Relationship crisis? The tensions between the two most important chip companies in the world

The intriguing companies in the field, the events you shouldn’t miss and the developments that will shape tomorrow: a new section of Globes will present every week the news from the past week in the high-tech industry.

And this week: this is how Amazon responded to Israeli complaints about being blocked from registering for the live compilation platform Twitch, Nvidia and TSMC are moving away, a lawsuit against the US Department of Defense: the Chinese drone giant claims that it was blacklisted for no substantial reason, and the veteran venture capitalist who leads an investment round of 15 million dollars in the Biltown company.

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1Israeli users were blocked from Amazon’s popular network – this is how she responded

Amazon is the second largest company in the US and as such it reflects the face of American society – it has employees and users who support Israel and there are those who oppose it.

At the same time, and although the company has a pious policy against harming LGBT people, Asians, blacks, women and the disabled – when it comes to Israelis, control is looser, even though the company owns development centers in Haifa and Tel Aviv that bring in billions of dollars. For example, at the beginning of the war, the management the global It followed a policy of not officially recognizing the kidnapped employee Sasha Trupanov, in tolerating anti-Semitic statements in Arab and Muslim discussion groups on the internal network, and also in several incidents against Israel on the streaming platform Twitch (Twitch), which Amazon purchased in 2014.

Twitch, the live broadcasting platform that allows influencers to conduct political conversations, broadcast computer games or record themselves coding software – has blocked the registration of new users from Israel. It was only after complaints arrived that it apologized, removed the block, and claimed that it had disabled the registration of “new users who chose verification by email address in Israel and Palestine following the attacks of October 7, 2023 in order to prevent the uploading of graphic material related to the attack.” The company even admitted that the registration It was closed like that for a whole year “in distraction”, according to her.

Among the community of users on the social network Reddit, Twitch’s response received sharp criticism: surfers claimed that registration from mobile phones was also blocked in many cases – and users simply did not receive the error message; Second, it is hard to believe how such a large company “misses” a key figure such as the rate of registration for the service from one country for an entire year, when these figures are usually carefully examined throughout the year as a measure of the company’s growth.

2Strained relations between Nvidia and TSMC

Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) have been working together for more than thirty years, but the global hunger for graphics processors and artificial intelligence processing power is putting the loyalty between the two companies to the test. About six months ago, the technology site Deinformation revealed tensions between the two companies after it became clear that the launch of Nvidia’s flagship processor, the “Blackwell”, was expected to be delayed due to problems working in a high-voltage environment that characterizes server farms, and soon a battle of versions arose between Nvidia, which plans the The chips, to TSMC that manufactures them – regarding the responsibility for the malfunction. Nvidia engineers blamed TSMC’s new chip packaging technology that packaged different types of chips together, while TSMC officials told De Information that Nvidia rushed the development of its new manufacturing process, which led to the appearance of faults.

Now De Information reveals a mask of pressures and hand bending between the two companies that may signal a new crisis in relations. Nvidia, it is claimed, is exerting heavy pressure on TSMC to develop updated production technology for it, to expand its production lines by tens of percent every year and to build a chip packaging factory especially for it. This, for its part, is having difficulty doing this at the desired pace: the possibility of expanding rapidly within Taiwan is challenging due to the topographical characteristics of the island, burdening it with particularly heavy operating costs, and besides that, it must first of all serve its largest customer, Apple, which precedes Nvidia in terms of business priority. What’s more, excessive requirements such as those of Nvidia, in its opinion, may bring other customers to similar requirements – something that TSMC will not comply with. According to executives who spoke to DeInformation, a conversation between Nvidia and TSMC got so heated that some chip factory executives who were present questioned Nvidia’s importance as a customer.

Therefore, for the first time, Nvidia is also examining the possibility of producing gaming chips – chips with less sophisticated characteristics than those of the artificial intelligence processors – at the Samsung factories in Korea. According to the publications, Nvidia is looking to reduce the production of processors by up to 30%.

