Hello world, it’s Friday, September 18th.
Crusoe closed an oversubscribed $3.9 billion Series F at a $30.9 billion valuation, co-led by Atreides, Mubadala, and Valor, one of the larger single raises by an AI infrastructure operator outside the hyperscalers. CXMT is standing up a NAND flash R&D line in Beijing to take on YMTC, Jensen Huang says Nvidia will sell twice as many chips in the coming year, CoreWeave upsized its convertible notes to $3.7 billion, and Solidigm is weighing a US NAND fab.
Let’s get into it. — Austin & Vik
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Crusoe Raises $3.9 Billion Series F for AI Infrastructure Expansion
Crusoe has closed a $3.9 billion Series F round, co-led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners. The AI infrastructure company says the capital will fund growth across what it calls AI factories, a category spanning large-scale campuses down to modular Crusoe Spark units, alongside continued development of its Crusoe Cloud platform.
The round is one of the larger single tranches raised by an AI infrastructure operator outside the hyperscalers, reflecting the appetite among sovereign and institutional capital for dedicated compute capacity. Mubadala’s participation brings Gulf sovereign wealth into the syndicate alongside Atreides and Valor, two firms with established positions in technology growth equity.
Vik: Some people view neoclouds as a bad business, but they often provide the ability to deploy and scale AI infrastructure. This know-how is useful when compute is always in a crunch, and those who can help convert watts deployed to tokens, in the shortest time frame possible, are often big beneficiaries in the AI build out.
Austin: What’s cool about Crusoe is they are innovating in ways traditional clouds aren’t, from finding interesting sources of energy to small form factors like Spark.
CXMT Moves Into NAND Flash, Challenging YMTC on Home Turf
According to Reuters, CXMT is establishing a dedicated NAND flash R&D line in Beijing, a direct push into territory that domestic rival YMTC has held largely unchallenged. The Hefei-based company built its reputation on DRAM and has been squeezing Samsung and SK Hynix on that front; adding NAND opens a second competitive axis across the full memory stack. Barron’s argues the pressure falls harder on SK Hynix than on Micron, given Hynix’s heavier exposure to the segments CXMT is targeting. YMTC, for its part, now faces a well-funded domestic challenger rather than just foreign competition. The R&D line is positioned to exploit the current global NAND shortage, giving CXMT a window to build process credibility while demand outpaces supply.
Vik: NAND competition with YMTC is one thing. The bigger signal to pay attention to is that CXMT is going to occupy a share of the global NAND supply. If NAND demand is fully accretive to the top, then CXMT has a new spot. Otherwise, they will take somebody’s market share.
Jensen Huang Sees Chip Sales Doubling; GPU Cloud Rates Climb
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expects to sell twice as many chips in the coming year, citing AI adoption spreading across industries. That projection is already finding support in the market’s pricing behavior. Nebius, the AI cloud provider, raised rates on Nvidia GPUs by up to 21% in October, its second price hike as demand for compute capacity continues to outpace available supply. Nebius lifted prices on Nvidia GPU instances and AMD CPU configurations alike, with the company’s stock rallying on the announcement. Huang offered no specific shipment volume, but the directional claim from Nvidia’s own CEO, paired with a cloud operator charging more for the same hardware, paints a consistent picture without needing much elaboration.
Vik: Do I see chip sales doubling in 2028? Let’s say I do. But its not chip sales in isolation that matters. It is whether the whole AI infra stack - networking, cooling, and power - has equal capacity to keep up with chip growth. This is the difficulty of forecasting in a severely bottlenecked industry… a single forecasting errors brings down the whole model.
Austin: I would think Nvidia has as good of insight as anyone though?
Solidigm Weighs Building a US NAND Fab
Solidigm is weighing building a NAND memory chip factory in the United States, according to Reuters sources, a move that would bring SK Hynix’s storage unit onshore at a time when NAND supply chains are under sustained political pressure. The details, including site, scale, and timing, remain unresolved.
SoftBank Piles On AI Debt as Nvidia Backs Brookfield Infrastructure Fund
SoftBank closed the week with nearly $21 billion in fresh borrowings across new debt deals, while separately expanding its Arm margin loan to $25 billion and boosting a credit line to $6.5 billion, bringing its total AI financing activity well into the tens of billions in a single stretch. A further $10 billion to $20 billion jumbo bond deal is reportedly planned for the following week. Nvidia, for its part, committed $2 billion into Brookfield’s AI infrastructure fund, pairing one of the industry’s largest chipmakers with one of its largest infrastructure backers. The two moves sit in the same week but belong to different firms chasing the same buildout, and neither company appears to be treating current AI capital costs as a reason to slow down.
