The Pakistani Rupee (PKR) on Friday appreciated by 02 paisa against the US Dollar (USD) in the interbank trading and closed at Rs. 281.90 against the previous day’s closing of Rs. 281.92.
The price of the Euro decreased by Rs. 1.74 to close at Rs. 326.84 against the last day’s closing of Rs. 328.58, according to the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).
The Japanese yen came down by 02 paisa and closed at Rs. 1.89, while the exchange rate of the British Pound witnessed a decrease of Rs. 1.81 to close at Rs. 377.93 against the last day’s closing of Rs. 379.74.
The exchange rates of the Emirates Dirham remained unchanged at Rs. 76.75, and the Saudi Riyal went up by 01 paisa to close at Rs. 75.13.
A technical change in the latest model from Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek could be a big step towards achieving China’s goal of AI self-sufficiency, as it shows a new level of coordination between local model developers and hardware makers, according to analysts and industry insiders.
While DeepSeek did not specify the vendor of the implied chips or whether their use would be in training or inferencing, the wording elicited enthusiasm about an upcoming tech breakthrough that could enhance China’s prospects of cutting reliance on imported AI chips such as the graphic processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia.
DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Separately, Shanghai-listed shares of Cambricon Technologies, a local GPU designer that is a potential challenger to Nvidia, gained 20 per cent on Friday. The stock has more than doubled from a July low, as mainland investors bet on its growing role in supplying domestic AI chips.
In Hong Kong on Friday, shares of Hua Hong Semiconductor gained 18 per cent, while Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp was also up 10 per cent amid hopes that the two chip foundries could do the heavy lifting in producing China’s own GPUs.
SAN JOSE, Calif., August 22, 2025 – Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) will participate in the 2025 Deutsche Bank Technology Conference.
No new financial information will be discussed at this event
Fireside Chat
Thursday, Aug 28, 2025
8:00am-8:35am PST (webcast will be available on investor.cisco.com)
Cisco Speakers:
Mark Patterson, EVP & Chief Financial Officer
Jeetu Patel, President & Chief Product Officer
During the conference, Cisco management and Investor Relations will also participate in Investor Meetings on Thursday, Aug 28, 2025.
About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that is revolutionizing the way organizations connect and protect in the AI era. For more than 40 years, Cisco has securely connected the world. With its industry leading AI-powered solutions and services, Cisco enables its customers, partners and communities to unlock innovation, enhance productivity and strengthen digital resilience. With purpose at its core, Cisco remains committed to creating a more connected and inclusive future for all. Discover more on The Newsroom and follow us on X at @Cisco.
Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco’s trademarks can be found at http://www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word ‘partner’ does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.
When Texas Instruments announced a $60 billion manufacturing megaproject in July, it was a bold bet that companies would want to mass produce foundational microchips on U.S. soil. In August, Apple vowed to do just that.
During the same Oval Office press conference where President Donald Trump announced a 100% tariff on chips from companies not manufacturing in the U.S., Apple CEO Tim Cook upped his companies’ U.S. spending commitment to $600 billion over the next four years, up from an original $500 billion announcement in February.
Part of that spending, Cook said, will go toward making “critical foundation semiconductors” for iPhones and other devices at Texas Instruments’ new chip fabrication plants in Utah and Texas.
In July, CNBC became the first news organization to see the inside of TI’s newest fab in Sherman, Texas. There, full production is on schedule to start by the end of 2025. It’s one of seven new factories the chipmaker is building in the U.S. to provide chips to major customers like Nvidia, Ford Motor, Medtronic and SpaceX.
Although Texas Instruments doesn’t make the world’s most advanced chips, its essential components are found almost everywhere, from smartphones to the graphics processing units powering generative AI.
“If you have anything that plugs into the wall, or has a battery in it, or has a cord in it, you probably carry more than one TI chip in it,” said Mohammad Yunus, TI’s senior VP of technology and manufacturing.
But just one month after TI announced the $60 million project, its shares plummeted 13% following weak guidance and tariff concerns raised in its July 23 earnings call.
