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.
How do CPU companies market in a newly, highly-fragmented market? There are no easy answers in this very complex, rapidly moving environment, but there is some hope.
There are really three markets for AI semis – training, cloud inference and edge inference. All of them are already fairly crowded. Choose your battles carefully.
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.
The data center silicon market is massive, but also challenging for incumbents let alone new entrants. We do some math to back this up.
AWS cannot control the software it runs, but it can still benefit from having its own CPU by reducing power consumption and thus increasing capacity of its data centers. And maybe that also introduces a new form of customer lock-in.
The large, incumbent chip companies are all choosing to embrace the trend of Roll-Your-Own chips by offering support services to non-chip companies’ efforts. Done well this may end up driving those customers to buy more catalog parts. Hopefully.
AMD is a good proxy for the rest of the semis industry – beset by cyclical challenges but also increasingly well-positioned for the changing shape of the industry.
There seems to be some momentum for Arm to sell itself to some sort of consortium of major licensees. In theory, this could be a good outcome, but in practice would be very complex.
Global Foundries IPO!!! – While GF’s financials make for some tough reading (negative gross margins?!?), they are generating cash and are definitely doing something right to attract $19 billion of customer commitments.