Sony Group said on Tuesday it would invest about $500 million in a joint venture with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co that will build a $7 billion chip plant in Japan. From a report: Construction of the factory, which local media said last month would supply semiconductors to Sony's image sensor business, will begin in 2022, with production slated to begin at the end of 2024, the companies said in a press release. The decision marks a success for Japanese industry ministry officials, who want world No.1 contract chipmaker TSMC to build plants to supply chips to Japan's electronic device makers and auto companies as trade frictions between the United States and China threaten to disrupt supply chains and demand for the key component grows.

"The fab (plant) is expected to directly create about 1,500 high-tech professional jobs and to have a monthly production capacity of 45,000 12-inch wafers," Sony and TSMC said. The plant will produce 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer chips to address strong global demand for speciality chip technologies, they said.

Japan will create a scheme to subsidize construction of domestic chip factories with a new plant planned by Taiwan's TSMC likely to be the first recipient, the Nikkei newspaper reported on Monday. Reuters reports: The government will set aside several hundreds of billion yen under this year's supplementary budget to create a pool of funds at NEDO, a state-run body promoting research and development on energy and industrial technology, the paper said. Companies will be eligible for the subsidies on condition they ramp up chip production in times of short supply, the Nikkei said without citing sources.

The government is likely to subsidise up to half of TSMC's estimated 1-trillion-yen ($8.82 billion) investment for building a chip plant in Kumamoto, southern Japan, the Nikkei said. The plant in Kumamoto, southern Japan, is expected to produce semiconductors for automobiles, camera image sensors and other products which have been hit by a global chip shortage, and is likely to start operations by 2024, the paper said.

"Another space agency, about one-tenth the size of NASA, is thinking outside of the planet-sized box in its search for Martian life," reports CNET: With its Martian Moons Exploration mission (or MMX), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, later this decade will touch down on a world no spacecraft has visited before: Phobos, one of Mars' mystifying moons. Scientists at JAXA, and other astronomers, hypothesize that on this curious moon they may find signs of ancient microbes that were catapulted off the surface of Mars and flung across the cosmos. The remains of these unwitting spacefaring organisms have been untouched for millions of years and, soon, could be plucked from Phobos' face and returned to Earth.

When an asteroid collides with a planet, the planet unleashes a mighty sneeze of dust and rock. The faster the asteroid smashes into the surface, the bigger the sneeze... [I]f the asteroid impact is powerful enough, the sneeze will fling dust and rock into space... Just like a human sneeze contains microbes, the material ejected by a planet may also contain microscopic life — or the remnants of it. If the asteroid death blast doesn't melt the rock and the microbes to mere atoms, there's a chance they can float into the cosmos... Mars is scarred by impacts from drifter asteroids that slammed into the surface over the planet's life. If these impacts were to hit in just the right spot, at just the right angle and just the right time, there's a chance the ejected material would make it to Phobos, Mars' curious, potato-shaped moon. Phobos has the closest orbit of any known moon to its parent body, circling the red planet at a distance of just 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles), about the same as the distance between Tokyo and Honolulu....

Phobos is practically hugging Mars, and moves around the planet so quickly that if you were to observe it from the surface, you'd be able to see it rise and set twice every Martian day. Its proximity to the red planet has led JAXA scientists and engineers to speculate about the potential for finding the remnants of Martian microbes on the moon's surface. "If Martian life once existed and was widespread elsewhere on Mars, the chance that its dead remains exist also on Phobos is, in my opinion, relatively high," says Ryuki Hyodo, a planetary scientist at JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science... It's possible, JAXA believes, that Phobos could be a satellite cemetery, unwittingly holding molecular evidence of long-dead microorganisms....

With a planned sample return date of 2029, MMX would be the first time samples have been returned from the Martian sphere. While the space agency estimates just 0.1% of Phobos' soil likely originated on Mars, there's a chance MMX could bring back the first samples of the red planet to Earth.

