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IBM’s 2-nanometer (nm) chip technology puts 50 billion transistors, each the size of roughly five atoms, on a space no bigger than your fingernail. The landmark technology—the smallest, most powerful microchip ever developed—could quadruple the life of cell-phone batteries and slash the carbon footprint of data centers, among other things. Now the manufacturing competition is on. Samsung and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. have announced plans to produce the chip by 2025, and in August, the U.S. and Japan unveiled a plan to build a joint research center focused on 2-nm tech.
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