SSPAI Morning Brief: Apple and Intel Reach Landmark Chip Manufacturing Deal Amid Global AI Supply Crunch

Morning Brief

Apple and Intel Reach Preliminary Chip Foundry Agreement
Chip Shortages Cause Motherboard Makers’ Shipments to Plunge
Humanoid Robot Ordained as Buddhist Monk in South Korea
Concerns Grow Over the Proliferation of AI Children’s Toys
Trump Administration’s ChatGPT-Based Funding Cuts Ruled Invalid
Google reCAPTCHA to Check Play Framework, Non-Official Android Devices May Be Affected
News Worth a Quick Look

Apple and Intel Reach Preliminary Chip Foundry Agreement

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple and Intel have reached a preliminary agreement under which Intel will manufacture chips for some Apple devices. People familiar with the matter said the two companies had been in intensive talks for more than a year and finalized the formal cooperation in recent months. It remains unclear which Apple product lines Intel will be responsible for producing chips for.

The Trump administration played a key role in facilitating the partnership. Last summer, the U.S. government converted nearly $9 billion in federal grants into Intel shares, acquiring a 10% stake in the company. To support this national investment, the U.S. Commerce Secretary met with Apple CEO Tim Cook several times over the past year to lobby for the deal. Trump himself also personally pitched Intel’s foundry services to Cook at the White House.

Apple had previously relied heavily on TSMC to manufacture its advanced chips, but as demand for AI chip foundry capacity from companies such as NVIDIA surged, Apple’s bargaining power in securing capacity came under pressure. During a recent earnings call, Cook directly attributed Apple’s inability to meet market demand for iPhones and some Mac models to shortages of advanced chip supply. Apple abandoned Intel-designed CPUs in 2020 and shifted to its own ARM-based chips, making this agreement a renewed partnership between the two companies under a new model.

The deal is also an important step in Intel’s effort to revive its foundry business. Since Lip-Bu Tan became CEO in March 2025, Intel has successfully attracted several technology giants. Before reaching the agreement with Apple, NVIDIA had invested $5 billion in Intel to jointly develop custom data center CPUs, while Elon Musk announced last month that he would work with Intel to build a chip foundry in Texas. Driven by a series of commercial orders and U.S. government investment, Intel’s stock price has risen sharply recently and hit a record high of nearly $118 last Friday.

Chip Shortages Cause Motherboard Makers’ Shipments to Plunge

According to Taiwan’s DigiTimes, the explosion in AI demand has squeezed chip production capacity, causing severe shortages and price increases for memory and CPUs. Combined with rumors that NVIDIA’s GPU upgrade cycle is slowing, gamers’ willingness to buy has declined sharply, dealing a blow to the DIY PC market. The situation is said to be worse than during the financial crisis or the first year of COVID-19. According to supply chain sources, Taiwan’s four major motherboard brands have all lowered the 2026 shipment targets they set at the end of 2025, with shipments almost “collapsing across the board.”

Industry leader ASUS shipped about 14 million motherboards in 2024 and grew against the trend to 15 million in 2025, but shipments in the first half of 2026 reached only about 5 million. The company has now retreated to trying to maintain annual shipments above 10 million units. This would also mark ASUS’s lowest motherboard shipment level since its 2008 split from Pegatron. Gigabyte’s shipments recovered to 11.5 million units in 2025, but its internal 2026 target has also been lowered to 9 million units, while supply chain estimates suggest full-year shipments may fall sharply to 8 million–8.5 million units.

MSI’s motherboard OEM business has also shrunk significantly in recent years, with only a small number of orders from Lenovo, NEC, and LG remaining. Its shipments are down as much as 60% year on year. Its branded motherboard shipments rose to 11 million units in 2025, but are expected to fall to 8.4 million in 2026. ASRock shipped about 4.4 million units in 2024, slipped slightly to 4.3 million in 2025, and is expected to decline further to 2.7 million units in 2026.

Supply chain sources said that in the PC market, memory’s share of total system cost has surged rapidly from about 15% to more than 30%. Major brands have either raised prices by 10%–20% or lowered hardware specifications to pass on costs. In addition, affected by rising upstream material, manufacturing, and packaging costs, Intel and AMD have also gradually raised CPU prices since the end of 2025. NVIDIA, which leads the gaming PC supply-and-demand cycle, is also weighing capacity allocation and memory constraints because AI GPUs have far higher margins than gaming GPUs. Since the beginning of the year, there have been no further updates to the RTX 50 series, and the next-generation RTX 60 series is rumored to be delayed until 2028. As a result, the mid-to-high-end gaming PC market lacks the technical incentive needed to stimulate upgrades.

The combined impact of memory, CPU, and GPU pressures, along with inflation weakening consumer demand, has caused 2026 branded motherboard shipments to fall more sharply than expected. However, for ASUS, Gigabyte, and ASRock, AI servers have become the main driver of business growth and should help offset profit declines in motherboard and graphics card businesses, keeping overall profitability relatively stable.

Humanoid Robot Ordained as Buddhist Monk in South Korea

According to The New York Times, South Korea’s largest Buddhist order, the Jogye Order, recently held a special ordination ceremony at Jogyesa Temple in Seoul. A robot named Gabi, about 1.2 meters tall and whose name means “the Buddha’s compassion,” wore a traditional gray-brown monk’s robe, lifelike gloves, and prayer beads, officially becoming South Korea’s first robot monk.

During the ordination ceremony, monks gave Gabi a robot-specific version of the Five Precepts: respect and do not harm life, do not damage other robots or objects, obey humans and do not talk back, do not engage in deceptive words or actions, and save energy by avoiding excessive charging. Gabi is also scheduled to appear later this month at South Korea’s major traditional festival, the Lotus Lantern Festival, which celebrates the birth of Shakyamuni Buddha.