“The worry is their end customers. Like in the wake of tariff uncertainty, they don’t know what to expect. Are they stockpiling?” said Stacy Rasgon, senior analyst at Bernstein Research.
It remains to be seen whether demand will remain high once tariff uncertainties calm. Still, shares did recover some ground in August.
“I would position them as more of a tariff winner than a tariff loser,” said Timothy Arcuri, managing director at UBS. Arcuri said TI’s U.S. foundry will allow it to undercut the pricing of its rivals’ Taiwan-made chips.
The market for TI’s chips, however, is not a guarantee. After TI had trouble keeping up with demand during the chip shortage in 2020, Arcuri said TI’s share of the analog market “fell off a cliff.” It went from a high of 19.8% in 2020 to a low of 14.7% in 2024, according to UBS.
TI’s $60 billion megaproject includes four fabs in Sherman, Texas, one in Richardson, Texas, and two in Lehi, Utah. The new fabs will give TI five times the capacity it has today, Yunus told CNBC.
“They’re making a big bet on the fact that they regain share and that demand comes rocketing back,” Arcuri said. “If you don’t regain that share, it’s hard to justify building this much capacity.”
SM1 and SM2, the first two of four new chip fabrication plants being built by Texas Instruments in Sherman, Texas, shown on July 24, 2025.
Graham Merwin
Ramping to 300mm
While TI is well known for its graphing calculators, the company is also responsible for helping revolutionize the electronics industry. In 1958, TI engineer Jack Kilby filed the first patent for an integrated circuit. That paved the way for miniaturizing chips by building all the components of a circuit, not just the transistors, directly into a single piece of silicon.
The majority of TI’s business today comes from automotive and industrial customers that buy the company’s analog and embedded chips. Analog chips process signals like sound, light and pressure, like the temperature on a thermostat or voltage on power management chips that keep electronics safe when plugged in. Embedded chips are typically signal processors and microcontrollers for operating everyday devices, like telling the toaster to ding, the dishwasher to end a cycle or anti-lock brakes to engage.
Unlike the costly bleeding edge 2 and 3 nanometer chips made by giants like TSMC, TI’s chips are made on cheaper, legacy nodes: 45 to 130 nanometers.
That size “is the sweet spot for analog and embedded because they provide the right performance, the power, the voltage that our portfolio needs,” Yunus said.
While each TI chip costs about $0.40, according to Arcuri, they play crucial supporting roles for the world’s most advanced technologies. In a new partnership with Nvidia, for example, TI is developing a chip to drive efficiency in power-hungry data centers.
In 2009, TI made another bold move to help bring the cost of its chips down further. It opened the world’s first 300 millimeter fab for analogchips, re-purposing a memory fab from Qimonda after the chipmaker went bankrupt in the financial crisis.
“That’s what really was the catalyst for TI to have such a cost advantage,” Arcuri said.
The new wafer size gives TI “tremendous cost efficiency” because 300mm can fit “2.3 times more chips in it versus a 200mm wafer,” Yunus said. TI’s been closing and selling off some of its 200mm fabs, and all of its seven new fabs will produce on 300mm wafers.
Texas Instruments senior VP of technology and manufacturing Mohammad Yunus talks to CNBC’s Katie Tarasov in the first of TI’s four new chip fabrication plants in Sherman, Texas, on July 24, 2025.
Graham Merwin
Global supply, Texas growth
TI told CNBC it’s the country’s biggest analog and embedded semiconductor manufacturer, selling tens of billionsof chips each year. About 60% of revenue comes from customers based outside the U.S., with China making up about 20%.
About 75% of TI’s capital spend happens in the U.S., but it also makes chips abroad at fabs in Germany, Japan and China, the company told CNBC. It does testing and assembly in Mexico, Taiwan, the Philippines and Malaysia, where it’s spending $3 billion on two new sites, one of which is now in production.
TI’s global footprint is a benefit in the “dynamic situation” of tariffs right now, Yunus said.