The United States Marine Corps and Japan's Maritime Self Defense Force made history last month with an epic flight that relaunched Japan's carrier aviation program. From a report: The flight involving the Japanese aircraft carrier Izumo and American F-35B fighter jets marked the first time Japan has operated an aircraft carrier since 1945. Japan was one of the first pioneering naval aviation powers, but its involvement in World War II saw the destruction of nearly its entire fleet battle force -- particularly the carriers. The flight took place on October 3 in the Pacific Ocean. Two F-35B Joint Strike Fighters operating from Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni took off from mainland Japan, refueled in midair, and then landed on the ship JS Izumo. The F-35Bs landed vertically on Izumo's flight deck and then performed a rolling takeoff. [...] In December 1941, Japan operated the largest and best-trained carrier force in the world. Japan was heavily reliant on its navy for power projection and took a natural liking to the concept of operating planes from ships. The Imperial Japanese Navy built the world's first purpose-built aircraft carrier, Hosho, in 1922. (Other countries, including the United States, built early carriers by using the hulls of other types of ships.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo, written by climate reporter Brian Kahn: In a major announcement at United Nations climate talks on Thursday, 20 countries said they would stop funding fossil fuel development abroad and instead plow money into clean energy. The group of countries includes finance heavy-hitters like the U.S., UK, and Canada as well as smaller players like Mali and Costa Rica. An analysis by Oil Change International indicates that the 20 countries plus four other investment institutions who signed on could shift $15 billion annually from funding fossil fuels to clean energy projects. "The signatories of today's statement are doing what's most logical in a climate emergency: stop adding fuel to the fire and shift dirty finance to climate action," Laurie van der Burg, the global public finance campaigns co-manager at Oil Change International, said in an emailed statement.

[T]he agreement doesn't pull funding from projects already in the pipeline (climate joke, please laugh). Between 2018 and 2020, Oil Change International also found, the G20 kicked an estimated $188 billion to fossil fuel projects in other countries. That's a lot of very recent extraction happening. The lack of financing abroad also doesn't mean a lack of financing at home. The U.S. and Canada, for example, are major oil and gas producers. Without a plan to wind down production at home, the pledge to end financing for fossil fuels abroad is a bit like promising you won't lend your neighbor money for cigarettes while you keep smoking a pack a day.

Some of the biggest smokers -- errr, fossil fuel funders -- on the block also didn't sign on. Those include Japan, Korea, and China, which are the biggest fossil fuel backers in the G20, according to Oil Change International. Together, they account for more than $29 billion in annual fossil fuel development abroad. That's a major lifeline for fossil fuel developers. We also still need more details on the pledge to end funding, including how exactly the 20 countries and banks define fossil fuel funding. Lastly, the world's private banks and investment firms also need to sign on.

Joshua Chou writes via The Conversation: Last month the Australian Space Agency announced plans to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon by as early as 2026, under a deal with NASA. The rover will collect lunar soil containing oxygen, which could eventually be used to support human life in space. Although the deal with NASA made headlines, a separate mission conducted by private companies in Australia and Canada, in conjunction with the University of Technology Sydney, may see Australian technology hunting water on the Moon as soon as mid-2024. If all goes according to plan, it will be the first rover with Australian-made components to make it to the Moon.

The ten-kilogram rover, measuring 60x60x50cm, will be launched on board the Hakuto lander made by ispace, a lunar robotic exploration company based in Japan. The rover itself, also built by ispace, will have an integrated robotic arm created by the private companies Stardust Technologies (based in Canada) and Australia's EXPLOR Space Technology (of which I am one of the founders). Using cameras and sensors, the arm will collect high-resolution visual and haptic data to be sent back to the mission control centre at the University of Technology Sydney. It will also collect information on the physical and chemical composition of lunar dust, soil and rocks -- specifically with a goal of finding water. We know water is present within the Moon's soil, but we have yet to find a way to extract it for practical use.

