems that following a firmware update the reliability of these drives has improved dramatically. Further reading: Seagate HDDs Top and Bottom Backblaze's 2021 Failure Rates Data (Tom's Hardware)

According to Chinese news outlet Sina, BOE has made breakthroughs in monitor technology and has built the world's first 500 Hz gaming monitor. Tom's Hardware reports: The monitor features a 27-inch, Full HD panel equipped with a high-mobility oxide backplane which is how BOE achieved the blisteringly high refresh rate, with a response time of just 1ms. BOE has ample experience with oxide semiconductor display technology. For example, the company's 500 Hz monitor is significantly faster than the fastest gaming monitors on the market today, from the likes of Asus, Alienware, and Acer, which "only" top out at 360 Hz. Other attributes include accurate 8-bit output and support for an 8-lane eDP signal. Remember that BOE's monitor is a prototype designed for demonstration purposes only. BOE has not stated if it will be making a 500 Hz gaming panel for the mass market anytime soon, so we could be waiting a long until an official monitor arrives in the hands of gamers.

A Charlotte, North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to charges of mail fraud after stealing and reselling merchandise from an Amazon warehouse, the Department of Justice said in a news release. The Verge reports: Between June 2020 and September 2021, Douglas Wright, Jr., an operations manager at Amazon's Charlotte warehouse, allegedly stole products with a total value of more than $273,000, using his access to get computer parts like internal hard drives and processors, according to the DOJ. Wright said in court on Friday that he shipped the products to his home, then sold them to a computer wholesale company in California. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A sentencing date has not been set.

Ohio promised Intel roughly $2 billion in tax breaks and incentives to attract its $20 billion chip-making factory to the state, according to the Associated Press. The state's development director tells them it may be the biggest economic development deal in history.

Intel's hoping it creates a powerful new technology hub in the Midwest, while also eventually addressing an ongoing chip shortage, according to the article. Unfortunately, the factory's production isn't expected to come online until 2025, though "The complex could grow much larger and more quickly, Intel executives said, if Congress approves a $52 billion bill that would invest in the chip sector and help ensure more production in the U.S." Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger said the total Ohio investment could top $100 billion over the decade, with six additional factories, making it one of the world's biggest chipmaking sites....

Ohio's offer includes $600 million to help Intel offset the cost of building the factories, which is more expensive than it would be in Asia, said Lydia Mihalik, the state's development director. The state also will pay nearly $700 million for roadwork and water infrastructure upgrades, including a system that will allow the plant to reuse wastewater. The state Legislature this summer approved a 30-year tax break that will allow Intel to save $650 million.

The state's share will be money well spent because the Intel facility will not only create jobs, but also make Ohio more attractive to industries such as auto, aviation and defense that rely on chips, Mihalik said. "These investments will not only ensure that this project is successful here, but will also be supporting the region by increasing local infrastructure to support future growth," Mihalik said.
The article also cites the Semiconductor Industry Association's estimate that America's share of the world's chip manufacturing has declined from 37% in 1990 to 12% today.