“Our manufacturing across 15 different sites provides us the position to be able to support our customers, no matter where they are and in any political or economic environment,” he said.
Although TI considered building its new sites internationally in places like Singapore, the company ultimately settled on Sherman, Texas. The small city 65 miles north of Dallas has a population of just 50,000 people. It’s also home to a GlobalWafers factory. The Taiwan-based company manufactures the bare silicon wafers that chips, including TI’s, are made on.
Sherman Mayor Shawn Teamann said the city is now “the hub of the Silicon Prairie.”
Teamann’s grandfather worked alongside Kilby at TI in the 1950s. TI first came to Sherman in 1966, but when it announced plans to close its outdated 150mm fab, the city enticed TI to stay with incentives like tax breaks and water discounts.
The plan worked, and in 2021, TI announced it would stay in Sherman with acampus of new 300mm fabs. Now, the first of four 300mm fabs is complete in Sherman. Teamann said the 300mm project has more than doubled the city’s rate of population growth since it was announced in 2021.
As for federal support, TI got $1.6 billion of CHIPS Act funding, and a whopping 35% investment tax credit from Trump’s big bill passed in July.
At the state level, Gov. Greg Abbott has long offered incentives to chip companies willing to build in the state, from low taxes to the $1.4 billion Texas CHIPS Act passed in 2023.
Samsung is the other chip giant in Texas since 1996. The South Korean company is building a $17 billion advanced chip fab near Austin. That’s also where Apple, Amazon and AMD design many of their chips. Other chip companies in Texas include Infineon, NXP, X-Fab, Micron, GlobalFoundries, and tool supplier Applied Materials.
Water, power, workers
Making chips takes an immense amount of water, and about a quarter of Texas is in drought.
Luckily, Sherman has water rights to nearby Lake Texoma.
“It was about acquiring more rights, ramping up our production and being able to provide for the mass quantities of water it takes to run a semiconductor facility,” said Teamann, adding that the fab has almost doubled the amount of water Sherman uses.
TI will use about 1,700 gallons of water per minute when the new Sherman fab is complete, with plans to recycle at least 50% of that, Yunus said.
Chip manufacturing is also a power hungry process, so it helps that Sherman has a power plant that recently increased capacity. TI’s new Sherman fab will run entirely on renewable energy, said Yunus, adding that making chips on 300mm wafers also helps with energy efficiency.
“You use pretty much the same amount of energy but produce 2.2 to 2.3 times more chips,” he said.
Texas’ uniquely independent grid largely cuts the state off from borrowing power across state lines. In 2021, that grid failed during an extreme winter storm, causing at least 57 deaths and halting production at chipmakers like Samsung and NXP. TI told CNBC it maintained “critical operations.”
“We built redundancy into this facility,” Yunus said. “We have multiple transmission lines that feed power into the site. We also have large diesel storage tanks that we’re able to use, and generators that can continue to power the site for a few days.”
Highly skilled chip engineers are another scarce resource. It’s a talent pipeline that’s been stymied by the dramatic decline of U.S. global semiconductor manufacturing. The U.S. went from holding a 37% share of the market in 1990 to just 10% in 2022, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
But TI has developed partnerships with various universities, community colleges and the military to fill the talent gap necessary to fill the roles at its Sherman fab.
“There’s a lot of younger people moving to the area. I actually think it’s going to be easier for them to get the talent now than it would have been 5 to 10 years ago,” Arcuri said.
With the full $60 billion project, TI said it expects to create 60,000 U.S. jobs, but the company could not give an expected completion date when asked for one.
“It’s hard to predict when exactly that will take off,” Yunus said. “We’re hopeful that we’ll continue to build out at a pretty brisk pace, but it really depends on the market.”
LinkedIn is famous for being the official corporate social media. And if you have so many people trying to show the authentic side of their working routines, you cannot allow fake engagement.