Although PCs are still selling at a greater volume than before the COVID-19 pandemic, demand is starting to drop. In Q3 2021, shipments of laptops, desktops, and tablets dropped 2 percent compared to Q3 2020, according to numbers that researcher Canalys shared on Monday. Interest in Chromebooks dropped the most, with a reported decline as high as 36.9 percent. Demand for tablets also fell, showing a 15 percent year-on-year decline, according to Canalys. From a report: Both Canalys and the IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker shared Q3 numbers for Chromebooks and tablets on Monday. Canalys said 5.8 million Chromebooks shipped globally during this time, while the IDC said the number was 6.5 million. Both pointed to a huge decline compared to Q3 2020. Canalys reported the drop at 36.9 percent, and IDC pegged it at 29.8 percent. Canalys said that Q3 Chromebook sales took a "major downturn" as the education markets in the US, Japan, and elsewhere became saturated. Demand lessened as government programs supporting remote learning went away, the research group said. After reaching a high of 18 percent market share since the start of 2020, Chromebooks reportedly represented just 9 percent of laptop shipments in Q3 2021.

A team of researchers built a machine learning system to scan satellite images for solar energy-generating facilities greater than 10 kilowatts and then deployed the system on over 550 terabytes of imagery "using several human lifetimes of computing."

Team-member Lucas Kruitwagen, a climate change/AI researcher at Oxford, reveals what they learned. "We searched almost half of Earth's land surface area, filtering out remote areas far from human populations." In total we detected 68,661 solar facilities. Using the area of these facilities, and controlling for the uncertainty in our machine learning system, we obtain a global estimate of 423 gigawatts of installed generating capacity at the end of 2018. This is very close to the International Renewable Energy Agency's (IRENA) estimate of 420 GW for the same period. Our study shows solar PV generating capacity grew by a remarkable 81% between 2016 and 2018, the period for which we had timestamped imagery. Growth was led particularly by increases in India (184%), Turkey (143%), China (120%) and Japan (119%). Facilities ranged in size from sprawling gigawatt-scale desert installations in Chile, South Africa, India and north-west China, through to commercial and industrial rooftop installations in California and Germany, rural patchwork installations in North Carolina and England, and urban patchwork installations in South Korea and Japan...

Using the back catalogue of satellite imagery, we were able to estimate installation dates for 30% of the facilities. Data like this allows us to study the precise conditions which are leading to the diffusion of solar energy, and will help governments better design subsidies to encourage faster growth. Knowing where a facility is also allows us to study the unintended consequences of the growth of solar energy generation. In our study, we found that solar power plants are most often in agricultural areas, followed by grasslands and deserts.

This highlights the need to carefully consider the impact that a ten-fold expansion of solar PV generating capacity will have in the coming decades on food systems, biodiversity, and lands used by vulnerable populations. Policymakers can provide incentives to instead install solar generation on rooftops which cause less land-use competition, or other renewable energy options.
A note at the end of the article adds that the researchers' code and data repositories have been made available online "to facilitate more research of this type and to kickstart the creation of a complete, open, and current dataset of the planet's solar energy facilities."

At an event in Japan today, Toyota unveiled its first all-electric car: the bZ4X. Electrek reports: "bZ" stands for "beyond zero," which is Toyota's latest electrification strategy and a sort of sub-brand for its upcoming electric vehicles, starting with the bZ4X. The electric SUV hasn't been updated much from the concept. It still features some sharp lines and aggressive design. In terms of specs, we finally have more details. Toyota has been clear that every spec it released today is for the Japanese version of the car. Details on the US version are expected to come next month, but it should still give us a good idea.

The vehicle is equipped with a 71.4 kWh battery pack. As for what range it enables, Toyota is only releasing right now "cruising range per charge (WLTC)," which it claims to be 500 km (310 miles) for the front-wheel drive version and 460 km (286 miles) for the all-wheel-drive version. The front-wheel-drive version is equipped with a single 150 kW motor while the all-wheel-drive version is equipped with an 80 kW motor on each axle. The DC fast-charging capacity is apparently capped at 150 kW and Toyota says that it can charge to 80% state-of-charge in about 30 minutes with that capacity.

