Chip equipment makers have been hit in recent days and weeks by the intensification of export controls to China and by order delays as manufacturers are experiencing troubles in building their new fabs. Most notably, Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC)’s $40 billion Arizona plant is running behind schedule. Accordingly, Dutch equipment giant ASML delivered this morning a…
There’s been a lot of attention in recent months about the computing power requirements of Artificial Intelligence and the rise of various pieces of hardware (GPUs, ASICs, TPUs…) used to train massive data models. Surprisingly, there’s been much less hype around software and, specifically, around data science and analytics software that appears as important as…
Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is the bedrock of modern digital transformation, encompassing software-based tools used by all semiconductor companies to design cutting-edge chips and complex integrated circuits that power our technological landscape. EDA has, accordingly, accompanied the growth of the semiconductor industry over the years. Looking forward, the growth pace of the main EDA players,…
As we commented a couple of months ago, generative AI has been emerging as a weapon for hackers, making phishing attempts (emails or texts inviting a user to open a malicious link to steal his/her credentials) bespoke and then much harder to detect, and helping to reduce malware software development cycles and/or rewrite code to…
If all investors’ eyes are currently focused on increasing microprocessors’ performances and speeds, a bottleneck is nevertheless emerging in AI training. This is called the memory wall, or the growing speed difference between microprocessors and computer memory, hence leaving the processing units idle until the requested/needed data becomes available for computing. The recent explosion of…
Even if data is widely considered as the oil of the 21st century, it has been largely under-monetized until now. As an illustration, OpenAI developed ChatGPT with massive amounts of data, free of charge… But data-rich companies, such as social media, have taken notice and the situation is rapidly evolving with both Twitter and Reddit announcing…
As the growth in data centers’ construction continues at an unabated pace around the world – hence sustaining investments in semis, software, networking, and storage solutions – the rise of Generative AI services (e.g., ChatGPT) is literally triggering a little revolution inside them. The workloads (training and inference) of these Deep Learning models necessitate an…
Nvidia’s last night earnings report was impressive, to say the least. The company notably guided to a 64% top-line growth in Q2 (53% above consensus!), including c.100% year-on-year growth in its data center segment. This strength should not come as a total surprise given that most companies are currently racing to deploy AI applications and…
The phenomenal success of Generative AI (GAI) services like ChatGPT or DALL-E has literally triggered an arms race amongst AI’s world leaders as the accuracy level coupled to the creative skills of GAI models are disrupting the $120bn annual revenue generating Web search industry (still heavily dominated by Google) as well as the nascent AI-based…
The so-called Moore’s law, promulgated by Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore in the mid-60s, states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (or IC) doubles every two years. Contrary to what many media said and are still saying nowadays, the doubling of IC’s density doesn’t mean that semiconductor chips are twice as powerful every…