Daily Update - May 26th, 2026

Cool hynix, Qualcomm XPUs, OpenRouter says tokens going vertical

May 26, 2026

On today’s hit list: SK hynix sneaks a cooling block inside the HBM stack (and gives it the ICE acronym), Qualcomm lands ByteDance as its first big AI ASIC customer, and OpenRouter raises $113M at $1.3B as weekly tokens hit 25 trillion.

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SK hynix unveils iHBM in-package cooling

SK hynix introduced “iHBM,” a high-bandwidth memory design that embeds cooling elements directly inside the HBM package to manage heat in AI processors. The company said the structural approach lowers thermal resistance by 30% compared with conventional packaging. SK hynix described the integrated cooling as a way to address heat management at the package level rather than relying solely on external cooling systems. (prnewswire)

Vik: I can’t believe they called it an integrated cooling element (ICE) 😭 — interestingly, the D2D PHY that does all the comms stuff between the HBM and SoC generates the most heat. Moving all those parallel lanes of data is no easy task. And this ICE block is kept on top of the PHY to cool it. Thermal resistance drops by 30%. Expect it in HBM5.
Austin: Will Micron and Samsung have this too? Or are we starting to see some differentiation? I’m always trying to understand if there’s true differentiation between HBM providers or if a bit any vendor is undifferentiated.

Qualcomm lands ByteDance as launch customer for AI data center ASICs

Qualcomm reached a deal with ByteDance to supply chips for AI data centers, per Bloomberg. ByteDance is set to procure “millions” of Qualcomm-built ASICs to support its Doubao AI agent software. The chips are fabbed by TSMC and fall within US export-control compute thresholds, allowing ByteDance to source without tripping restrictions. ByteDance recently raised its AI infrastructure budget 25% to 200 billion yuan (~$29.4B) per SCMP. Qualcomm shares rose as much as 8.3% to a new intraday record on the report. CEO Cristiano Amon had previously hinted at “engagement” with unnamed customers on the post-earnings call last month (Bloomberg)

Austin: One detail buried in the piece was “This deal will help ByteDance turn an already-completed in-house chip design into a semiconductor that’s ready for production, another person familiar with the matter said.”
Qualcomm is acting as the ASIC design-and-implementation partner here?

OpenRouter raises $113M led by CapitalG at $1.3B valuation as weekly token volume hits 25 trillion**

OpenRouter, the AI model marketplace founded three years ago, raised $113 million led by CapitalG (Alphabet’s investment arm) at a roughly $1.3 billion valuation per a person familiar with the round cited by The New York Times, more than double its prior round. CEO Alex Atallah pitched the company as the “Stripe for AI models” — a single access point fronting 400+ models so customers aren’t locked into one provider. OpenRouter says it now processes 25 trillion tokens per week, up from 5 trillion six months ago. The most-used models on the platform over the past week were the open-source DeepSeek and Tencent models, followed by Anthropic’s Claude 4.7 Opus. Other investors in the round include the VC arms of Nvidia, ServiceNow, MongoDB, Snowflake, and Databricks, plus existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures. (NYT DealBook)

Austin: I use OpenRouter personally, so thought this was interesting. 5T → 25T tokens/week in six months… that was from like last November/Dec until now… makes sense! Agents! I am personally also trying to reduce cloud token usage and am instead running AI locally on my “agent computer”, Framework AMD Ryzen Max+ 395. More on that side project coming soon.

Quick Hits

Schneider Electric expects its India data center business to outpace core growth, driven by the AI-fueled buildout of computing capacity. (Reuters)
Xiaomi is pouring resources into AI, in-house chips and EVs, building open-source models and custom silicon to future-proof its hardware empire across product lines. (SCMP)
AI server makers report component shortages so severe that GPU and CPU suppliers now verify every part is available before shipping systems. (X (@dnystedt))