Ethereum is quadrupling in value this year, Verizon sells Yahoo for $5 billion, and Intel announces a $3.5 billion upgrade to a chip manufacturing plant in New Mexico.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Tuesday, May 4 and I’m your host Alex Coop.
Cryptocurrency ether broke past $3,000 on Monday, setting a new record high that has piqued the interest of finance experts online. Ether, the token transacted on the ethereum blockchain, is up 325 per cent for the year so far. It’s even outpacing a 95 per cent rise in the much more popular cryptocurrency, bitcoin. Experts told Reuters that the launch of ether exchange-traded funds in Canada and surging demand for ether wallets to transact non-fungible tokens such as digital art have also pushed up the price.
It’s happening again! AOL and Yahoo are being once more, but this time to a private equity firm. Wireless company Verizon will sell Verizon Media, which consists of the two tech platforms, to Apollo Global Management in a $5 billion deal. Verizon says that it will keep a 10% stake in the new company, which will be called Yahoo. Long gone are the days when Yahoo dominated the internet at the end of the last century. The deal is expected to close in the second half of the year.
.@Intel CEO @PGelsinger says the company is spending $20 BILLION on two new fabs in #Arizona — #Intel‘s largest investment ever & another $3.5 billion to upgrade its Rio Rancho fab in #NewMexico 🤩 @IntelBusiness @Intel5GNetworks #semiconductor #5G #IoT pic.twitter.com/0veETwWjSa
— 🟣 Evan Kirstel $B2B (@EvanKirstel) May 3, 2021
That was Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger dropping big news in an interview with 60 Minutes last week, confirming that the chip manufacturer is investing $3.5 billion to upgrade a chip manufacturing plant in New Mexico. The move is meant to boost its new processor stacking technology called Foveros. Intel has been trying very hard in recent months to rejuvenate its manufacturing in the face of stiff competition from AMD and a global semiconductor shortage.
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