Intel's newest foundry tech, Mr. Huang goes to Washington, and tariff uncertainty for Apple and Qualcomm

A full slate of corporate earnings calls this week gave us a look at how President Donald Trump's tariff proposals are percolating through different parts of the tech industry. But before we dive in, let's take a look at Intel's foundry day held this week in Silicon Valley.

Nominally, the news of the day was that Intel has customer interest in its forthcoming 14A process technology in the form of test chips. But the bigger story was the shift in tone from last year, when then-CEO Pat Gelsinger was eager to make claims about process technology leadership. Under the leadership of Lip-Bu Tan, this year's buzzwords seemed to be predictability and reliability.

Naga Chandrasekaran conceded there had been "ups and downs" on 18A process technology and laid out future variants that would be more suited to outside customers. But mostly he seemed ready to assure the assembled crowd of chip designers and other technology partners that Intel will deliver what it says it will deliver, when it says it will deliver it.

Also of interest were a few technologies that take a markedly different direction than TSMC. Probably the most prominent is a new version of EMIB that delivers power directly through the bridge. The general idea behind Intel's bridge technology is to deliver complex packages at lower cost than TSMC's approach that uses larger interposers.

But my general takeaway from the event was a confirmation of what I'd suspected the previous week at TSMC's tech day: The core transistor technology between the two companies is converging go a point that the real fight will be had on packaging, service and capacity. On that last note, Intel took pains to show how much space is has available in U.S. and allied countries.

MR. HUANG GOES TO WASHINGTON

As the leader in artificial intelligence computing systems, Nvidia has been at the center of U.S. efforts to control exports of the technology to China. This week, CEO Jensen Huang made the rounds in Washington. One of his stops was Congress, where he expressed concerns to U.S. lawmakers about Huawei's growing prowess in AI technology.

With most of Nvidia's chips currently off the table in China, Huawei has stepped into fill the market gap. One of Nvidia's biggest concerns has been the erosion of its CUDA developer base in China, which his home to some of the most competitive AI researchers in the world. Huawei has been working to capture those developers at every level of the stack, from its chips (some of which were sourced from TSMC in violation of U.S. export rules) to its CANN software stack.

Are Huawei's current offerings as good as Nvidia's? All indications are that they currently are not. But necessity is the mother of invention, and it seems Huang is arguing that U.S. rules are creating a great deal of necessity among talented inventors.

TARIFFS START TO BITE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

With major tech firms reporting earnings this past week, we got our first look at how tariffs are rippling through the ecosystem.

The somewhat-okay news: Tariffs don't seem to be slowing AI adoption, and Microsoft hinted that, while it may be pulling back on investing data center shells a bit, it continues to buy chips.

But the news was markedly worse for consumer electronics, where Qualcomm's forecast fell short of Wall Street estimates. Apple, meanwhile, said it saw little impact in the just-ended quarter and forecasted about a $900 million hit from tariffs, in the current quarter, thanks largely to leaning on factories in India and Vietnam for U.S.-bound products. But the iPhone maker trimmed its stock buyback compared to last year, leading some analysts to wonder whether Cupertino is battening the hatches for rough seas ahead.

A REMARKABLE RULING AGAINST APPLE

Speaking of Apple, this week a federal judge in Oakland, California handed down a remarkable ruling against the company, referring some Apple executives to federal prosecutors for potential criminal contempt-of-court proceedings and raising the possibility of jail time.

First, some context. This is part of Apple's ongoing dispute with Epic Games, which accused Apple of being a monopolist in federal court. Apple largely won that battle, but U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered that Apple could not prevent iOS developers from providing links to users to pay outside of Apple's in-app payment system, which charges commissions of up to 30%.

Apple's response to that order was to charge developers a 27% commission for such links. When combined with the industry standard of about 3% for payment processing online, the commission would likely add up to roughly what developers pay for using Apple's in-app payment system.

As my colleague on the legal beat Mike Scarcella reported this week, Gonzalez Rogers found that Apple's response was a willful violation of her orders. In a scathing 80-page ruling, Rogers found that an Apple executive's testimony about its response to her order was "replete with misdirection and outright lies."

Apple can still appeal the ruling, and Gonzalez Rogers did not explicitly recommend bringing criminal charges, meaning it will be up to federal prosecutors to decide how to proceed.

I've been covering business for nearly two decades, including several high-profile lawsuits with some of the best legal representation money can buy. And I must say, I have never seen anything quite like this.