First off, it's capable of bidirectional charging for vehicle-to-home capacity. It's also offered with an optional solar roof, which Toyota says can "generates electricity equivalent to 1,800 km of driving distance per year." Toyota is also offering the bZ4X with an optional "wing-shaped" steering wheel, which the automaker claims improve visibility. The electric SUV is expected to land first in Japan in mid-2022. More details about pricing, specs and features will be available in the coming months. The news comes after the company said it expects to spend more than $13.5 billion to develop EV battery tech and supply by 2030.

In response to mounting pressure from activists, parents and regulators who believe tech companies haven't done enough to protect children online, businesses and governments around the globe are placing major parts of the internet behind stricter digital age checks. The New York Times reports: People in Japan must provide a document proving their age to use the dating app Tinder. The popular game Roblox requires players to upload a form of government identification -- and a selfie to prove the ID belongs to them -- if they want access to a voice chat feature. Laws in Germany and France require pornography websites to check visitors' ages. The changes, which have picked up speed over the last two years, could upend one of the internet's central traits: the ability to remain anonymous. Since the days of dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms, people could traverse huge swaths of the web without divulging any personal details. Many people created an online persona entirely separate from their offline one. But the experience of consuming content and communicating online is increasingly less like an anonymous public square and more like going to the bank, with measures to prove that you are who you say you are. [...]

Critics of the age checks say that in the name of keeping people safe, they could endanger user privacy, dampen free expression and hurt communities that benefit from anonymity online. Authoritarian governments have used protecting children as an argument for limiting online speech: China barred websites this summer from ranking celebrities by popularity as part of a larger crackdown on what it says are the pernicious effects of celebrity culture on young people. "Are we going to start seeing more age verification? Of course," said Hany Farid, a professor of engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who has called for more child safety measures. "Because there is more pressure, there's more awareness now, on how these technologies are harming kids." But, Mr. Farid said, regulators and companies need to proceed with caution. "We don't want the solution to be more harmful than the problem," he said. Further reading: 'Banning Anonymous Social Media Accounts Would Only Stifle Free Speech and Democracy'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Japanese police on Monday arrested a 43-year-old man for using artificial intelligence to effectively unblur pixelated porn videos, in the first criminal case in the country involving the exploitative use of the powerful technology. Masayuki Nakamoto, who runs his own website in the southern prefecture of Hyogo, lifted images of porn stars from Japanese adult videos and doctored them with the same method used to create realistic face swaps in deepfake videos. But instead of changing faces, Nakamoto used machine learning software to reconstruct the blurred parts of the video based on a large set of uncensored nudes and sold the content online. Penises and vaginas are pixelated in Japanese porn because an obscenity law forbids the explicit depictions of genitalia.

Nakamoto reportedly made about $96,000 by selling over 10,000 manipulated videos, though he was arrested specifically for selling 10 fake photos at about $20 each. Nakamoto pleaded guilty to charges of copyright violation and displaying obscene images and said he did it for money, according to NHK. He was caught when police conducted a "cyber patrol," the Japanese broadcaster reported. "This is the first case in Japan where police have caught an AI user," Daisuke Sueyoshi, a lawyer who's tried cybercrime cases, told VICE World News. "At the moment, there's no law criminalizing the use of AI to make such images." For example, Nakamoto was not charged with any offenses for violating the privacy of the actors in the videos.

U.S. memory chip maker Micron Technology will build a new factory at its Japanese production site in Hiroshima at a cost of 800 billion yen ($7.0 billion), the Nikkan Kogyo newspaper reported on Wednesday. Reuters: The new facility will make DRAM chips, which are widely used in data centres, with production set to begin in 2024, the report said, without citing sources. COVID-19 pandemic stay-at-home demand for electronic devices is causing shortages of non-memory chips that has forced some manufacturers, such as automakers and smartphone makers, to curtail production. That has also reduced sales of DRAM memory chips, but some industry watchers expect demand to rebound helped by an expansion of data centres.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Our new paper in Nature Communications presents a global assessment of how many rooftop solar panels we'd need to generate enough renewable energy for the whole world -- and where we'd need to put them. Our study is the first to provide such a detailed map of global rooftop solar potential, assessing rooftop area and sunlight cover at scales all the way from cities to continents. We found that we would only need 50 percent of the world's rooftops to be covered with solar panels in order to deliver enough electricity to meet the world's yearly needs.