Seems like the LinkedIn running folks have heard the prayers of all the LinkedIn influencers. Hidden in an official document, LinkedIn is now going to reduce the visibility of comments posted via automation tools or made in quick succession.
Why LinkedIn Is Cracking Down Now
As LinkedIn experiences record user engagement, concerns over fabricated interactions i.e., generated through comment “pods” or AI tools have intensified. To address this, LinkedIn added a line to its comment guidelines emphasizing that comments produced at scale or via automation may see limited visibility.
What This Means for Users, Marketers, and Bots
Human users win as authenticity now matters more than ever, with quality and thoughtful comments likely to carry more weight as LinkedIn deprioritizes automated noise. Marketers must adapt because relying on AI-generated replies or scheduled bulk commenting could now hurt visibility, making the shift toward meaningful engagement a necessity.
Bots and engagement pods are also losing ground as LinkedIn’s latest move signals that algorithmic detection is actively punishing mass comments shared mechanically.
While enforcement remains a challenge, the rule positions corporate social giant to take more stringent actions if needed, even hinting at future legal enforcement like in past data scraping cases.
What’s Next for Engagement on LinkedIn
As machine learning evolves, detect tools will likely get sharper, targeting behavioral patterns associated with automation. Users and brands may need to rely more on creativity, value, and genuine discourse if they expect to sustain reach.
Think of it as a call to dial up authenticity. On LinkedIn, real voices may soon rise above fake noise. And that could reshape the content game entirely.
A British Airways flight attendant was found naked in an onboard toilet while under the influence of drugs, a court has heard.
Haden Pentecost, 41, was working on a flight from California to London when he started to become agitated and was described as “sweating” and “babbling”.
A blood test later revealed Pentecost had methamphetamine and amphetamines in his system.
Pentecost, who has been sacked, pleaded guilty at Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court to performing an aviation function while impaired by drugs.
The court heard Pentecost had to be stood down by his manager when he failed to help with any pre-flight safety checks.
After complaining of cramps and saying he had to change his clothes, he locked himself in one of the toilets – where a colleague later found him naked and oblivious to the fact, the court was told.
He had dilated pupils, a high heart rate, and had to be checked every 20 minutes until the plane arrived at Heathrow. Paramedics then took Pentecost to hospital.
Pentecost, of Basingstoke, was granted bail and will be sentenced at Isleworth Crown Court at a later date.
British Airways has been approached by the BBC for comment.
The artificial intelligence party isn’t over yet despite fears of a bubble, according to tech bull Dan Ives — and he’s got a handful of names in mind as winning and losing from the trend. “My view is, you’re going to have these digestion periods, but you cannot get too nervous,” Ives, who is managing director of Wedbush Securities, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday. Markets bears are “going to come out of hibernation mode every time there’s some volatility,” said Ives, but he added that, “I view those more as a golden opportunities to own the tech winners.” Ives said that, although some names in the AI sphere — such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — have warned of overexuberance from investors about the technology, in his view, “the AI party … started at 9pm. It’s now 10pm. That party goes to 4am.” The analyst added there are certain companies that will be winners — and losers — during what he sees as an AI-driven market rally that could add another 20% to 25% to tech stocks over the next 12 months. Winners Big Tech: Ives praised the AI strategies of Big Tech firms such as Microsoft , Amazon , Google , Nvidia , Tesla and Meta . In the case of Microsoft, Amazon and Google, Ives said these so-called “hyperscaler” cloud names are benefiting from the wave of demand for data centers that are used to train and run powerful AI systems. All of these names, he said, have “wartime CEOs across the board,” but are ultimately “going to have to prove out” their respective strategies. With Tesla, Ives called out the electric car maker’s autonomous vehicles and robotics play — Tesla is aiming to roll out so-called “robotaxi” services, which are akin to a ride-hailing platform, but with vehicles operated autonomously with AI rather than human drivers. As for Meta, Ives said the key for the social media giant will be to prove that it can monetize its billions of users. Meta makes money from ads. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg is increasingly staking the company’s future on AI. He recently formed a new team focused on building AI that surpasses human intelligence. Select software names: Ives says that certain software firms like Palantir , Snowflake and Salesforce are going to see “a renaissance growth” thanks to heightened enterprise demand for AI services. Losers Legacy firms struggling to adapt: In the losers camp, meanwhile, Ives names design software firm Adobe and chipmaker Intel as some of the stocks to avoid. Adobe “has not pivoted quick enough and AI is potentially eating away its business model,” Ives told CNBC, adding, “They need to acquire aggressive and put in defensive and offensive strategic efforts to stop this boat from hitting into an AI iceberg.” Ives said that Intel “has lost its competitive edge and been run like a government agency with so much red tape.” He was likely referring to reports that the White House was discussing securing a 10% stake in Intel in exchange for funding under the CHIPS and Science Act, a law that aims to boost domestic U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. “It’s been a disaster and they massively miscalculated the competitive environment over the last decade,” Ives added. “Intel stayed on a treadmill while every chip player in the world passed them from an innovation perspective.” Intel has lost significant ground to rivals like Nvidia and AMD over the years. Nvidia in particular has capitalized on the AI boom, cornering the market for the GPUs, or graphics processing units, required for training and running large language models.