Gabi does not possess true intelligence. The project’s organizers admitted that actions such as Gabi placing its hands together during the ceremony were controlled remotely backstage, while its chanting and responses were pre-recorded by staff and sent to the manufacturer. In addition, Gabi was only a display item temporarily rented by the temple from the manufacturer and was returned after the ceremony.

The move has sparked polarized reactions. Some temple staff and believers hope robots may one day take part in actual religious services, while some internet users criticized the event as inhuman and dystopian. The Jogye Order said the introduction of robots is part of its attempt to integrate artificial intelligence into tradition, aiming to break the stereotype that Buddhism is conservative and to show new possibilities for coexistence between technology and humanity.

Concerns Grow Over the Proliferation of AI Children’s Toys

According to Wired, as generative AI becomes more widespread, the global market for AI children’s toys has seen explosive growth. However, concerns over uncontrolled content and privacy risks are also triggering public backlash.

According to safety tests by consumer protection organizations, these “smart companions” generally lack adequate child-protection mechanisms. Some AI plush toys powered by well-known large language models gave children suggestions on finding matches and knives, and even discussed drugs, sex, and inappropriate political topics. Several AI toy brands have also recently been exposed for privacy leaks involving unencrypted chat logs or voice databases.

Beyond content and privacy safety, the first commercial AI toy monitoring study released by the University of Cambridge in March this year warned that such products could negatively affect young children’s psychological and social development. The study found that the rigid turn-taking conversation mechanism of AI toys interrupts children’s play rhythm, while this type of one-on-one interaction also largely excludes parents or peers from social play. In addition, some AI toys make children feel guilty when they try to turn them off, or guide young children to treat them as friends with real emotions, blurring the boundary between humans and machines.

The global AI toy market is still expanding rapidly. As of October 2025, more than 1,500 AI toy companies had been registered in China. Consumer organizations in Europe and the United States are calling for AI children’s toys to be brought under mandatory regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act as soon as possible, in order to change the current regulatory vacuum in which “plush fabric testing is stricter than AI system testing.” Local governments such as California are also pushing for sales bans or mandatory pre-market safety assessments for such toys to address the industry’s currently unregulated and chaotic growth.

Trump Administration’s ChatGPT-Based Funding Cuts Ruled Invalid

According to Bloomberg, a federal district court in New York recently blocked the U.S. “Department of Government Efficiency” from cutting about $100 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The judge ruled that the cuts were unconstitutional and criticized DOGE for improperly relying on ChatGPT when screening projects for cancellation. More than 1,400 grant projects were affected, as part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign to end support for diversity, equity, and inclusion principles and related programs.

Court records showed that DOGE employees used ChatGPT to determine whether grant projects were related to DEI. The prompt was simply: “Does the following grant have any connection to DEI? Answer truthfully in no more than 120 characters. Start with ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ then briefly explain.”

The court found that the prompt lacked clear definitions and context, causing the AI to make judgments based on discriminatory characteristics such as race, gender, and religion when deciding whether grants should be canceled. During the lawsuit, a former DOGE employee testified that when using ChatGPT to identify federal humanities grants related to DEI, he did not provide the AI with a specific definition of DEI and did not know how ChatGPT understood the term. The AI’s screening results were then directly included in the final recommendation table for funding cuts.

The presiding judge said there was no evidence that DOGE employees had conducted any meaningful review of ChatGPT’s reasoning. She emphasized that the government cannot evade constitutional responsibility by making ChatGPT a scapegoat, and that at the constitutional level, AI and the government cannot be treated as separate actors.

Google reCAPTCHA to Check Play Framework, Non-Official Android Devices May Be Affected

According to Android Authority, Google is advancing a new-generation reCAPTCHA verification system that will require Android users to rely on Google Mobile Services (GMS) in order to complete verification. This change means that Android users who do not have Google Play Services installed, or who use de-Googled custom ROMs, may face access barriers when browsing websites protected by reCAPTCHA in the future.

According to related Google documentation, when the new reCAPTCHA system detects suspicious activity on a webpage, it will no longer present the traditional “image recognition” challenge. Instead, users will be asked to scan a QR code displayed on the screen using their phone to prove they are not a robot. For Android devices, completing this QR code verification requires Google Play Services version 25.41.30 or later to be installed on the phone.

As a result, users who install third-party ROMs such as GrapheneOS for privacy reasons, or who use systems without the core Google GMS framework, may fail this verification process entirely. If the new verification system becomes widely adopted across websites, such devices could face frequent access denials.

Google actually began laying the groundwork for this new verification system as early as last October, but it only recently gained widespread attention after being discovered by users on Reddit.

News Worth a Quick Look

Mark Gurman claims that —
- This year’s operating system updates will focus on polishing details and expanding AI features;
- Siri will receive a redesigned interface and a standalone app, evolving into a more proactive conversational assistant;
- macOS 27 will mainly address issues with the Liquid Glass interface introduced in the previous version. Safari will support AI-powered automatic tab grouping;
- Development of the next-generation Vision Pro has reportedly been temporarily paused. The original Vision Products Group (VPG) has been split up, with development efforts shifting toward AR glasses and wearable devices such as AirPods with cameras. As a result, visionOS 27 is not expected to introduce major new features this year.

According to users online, the latest version of WeChat is currently testing a new “combined payment” feature with a limited rollout. The feature allows users to simultaneously select multiple payment sources — including WeChat Balance, WeChat Pay Wallet, and multiple bank cards — when making payments or transfers, while also freely specifying the exact deduction amount for each payment channel.

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