We designed a program that incorporated data from over 300 million buildings and analyzed 130 million km of land -- almost the entire land surface area of the planet. This estimated how much energy could be produced from the 0.2 million km of rooftops present on that land, an area roughly the same size as the U.K. We then calculated electricity generation potentials from these rooftops by looking at their location. Generally, rooftops located in higher latitudes such as in northern Europe or Canada can vary by as much as 40% in their generation potential across the year, due to big differences in sunshine between winter and summer. Rooftops near the equator, however, usually only vary in generation potential by around 1% across the seasons, as sunshine is much more consistent. This is important because these large variations in monthly potential can have a significant impact on the reliability of solar-powered electricity in that region. That means places where sunlight is more irregular require energy storage solutions -- increasing electricity costs. Our results highlighted three potential hotspots for rooftop solar energy generation: Asia, Europe and North America.

Of these, Asia looks like the cheapest location to install panels, where -- in countries like India and China -- one kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity, or approximately 48 hours of using your laptop, can be produced for just 0.05p. This is thanks to cheap panel manufacturing costs, as well as sunnier climates. Meanwhile, the costliest countries for implementing rooftop solar are the U.S., Japan and the U.K. Europe holds the middle ground, with average costs across the continent of around 0.096p per kWh. The report mentions this endeavor would be "extremely expensive," and won't be a solution for some industries that require very large currents and specialized electricity delivery. However, the report concludes by saying: "If the costs of solar power continue to decrease, rooftop panels could be one of the best tools yet to decarbonize our electricity supply."

Microsoft said its Azure cloud service mitigated a 2.4 terabytes per second (Tbps) distributed denial of service attack this year, at the end of August, representing the largest DDoS attack recorded to date. From a report: Amir Dahan, Senior Program Manager for Azure Networking, said the attack was carried out using a botnet of approximately 70,000 bots primarily located across the Asia-Pacific region, such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and China, as well as the United States. Dahan identified the target of the attack only as "an Azure customer in Europe."

The Microsoft exec said the record-breaking DDoS attack came in three short waves, in the span of ten minutes, with the first at 2.4 Tbps, the second at 0.55 Tbps, and the third at 1.7 Tbps. Dahan said Microsoft successfully mitigated the attack without Azure going down. Prior to Microsoft's disclosure today, the previous DDoS record was held by a 2.3 Tbps attack that Amazon's AWS division mitigated in February 2020.

TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, and Sony are considering joint construction of a semiconductor factory in western Japan amid a global chip shortage, Nikkei has learned. From the report: The total investment in the project is estimated at 800 billion yen ($7 billion), with the Japanese government expected to provide up to half the amount. Japan's top auto parts maker Denso is also looking to participate through such steps as setting up equipment at the site. The Toyota Motor group member seeks stable supplies of chips used in its auto parts. Sony may also take a minority stake in a new company that will manage the factory, which will be located in Kumamoto Prefecture, on land owned by Sony and in an area adjacent to the latter's image sensor factory, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The factory will make semiconductors used in camera image sensors, as well as chips for automobiles and other products, and is slated to go into operation by 2024, the people said.

Plans for the facility -- which would be TSMC's first chip production operation in Japan -- come as the global tech industry grapples with unprecedented semiconductor shortages and supply chain disruptions. The Japanese government, which is increasingly concerned about maintaining supply chain stability amid the chip shortage and rising tensions surrounding the Taiwan Strait, will support the project with subsidies, Nikkei learned. In exchange for subsidies, the government will seek a commitment that chip supplies to the Japanese market will take priority.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Nintendo of Europe announced a very region-specific -- and era-specific -- tweak for its upcoming collection of N64 games on Switch: an option to switch between the video standards PAL and NTSC. While the announcement may sound ho-hum to outsiders, anyone in Europe with a vested interest in classic gaming will appreciate what the toggle affords. The issue boils down to differences between NTSC and PAL, the leading video broadcast standards on CRT TVs during Nintendo's '80s and '90s heyday. North American and Japanese TV sets were configured for NTSC, which has a refresh rate standard of 60 Hz, while PAL sets dominated Europe with a slightly higher pixel resolution and a lower refresh rate standard of 50 Hz.

