The Briefing

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Who says software is dead? Jack Dorsey’s Block today unveiled a new “collaboration workspace”—software people can use to communicate and work together—which Dorsey says aims to reduce “our dependency on Slack and GitHub.” That’s a bit of a provocative statement from Dorsey, who also co-founded Twitter and therefore knows a thing or two about communication platforms (even if he was a dismal CEO of Twitter).

Known as Buzz, the new service will include threads, direct messages and voice capabilities, all of which are available on Salesforce’s Slack, as well as code repositories (presumably like those in Microsoft’s GitHub) and automated workflows. Block says Buzz is designed for use by both people and AI agents, which makes it reminiscent of the flood of social networks for agents that proliferated earlier this year after OpenClaw took off. They don’t seem to have gone anywhere, so it’s a little hard to gauge whether Buzz can get any buzz of its own.

Moreover, Slack is well entrenched, so we’re not expecting thousands of companies to suddenly rip it out of their workforce. Still, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, already facing investor worries about possible AI competition for enterprise software, won’t welcome Buzz. As for GitHub, there is no question it is vulnerable, thanks to its struggles to deal with huge usage sparked by the AI boom.

Buzz has echoes of Twitter, both as a communication service and in its marketing: Its website showed an image with lots of bees buzzing around, which is a little reminiscent of the tweeting bird imagery of Dorsey’s earlier creation. Yes, Dorsey has now adopted both birds and bees as mascots!

TSMC’s Potential Price Rise

Inflation! Forget the price of eggs. The cost of chips is set to rise even further—and we’re not talking about potato chips. The Asian news outlet Nikkei reported on Tuesday that TSMC, the dominant manufacturer of chips in the world, was set to raise prices by up to 10% next year, “to reflect rising costs for materials, manufacturing equipment and construction of new overseas chip plants.”

The report followed one from The Information last week that ASML, the primary maker of chipmaking equipment and therefore a key supplier to TSMC, is planning to raise its prices—by 10% for one of its main equipment models. ASML, which is overwhelmed with demand for its equipment and is expanding its capacity, had room to raise prices, executives acknowledged on an earnings call that day.

The folks at TSMC, which also reported last week, didn’t give any such indication on their earnings call, to be sure—instead CEO C.C. Wei emphasized that TSMC wanted its customers to succeed and therefore “we don’t suddenly increase our price by…4x or 5x,” a reference to the price increases that memory chip makers have passed on lately. But Wei didn’t address the possibility of a much smaller price bump, other than noting TSMC faced “very strong” demand stretching out several years, which is causing it to invest heavily in new capacity.

How would a 10% price increase from TSMC flow through? Remember that its clients include all the major tech firms, including Nvidia, Apple and Google, all of which design their own chips. They’re all struggling to get enough manufacturing allocation at TSMC, so they wouldn’t have much room to push back against a price rise.

The likelihood of higher chip costs would add to other rising prices, including those related to data centers—such as for power—which have bedeviled firms like Oracle. All this is a good reminder of the steep cost of fancy new AI technologies.

In Other News

• Microsoft will spend billions of dollars to purchase new Nvidia graphics processing units that it plans to share withEuropean startup Mistral AI, the two companies announced Tuesday.

• Google on Tuesday announced three new versions of its more efficient “Flash” Gemini models, including one focused on cybersecurity. But the company offered no update on the timing for its long-awaited 3.5 Pro, expected to be its next flagship model.

• Tesla announced on Tuesday that it had added two new Robotaxi hubs in Tampa and Orlando, Fla. That follows the driverless service’s launch in Miami earlier this month, its first expansion in Florida.

• Ant International, an overseas affiliate of Chinese financial technology giant Ant Group, said it had raised about $1.2 billion in a funding round to further expand its global payment network.

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reiterated on Tuesday that the Trump administration supports open source AI software, but does not support the theft of intellectual property. “If we see especially that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft,” Bessent said on Fox Business. “These models have to be held to the same standard that U.S. models are.”

• Shares of Supermicro, a distributor of Nvidia AI chips, jumped 17% in after-hours trading after the company said its June-quarter revenue would be near the low end of its guidance of between $11 billion and $12.5 billion. The low end implied year-on-year growth of about 90%. Supermicro said its gross margin would be much higher than expected.

Today on The Information’s TITV

Check out today’s episode of TITV in which we unpack the AI policy debate that has unfolded around Kimi K3.

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