Donald Trump may be preparing to announce sweeping new semiconductor tariffs at the absolute worst time, the tech industry fears.

On Thursday, Politico reported that a wide range of new semiconductor tariffs, which the tech industry expects will “doom” artificial intelligence innovation in the US, could be imposed in the coming “weeks or months.”

About eight people familiar with the Trump administration’s plans were granted anonymity to discuss how the tariffs might work. They suggested that the framework for tariffs may change as it becomes finalized, but one approach under consideration could “dramatically expand the number of tech products subject to the duties, hitting not just chips but potentially many of the goods made with them, such as gaming consoles or the servers that fill data centers.”

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Impressive as it most certainly is when an amateur fabricates a semiconductor, most of the projects we’ve seen are more demonstrations than workable chips. [Dr. Semiconductor], however, is going much further with his fabrication process, and is already working on a method to bond chips to printed circuit boards. It’s difficult to align a PCB with the pads on the underside of an opaque silicon wafer, however, so as a trial run he’s made and bonded some transparent LED chips.

The starting material for these chips is a gallium nitride (GaN) LED epiwafer, a stacked structure of n-doped GaN, an indium gallium nitride quantum well layer, and p-doped GaN grown on a sapphire substrate. When current passes through the structure, electrons from the n-doped layer and holes from the p-type layer recombine in the quantum well layer, emitting blue light. To make a functional LED from this, [Dr. Semiconductor] needed to make electrical contacts to both the n-type and p-type layers. Making the n-type contact required cutting through the p-type and quantum well layers.

This would normally be done with reactive ion etching in chlorine, but [Dr. Semiconductor] came up with a new process: a 355-nm ultraviolet etching laser causes GaN to break down into gallium and nitrogen, with the resulting cut being cleaned up by a potassium hydroxide etch. To deposit the contacts themselves, [Dr. Semiconductor] formed a photoresist mask, deposited metal (nickel, silver, and titanium) in a sputtering chamber, and used a developer solution to dissolve the mask and lift off the unwanted metal regions.

When [Dr. Semiconductor] applied current between the two contacts, the LED glowed bright blue. The next step was to mount it to a PCB; to do so, he first sliced the wafer into individual LED chips with the ultraviolet laser. He then electroplated indium bumps onto a printed circuit board, positioned the chip above these bumps, added some rosin flux, and melted the indium bumps. This soldered the chip to the board and let the board power the LED.

Like most commercial LEDs, these were blue; most LED assemblies additionally include a phosphor layer which absorbs blue light and emits another color. To create a white LED, for example, [Dr. Semiconductor] mixed cerium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet phosphor powder with clear silicone and spread it over the LED. This absorbs some of the blue light and emits yellow light, and the resulting mixture of blue and yellow light looks white to human eyes.

We’ve previously covered some of the history of LEDs and the phosphors which make them useful. This seems to be the first inorganic LED we’ve seen, but we’ve also seen a few homemade OLEDs.

Thanks to [SpuriousIndices] for the tip!

Amazon’s next pillar could be built on a foundation of silicon.

In a new interview with Fortune, Amazon founder and Executive Chair Jeff Bezos says the company’s custom chip business is on track to become one of Amazon’s most durable businesses, placing it alongside Marketplace, Prime, and Amazon Web Services as a core pillar of the company.

“A few of our offerings have become durable pillars, things like Marketplace and Prime and AWS,” Bezos told Fortune. “What I see right now is that our chips business, our silicon business, is lining up to be our next pillar.”

The comments offer one of Bezos’ clearest public endorsements yet of Amazon’s push to design its own chips for artificial intelligence, an increasingly important strategy as demand for AI computing soars and companies look for alternatives to Nvidia’s dominant processors.

More than a decade of investment

Amazon has invested heavily in custom silicon through Annapurna Labs, the Israeli chip startup it acquired in 2015. The company now develops its own AI chips under the Trainium and Inferentia brands, designed to train and run large language models while reducing costs for customers using Amazon Web Services.

AWS has positioned the chips as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers. AWS has positioned the chips as a lower-cost alternative for AI developers. Anthropic trains and runs its Claude models on Trainium, and OpenAI has committed to consume about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, ramping in 2027.

The company disclosed revenue for its in-house data center chips for the first time earlier this year, and since then its Trainium, Graviton, and Nitro chips have grown to a combined annual run rate of more than $20 billion. Amazon has been pouring billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, including new data centers and custom networking hardware.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly argued that demand for AI computing will remain strong for years, making investments in chips, servers, networking equipment, and power generation essential to the company’s long-term growth.

In an earnings release earlier this year, Jassy signaled plans to pour a record $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, citing “seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites.”

The real potential for Amazon’s chips business could come in going beyond the walls of its own data centers. Jassy wrote in his annual letter to shareholders this year that it’s “quite possible” Amazon will sell racks of its internally developed chips to third parties in the future.

Amazon’s fourth pillar?

This discussion about Amazon’s “pillars” goes back to Bezos’ 2014 letter to shareholders, where he described four characteristics of what he called a “dreamy” business: “Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time — with the potential to endure for decades.”

AWS, Marketplace, and Prime are considered the first three pillars. The question of what could become Amazon’s “fourth pillar” has been debated for more than a decade, with areas including shipping and logistics and Alexa cited as contenders in the past.

The company’s big bet on silicon also was emphasized by Jassy in the Fortune piece. He told the magazine that chips are often the key to computing. “The growth in AI has been so significant, but we have a chips business that we built over the last decade here that is growing very quickly,” he said.

The profile appeared alongside Fortune’s release of its 2026 Global 500 ranking, which placed Amazon at No. 1 for the first time, ending Walmart’s 12-year run as the world’s largest company by revenue after Amazon surpassed $700 billion in annual sales, as reported previously.

Walmart fell to No. 2, followed by State Grid of China, UnitedHealth Group, and Saudi Aramco. The magazine reports that Amazon is on pace to be the first trillion dollar company by revenue.

Amazon reports Q2 2026 earnings on Thursday afternoon. Check back with GeekWire for coverage.