Should you merely watch TV series or films on both NTSC and PAL sets, the difference between each is noticeable yet mild. But for much of the '80s and '90s, many TV video games, especially the ones made by the largely Japanese console industry, suffered in PAL because they were coded specifically for NTSC standards. In order to port them to PAL, developers generally didn't go back and reconfigure all of the timings, especially in the case of early 3D games. Instead, their internal clock speeds were often slowed down to 83.3 percent to match European TV refresh rates. This meant both slower gameplay than originally coded and slower playback of music and sound effects. (These also often shipped with NTSC's pixel maximums in mind in such a way that they were squished to fit on PAL displays, as opposed to being optimized for them.)

Sure enough, last month's announcement of N64 games on Nintendo Switch Online put fear into European classic-gamer hearts. That region's reveal video included slightly slower timings of classic N64 games compared to videos posted by Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Japan, since they were emulating the original European retail releases. At that time, Nintendo of Europe did not immediately reply to social media questions about whether European Switch owners would get an option for 60 Hz N64 gameplay -- especially in an LCD TV era, where such CRT-related restrictions no longer technically apply to most EU and UK TV owners. Monday's announcement confirms that European players will get a 60 Hz option by default for every N64 game in the Nintendo Switch Online "Expansion Pack" collection, along with the option to access a game's original 50 Hz version if it launched with multi-language support. Reading between the lines, we believe this means that if a European N64 game only had English language support, its Switch Online version will be the North American NTSC ROM.

Japan's Fair Trade Commission will investigate whether Apple and Google are leveraging their dominance in the smartphone operating system market to eliminate competition and severely limit options for consumers. From a report: The study will involve interviews and surveys with OS operators, app developers and smartphone users, commission Secretary-General Shuichi Sugahisa told reporters Wednesday. The initiative will explore market conditions not only for smartphones, but for smartwatches and other wearables. The antitrust watchdog will compile a report outlining OS market structure and the reason why competition has remained static. The commission will work with the central government's Digital Market Competition Council, which is moving forward with its own market probe. Practices found to be anticompetitive will be itemized in the report, along with possible violations of Japan's law against monopolies. In February, the government implemented the Act on Improving Transparency and Fairness of Digital Platforms. If officials decide that the law applies to the OS market, OS operators will be told to submit regular reports on transactions to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. In Japan, Apple's iOS commands a nearly 70% share among smartphone operating systems while Android's share stands at 30%. Any developer of apps -- whether they specialize in music, streaming videos, e-books or mobile games -- need to match the software with specifications of the operating systems if they want to appear on smartphones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: Much of the world is unprepared for the floods, hurricanes and droughts expected to worsen with climate change and urgently needs better warning systems to avert water-related disasters, according to a report by the United Nations' weather agency. Global water management is "fragmented and inadequate," the report published Tuesday found, with nearly 60% of 101 countries surveyed needing improved forecasting systems that can help prevent devastation from severe weather. As populations grow, the number of people with inadequate access to water is also expected to rise to more than 5 billion by 2050, up from 3.6 billion in 2018, the report said.

Among the actions recommended by the report were better warning systems for flood- and drought-prone areas that can identify, for example, when a river is expected to swell. Better financing and coordination among countries on water management is also needed, according to the report by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, development agencies and other groups. The report found that since 2000, flood-related disasters globally rose 134% compared with the previous two decades. Most flood-related deaths and economic losses were in Asia, where extreme rainfall caused massive flooding in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Nepal and Pakistan in the past year. The frequency of drought-related disasters rose 29% over the same period. African countries recorded the most-drought related deaths. The steepest economic losses from drought were in North America, Asia and the Caribbean, the report said. Globally, the report found 25% of all cities are already experiencing regular water shortages. Over the past two decades, it said the planet's combined supplies of surface water, ground water and water found in soil, snow and ice have declined by 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) per year. Despite some progress in recent years, the report found 107 countries would not meet goals to sustainably manage water supplies and access by 2030 at current rates.

