No Going Back: The New Data Center
The numbers on data center processor revenue share are stark. Nvidia has been growing strongly for years and now dominates the league tables. The only question is really what is the new status quo for their share?
The numbers on data center processor revenue share are stark. Nvidia has been growing strongly for years and now dominates the league tables. The only question is really what is the new status quo for their share?
We looked at revenue and operating income per employee for the big semis companies, and since that was so much fun, we looked at another dozen companies. Broadcom and Apple are in a league of their own. It is good to have a software or licensing business.
Apple’s M3 launch stood out for its focus on how people actually use computers, the lack of AI acronyms and the fact that they launched 3 chips all at once. It is only getting harder to compete with them.
Microsoft is opening up the market for Arm-based laptop CPUs. This is bad news today for Qualcomm, and potentially bad for Intel over the very long term
Nvidia’s massive earnings surprises have attracted a lot of attention online, not all of it positive. Sifting through the noise, the company is backed by real demand. And while its earnings will eventually hit an air pocket, it looks very strong long term
Like the hero of a zombie movie – Intel has fixed its manufacturing process and awoken from its coma – only to find the world radically altered. Intel has a lot of talent, but the competition is clawing at the door.
AMD reported a quarter with a lot of moving parts. Soft PC demand, a tight supply chain, uninspiring gross margins were offset by what sounds like good traction for new data center and AI products.
The three big questions for the AI semis market:
1) Is AI additive to the TAM?
2) How will the inference market shape up?
3) Can Nvidia’s dominance be challenged?
GPUs are the leading semis option for most AI systems today, but we think other chips will play important roles down the path including CPUs and possibly even FPGAs.
We attended AMD’s analyst event this week. The company has a solid product portfolio, but investors hoped to see more progress on AI. AMD makes the case that customers want an alternative to Nvidia, but Nvidia has 11 billion counter-arguments to that.