Standard Chartered Bank has introduced a convenient instalment-based financing option for Yamaha motorcycle buyers in Pakistan. The offer allows Standard Chartered credit card holders to purchase a Yamaha bike through the bank’s Aasan Instalment Plan with 0% markup for up to 12 months.
Offer Details
Under this limited-time offer, eligible customers can select any Yamaha motorcycle model and divide the total cost into equal monthly instalments over a period of up to one year. The 0% mark-up facility ensures that no additional interest is charged during the tenure of the plan.
This initiative is aimed at facilitating easier access to personal transport, especially for individuals looking for budget-friendly payment options without incurring financing charges.
How to Apply
Customers interested in availing the offer can contact Standard Chartered’s helpline at 021-111-002-002 to place their order. Before applying, customers must:
Hold an active Standard Chartered credit card
Ensure their account is in good standing
Choose their preferred Yamaha model
Once eligibility is confirmed, the instalment plan will be processed and reflected in the customer’s monthly credit card statement.
Additional Information
The plan does not include any processing fee for the 0% markup option. However, standard bank policies apply in the case of early termination, changes to the instalment duration, or delayed payments. Customers are encouraged to review the full terms and conditions on the Standard Chartered website.
While this plan is specific to Standard Chartered credit card holders, Yamaha also offers longer-tenure financing options up to 36 months through other channels, which may include mark-up.
The price of 24 karat gold witnessed an increase of Rs. 1,500 per tola on Friday and was sold at Rs. 355,700 against its sale at Rs. 357,200 on the previous trading day, All Pakistan Sarafa Gems and Jewelers Association reported.
The prices of 10 grams of 24 karat also decreased by Rs. 1,286 to Rs. 304,955 from Rs. 306,241, whereas the price of 10 grams of 22 Karat went down by Rs. 1,179 to Rs. 279,552 from Rs. 280,731.
The rates of per tola and ten-gram silver remained unchanged at Rs. 4,013 and Rs. 3,440, respectively.
The price of gold in the international market decreased by $15 to $3,330 from $3,345, whereas that of silver remained constant at $37.80, the Association reported.
Generations of PhD students have passed through SAP’s HANA Campus, located at company headquarters in Germany. Arne Schwarz, who runs the campus, has been there every step of the way.
Arne Schwarz
For more than 20 years, the HANA Campus has been home to PhD students applying research to SAP HANA and, more recently, other technologies.
As demands on technologies change — the first customers for SAP HANA went live in 2010, seven years after the HANA Campus welcomed its first PhD student — so has its name.
“What name should I give it?” muses Schwarz, explaining how prevailing technologies and circumstances have forced name changes over the years, including “The Campus,” “The Research Campus,” “The HANA Research Campus,” “The Student Campus,” or even “The HANA Database and Analytics Campus.”
