What is happening to semis stocks this quarter?
AI may wipe out humanity someday, but right now it is doing wonders for semis stocks.
AI may wipe out humanity someday, but right now it is doing wonders for semis stocks.
Qualcomm has a robust AI offering, and the market for AI Inference at the Edge is huge. But Qualcomm and every other company not named Nvidia, will struggle to ride this wave to AI riches.
Apple has a history of relegating its homegrown chips to the Apple Watch. Is that the fate of their future cellular modem?
Less than a decade ago, CPUs were the dominant form of compute and everyone ‘knew’ the market could only support two vendors. Today, there are over a dozen companies making CPUs.
Android is a hot mess. Google should make it truly open source. This would relieve them of a major anti-trust vulnerability and infuse a massive amount of energy to the project.
Nvidia just had a developer event which highlighted all the partners they have, a vision of the verticalized future of semis. In contrast, Qualcomm’s sales structure does not look like that.
Qualcomm does not have an easy path to replacing Apple revenue. Maybe Apple will fail at producing a modem. Or maybe Qualcomm could come up with a compelling RF/modem combo that Apple would find too compelling to ignore. Not easy, but possible.
Just for the sake of argument could Qualcomm buy its way back to near-term revenue growth? We take a not-so-serious look at one option. The point is there are not a lot of good targets left.
We are going to Barcelona for MWC. This is what we plan to learn about:
* Open RAN
* Cellular modem penetration beyond phones
* Cellular connectivity in cars and auto makers’ changing relationships with chip vendors
* The state of the wireless standards
We think there will be a few more legs of semis consolidation. So we compiled a list of 5 semis companies who we think will survive:
1. ADI & TI
2. QCOM
3. NVDA
4. Some chip company from China
5. The smoldering remains of Intel, probably owned by others.