A global deceleration of laptop sales is being linked in a new report from market research firm Trendforce to increasing vaccination rates and a corresponding decrease in remote work and remote learning. From a report: According to the findings, demand for Chromebooks slid by over 50 percent during one month since July. And notebook shipments for the remainder of the year are expected to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the shifting demand from businesses. Trendforce said that interest for ChromeOS-powered laptops within the last year had primarily been driven by remote learning. The analyst pointed to rising vaccination rates in North America, Europe, and Japan throughout the second half of 2021 as recently slowing demand for Chromebooks.

After being a "primary driver" of overall laptop shipments in the first half of 2021, Chromebook shipments dropped by over 50 percent during one month in the second half of the year. And because Chromebooks represent a "relatively high share" of HP's and Samsung's overall laptop shipments, the OEMs' shipments are predicted to fall by 10 to 20 percent from the first half of the year to the second half. Still, it's not all downhill from here for Chromebooks -- Trendforce still expects a total of 36 million devices shipped in 2021. "The US FCC released the Emergency Connectivity Fund, which totals US$7.17 billion, in July in order to facilitate the purchase of such equipment as notebooks, tablets, and network connectivity devices by schools and libraries," Trendforce said. "This fund will likely sustain the demand for Chromebooks for the next year."

"The global semiconductor shortage that has paralyzed automakers for nearly a year shows signs of worsening," reports the Washington Post, "as new coronavirus infections halt chip assembly lines in Southeast Asia, forcing more car companies and electronics manufacturers to suspend production." A wave of delta-variant cases in Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines is causing production delays at factories that cut and package semiconductors, creating new bottlenecks on top of those caused by soaring demand for chips...

Demand for the components is soaring as more consumer goods become computerized, but supply is scarce because semiconductor factories are extremely expensive and time-consuming to build... The debacle is likely to cost the auto industry $450 billion in global sales from the start of the crisis through the end of 2022, according to Seraph Consulting. Martin Daum, chief executive of the Daimler AG division that makes trucks and buses, described the problem as intensifying. "Until the second quarter we were able to manage the situation quite well at Daimler Truck," Daum said Wednesday. "But since summer the semiconductor situation has worsened for us. Our production in Germany and the U.S. was affected, which led to a situation in which we could deliver fewer vehicles to our customers."

Even automakers such as Toyota and Hyundai, which planned for potential shortages and initially managed to avoid crippling shutdowns, are starting to encounter problems. Toyota this month was forced to slash production at 14 factories in Japan over a lack of semiconductors. Some of the cuts will continue into October due to a lack of components from Southeast Asia, Toyota has said. Ford and General Motors in recent months have been suspending production for weeks at a time at more than a dozen North American factories... [T]he problem is hurting industries beyond autos. "This is having an impact all across the economy, with automobiles, yes, but even beyond that, into medical devices, networking equipment — we're hearing regularly from companies that cannot get the supply they need," one of the Biden administration officials said...

Some chipmakers have taken steps to help auto manufacturers. Taiwan's TSMC, which produces a type of chip called a microcontroller that is widely used by automakers, said it is increasing output of the components by 60 percent this year compared with 2020. GlobalFoundries is adding manufacturing equipment to a factory near Albany, N.Y., to increase output for all types of chips, and recently broke ground on a $4 billion expansion of its factory in Singapore, with financial support from the Singaporean government. Globally, chip factories have increased their production capacity by 8 percent since early 2020 and plan to boost it by over 16 percent by the end of 2022, according to the U.S.-based Semiconductor Industry Association. Global spending on semiconductor manufacturing equipment is likely to grow by more than 30 percent this year to $85 billion, showing that chipmakers are expanding production, according to C.J. Muse, a semiconductor analyst at Evercore ISI.

But that comes after chip companies had "underinvested over the last five years," he said...

Intel on Friday will break ground on two new chip factories in Arizona, on which it plans to spend $20 billion.