Daily Update - May 28th, 2026
Inference, inference everywhere. EDA for tau scaling, Ayar optical rack, SNOW and XFAB.
A few of this week's biggest stories all point the same direction: everyone is building for the inference and agentic AI era: Furiosa AI, EDA for LogicFolding, Cognition’s $1B. See Ayar’s all optical rack, massive stock boosts to Snowflake and XFAB, and a really cute edge AI board.
Time to dive in.
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FuriosaAI lines up Broadcom for a 2nm, multi-die, HBM4-class inference accelerator
South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI is teaming up with Broadcom to build its third-generation accelerator.
The new design moves Furiosa’s TCP architecture into a multi-die system. It will use a 2nm compute die, HBM4/4E memory, several silicon dies in one package, and Broadcom’s Ethernet and PCIe technology for fast, rack-scale networking. Sampling is expected in the first half of 2028.
FuriosaAI was founded in 2017, raised about $115M across four funding rounds, and reportedly looking for another $300M to $500M before a planned IPO. They turned down an $800M buyout offer from Meta in March 2024 to stay independent. The first-gen RNGD (180W, PCIe, built on TSMC 5nm) is in mass production, and the second-gen chip is also in mass production at TSMC.
CEO June Paik said combining Broadcom’s infrastructure strengths with Furiosa’s architecture and software lets them deliver a full system rather than just a chip.
Peking University publishes a 3D EDA prototype tuned for Huawei’s LogicFolding
One day after Huawei revealed its Tau (τ) Scaling Law and LogicFolding architecture (covered in yesterday’s brief), Peking University’s School of Integrated Circuits announced a prototype EDA tool built to support LogicFolding-style chip designs. EDA tools are the software used to design chips.
The tool uses a “true-3D” method. Instead of designing flat 2D layers and stacking them, it treats a multilayer chip as one single structure from the start. On open-source industry-grade designs, it claims a 30% cut in total wire length, along with better performance and thermal behavior.
(SCMP)
Cognition raises $1B at $26B as Devin’s ARR jumps 13x in a year — inference demand made visible
Cognition AI just raised over $1B in a new round at a $26B valuation. That valuation is more than double its September 2025 round, and the company has now raised over $2.5B in total.
Its main product is Devin, an AI coding agent. Internally, Devin now writes more than 90% of Cognition’s own code. Devin’s revenue has jumped fast:
$37M ARR in May 2025
$492M ARR now, about a 13x jump in 12 months
Goal of passing $1B ARR by the end of 2026
CEO Scott Wu said the new funding lets the company stay independent and keep operating on its own. On model strategy, he said that as the model layer gets more competitive, using a mix of models works better than relying on just one. Cognition runs a blend of its own models plus OpenAI and Anthropic.
Quick Hits
Snowflake is riding the AI data + agentic AI wave hard. They announced a massive $6 billion, multi-year strategic deal with AWS to supercharge enterprise agentic AI adoption. SNOW 0.00%↑ up >30%. (snowflake)
Ayar Labs detailed a production-ready optically connected rack design for AI scale-up, targeting rack-scale systems like Nvidia and AMD’s 72-GPU configurations. (Ayar Labs)
Epiwafer and substrate maker IQE of Cardiff, Wales, UK has completed its fundraising, yielding total subscription proceeds of £81m. (semiconductor-today)
XFAB is getting pumped up by semi trader on X. Stock up 70-80% in one day. Proceeds to drop after. (bloomberg)
Key Data
We have a full episode coming up on the Semi Doped podcast this week about Huawei’s Tau Scaling and LogicFolding where we discuss thermal issues. Turns out Huawei is putting a micropump in Kirin fir cooling. Insane!
Google’s Coral Board
Look at this cute board for running AI on the edge. Available this summer, after Google I/O 2026. (via Google Gemma)