But while its name may change, its mission remains the same: to help satisfy the demand for high-tech research, primarily for SAP HANA but also for SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC), Global Cloud Infrastructure Services, and SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
What makes the HANA Campus unique?
To date, the HANA Campus has been home to more than 40 PhD students, mostly matriculated at universities in Germany, who have successfully defended their dissertations grounded in research at SAP. Or, to put it another way, PhD students have collectively contributed decades of applied research focused primarily on SAP HANA.
Bringing academic innovation into the product comes in different flavors at SAP. On the one hand, PhD students can be recruited directly to SAP and tasked with researching a predefined topic. On the other, SAP funds university chairs, such as the recent Hasso Plattner Endowed Chair in Artificial Intelligence, and research projects with academia.
PhD students arrive at the HANA Campus via SAP-funded research projects with academia. The campus is unique, according to Schwarz, due to “the sheer mass of research projects executed over the years and the fact that the dedicated space in Walldorf acts as a safe haven for PhD students.”
Students assigned to the HANA Campus work on-site at SAP, get a feel for life at the company, and have direct access to development teams and test environments. The contract for the research projects with academia also frees PhD students from university teaching obligations. It is also important to note that PhD students do not belong to a specific development team, avoiding the risk of their research being deprioritized in the face of operational pressures. At the HANA Campus, PhD students can focus all their efforts on their research and studies.
It all began with a knowledge gap
Bringing academic expertise in-house for HANA started back in 2003, Schwarz explains, in the era of TREX, a search engine in SAP NetWeaver. TREX was the forerunner of SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator, which ultimately led to the SAP HANA database. Engineering teams were under intense pressure to quickly build and deliver the emerging technology of in-memory database.
However, Schwarz explains, a knowledge gap was threatening to slow everything down: there were only two or three engineers who had the knowledge to drive the technology forward, but they didn’t have the bandwidth to do so. With an ever-increasing number of teams requiring specialist knowledge, the threat of a slowdown in development was becoming more real by the day.
As luck would have it, Wolfgang Lehner, professor at the Technical University (TU) Dresden, was also researching the same technology. A mutually beneficial partnership was born: SAP offered a cutting-edge research opportunity for students, and Professor Lehner’s students could bridge the knowledge gap with academic expertise. The potential obstacle was overcome, and research projects with academia and PhD students continue to augment the technological knowledge and expertise that powers SAP HANA and other SAP technologies to this day.
Since that first research project with TU Dresden, the HANA Campus has collaborated with many more universities. “Collaborations with the universities are always limited to the timeframe set out in the original research contract,” Schwarz says, clarifying that the driver for selecting a university is the fit of current research topics to SAP’s technological requirements and not past collaborations.
The HANA Campus is a “win-win” for both SAP’s talent pipeline and PhD students.
Many students choose to stay at SAP once they have defended their thesis and been awarded their PhD. The teams know the value of their PhD research and the PhD graduates know what life is like at SAP.
Even those PhD graduates who do not stay at SAP remain, for the most part, in data management and analytics development; they either join other companies or take a postdoc position. Their ties to the company “give SAP a foothold in academia as well as advocates and a more direct route to research projects,” Schwarz confirms.
Through Schwarz, the HANA Campus also supports SAP’s participation at academic conferences, another tool to strengthen academic connections, PhD student recruiting, and SAP’s technological reputation. In June of this year, HANA Campus provided a venue for a workshop at the SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data. Sponsoring and participating in these conferences, Schwarz says, “is pivotal to getting access to the inner circle of academia, strengthens SAP academic connections and reputation, and allows SAP to share and augment research findings with other experts from academia.”
Find out more
Twenty-two years in and 40 dissertations later, SAP’s HANA Campus continues to be home to the next generation, welcoming two more PhD students later this year to deepen research around SAP HANA as well as SAP BTP and SAP BDC.
A vast collection of publicly available scientific publications about SAP HANA Database and Analytics, dating from 2006 to the present day, is available on GitHub here.
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