3The pro-Palestinian cyber attack masquerading as a credible cyber company

A pro-Palestinian cyber attack managed to create a panic by impersonating a legitimate cyber company. Last October 8, close to the anniversary of the massacre, companies in Israel received an email that was allegedly sent from the Slovak cyber company ESET, which has marketing and sales activities in Israel. The message, which carried the logo of the cyber company, urged users through links to download files allegedly hosted on company servers in order to defend against future attacks.

Cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont, who publicized the attack, claimed that the hackers hosted malicious files on ESET’s servers, indicating that they were able to breach the company’s defenses. Gigtime even claimed that the email made its way more easily to the users’ mailbox due to the fact that it came from real servers in the eset.co.il domain, and that the files stored in the ZIP file were signed by ESET. But not all of them: one file that was not was signed by the cyber company, according to the claim, a malicious Wiper that deals with deleting information from computers or servers, which also tried to create a secondary attack on the Home Front Command website by repeatedly calling its address. The date embedded in the file, according to security researcher Costin Rayo, was the 7.10.2023 at 6:29 – the time of the start of the Hamas attack on Israel.

Apparently, the attackers did not attack ESET’s servers, but the servers of ComScure, which represents ESET in Israel. The company responded: “In the context of the overall attack that Israel is undergoing, and the targeting of attack groups on Israeli businesses and organizations, especially around the anniversary of the events of October 7, a weakness was identified on October 8 in a vulnerable system that allowed the distribution of emails with pro-Palestinian content, including videos of atrocities from the events of the – October 7. We took quick steps to handle the incident, and within 10 minutes we blocked the threat and carried out comprehensive checks to confirm that our customers are safe, and we have not received any inquiries about affected customers our website regularly to proactively prevent threats and protect our customers in every action.”

4The drone company that entered the US blacklist – and sued

The Chinese communication, drone and camera companies have been protesting for a long time about their inclusion on the list of prohibited suppliers in the US due to the fact that they are allegedly in contact with the Chinese security system, not to mention subordinate to it. Now the Chinese drone giant from Shenzhen DJI is going one step further: the company submitted during the weekend A lawsuit against the US Department of Defense alleging that its inclusion in the blacklist was done without a substantial reason and that the classification it received as a “Chinese military company” harms it, according to an AFP report.

In the lawsuit it filed, DJI claims that its inclusion on the Department of Defense’s blacklist resulted in the loss of contracts and damage to its reputation. Treating her as a threat to American national security constitutes a negative stigma for her and nothing more. DJI was also previously blacklisted by the US Treasury Department due to its alleged involvement in the Chinese government’s surveillance of the Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region.

DJI, which dominates the global drone market with a whopping 70% market share, has been trying to woo the US for several years – and in April 2022, after receiving criticism that its drones were serving Russia, it stopped selling its products to the invading army. In Israel, DJI enjoys a contract with The Ministry of Defense to supply thousands of drones, alongside another Chinese company called Otel.

5Ronen Nir’s real estate investment

Veteran venture capitalist Ronen Nir, the senior partner of the American PSG fund that invests in growth companies, is leading a $15 million investment round in Bilton, developer of the popular Beti application for contractors and construction companies. The application encourages the workers and managers at construction sites to report safety failures and possible dangers in order to warn their co-workers, thus standing out from other applications for managing construction workers – such as Connect or Homebase – in the field of safety. In doing so, it generates through an algorithm that processes all safety and quality data a “safety rating” in real time for each construction site and enables companies to improve the work processes at each of the sites.

The company was established under the name Beti and began its operations with a solution based mainly on the field of safety, but changed its name to BiltOn following the addition of additional management products for construction sites such as scanning the faces of employees at the entrance to the site, manpower management, project progress graph, management of suppliers and external contractors , quality control, property delivery protocol and management of tenant files.

According to its announcement, it has reached a scope of activity of 70% of the construction market in Israel, with huge clients such as Shapir Engineering, Ashstrom and Y.H. Demari, and is expanding rapidly in the American market with Hunter Roberts, Pinnacle, Roden, SD Builders. Biltown, which already employs 90 people, was established in 2018 by attorney Omer Slavin, CEO of the company, fourth generation of a family of contractors, Shir Mautner, Dekal Shwartzman and Assaf Gutter. The founders served together as combat officers in the Israel Defense Forces patrol and later managed residential construction projects in Poland and Israel.