India Semiconductor Pacts Move From Pledge to Contract at SEMICON India 2026
Tata Electronics signed formal agreements with Nexperia, Fujifilm, and Besi at SEMICON India 2026, converting what had been a pipeline of $12 billion in announced investments into binding commitments. The Nexperia deal carries particular weight: the Dutch chipmaker formalized its India partnership after a public break with its Chinese parent, Wingtech, making Tata its anchor relationship in the region. ASML simultaneously deepened its support for the Tata Electronics fab and said it expects India’s semiconductor market to reach $120 billion by 2030. Infineon’s CEO told the Economic Times that India’s chip program is more comprehensive than most national efforts, with the company expanding its engineering workforce here. Renesas added India headcount for global chip development work.
Doosan Commits ₩968B to Copper Clad Laminate as AI Server Demand Bites
Doosan announced on Sept. 17 that it will spend ₩968.4 billion expanding copper clad laminate capacity for AI data centers, a sum equal to 7.92% of the company’s consolidated equity. CCL sits at the foundation of printed circuit boards in server infrastructure, and the scale of this commitment reflects how tight that supply chain has become as AI rack builds accelerate. Samsung Electro-Mechanics is pressing from a different angle, unveiling high-capacity MLCCs engineered specifically for AI server power delivery, targeting the passive-component bottleneck that plagues dense power rails in modern GPU trays. Two Korean suppliers, two different materials, one shared constraint.
Vik: Great to hear about investments for CCLs — the literal foundation on which AI is built. There are stories of lots of delay because of the current lead time which is CCL laminates is closer to 1 year.
Sector Watch
Compute & Edge
Lattice Semiconductor launches the Mach-N2 FPGA with post-quantum security features, targeting secure control applications in the quantum-computing transition era. (The Elec)
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ASUS launches the Ascent QN10 mini PC powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite, delivering 80 TOPS of on-device AI inference. (gHacks)
Foundry & Packaging
Kools develops warpage-suppression bonding technology for Nvidia Rubin Ultra-class ultra-large AI packages, securing a positioning in next-generation advanced packaging supply. (The Elec)
Taoyuan City will sign high-end IC substrate MOUs with Unimicron and Kinsus as its Aerotropolis special zone takes shape, anchoring advanced substrate supply near TSMC. (digitimes)
AnyCasting raises 7.5 billion won to commercialise through-glass via plating processes, advancing glass core substrate technology toward production readiness. (The Elec)
Power & Data Centers
Oracle signs over 1.7 GW of clean-energy agreements, including deals with ENGIE for Texas operations, targeting 100% carbon-free matching for its data center fleet. (ESG Today)
EQT Infrastructure backs a $2 billion small-battery investment programme aimed at cutting power costs for industrial consumers and AI data centers. (Bloomberg Tech)
Optics & Networking
Coherent expands its pluggable optical line systems portfolio, broadening high-capacity transport options for AI and hyperscale network buildouts. (Globe Newswire)
Credo Technology will showcase its 1.6T optical connectivity solutions for AI scale-out fabrics at ECOC 2026, building on its ZeroFlap 224G platform. (Business Wire)
Adtran prepares next-generation optical transceivers and a new control architecture for demonstration at ECOC 2026, targeting AI-era transport networks. (Telecompaper)
Policy & Trade
Infineon bets on RISC-V for its next-generation automotive MCUs, with regional lead Liu Lin confirming a full architectural shift to the open ISA. (Gasgoo)
Winbond shares rise after news of an Infineon supply or partnership deal, signalling fresh demand momentum for specialty memory. (Taipei Times)
UK Parliament launches a Defence and National Security Semiconductor Paper via the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Semiconductors, pressing for sovereign chip capability. (Semiconductor Digest)
PCB & Components
Samsung Electro-Mechanics is on track for a record Q3 as AI-driven demand lifts earnings, with KB Securities maintaining a 3-million-won target price. (Chosunbiz)
EE Times highlights surging engineer demand for COTS capacitors in new-space applications as commercial satellite deployments accelerate component-sourcing rethinks. (EE Times)
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