#ai-chips

#ai-chips

Dow futures are up another 68 points to 47,963 and Nasdaq futures are up 123 points to 26,284. And all could easily push even higher, as markets wait for the Federal Reserve's decision later today. "Markets are assigning a nearly 100% probability that the Federal Open Market Committee will approve a second consecutive quarter percentage point, or 25 basis point, reduction in the federal funds rate. The overnight lending benchmark is currently targeted between 4%-4.25%," says CNBC.

Amazon added 3.8 GW of power in the last 12 months, expects another >1 GW in Q4, and plans to double AWS power capacity again by 2027. Power is becoming the main bottleneck for the industry, but Amazon is aggressively adding and immediately monetizing capacity. Trainium2 is "fully subscribed," already a multibillion-dollar business, and grew 150% q/q. Today it's mostly very large customers (example: Anthropic training Claude on ~500,000 Trainium2 chips, going to ~1 million).

The $1.65 trillion chip giant Broadcom cut staff earlier this week. The cuts on Thursday affected staff largely in sales, as well as customer success, account management, and solutions, according to LinkedIn posts and a person familiar with the matter. It's unclear how many roles were affected. Broadcom has been making rolling cuts at the company, including at software firm VMware, which it acquired in late 2023. VMware's workforce has been slashed by roughly in half, Business Insider reported earlier this year.

Microsoft will slacken its dependence on OpenAI through a new partnership with Anthropic, The Information on Tuesday. The deal will enable Microsoft to embed Anthropic's AI systems into Microsoft 365 (formerly Office) platforms like Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. This marks a turning point for Microsoft, which has otherwise been largely (though not entirely) reliant on OpenAI's technology to power its consumer-facing AI efforts.

( BroadcomNASDAQ:AVGO) has been a standout performer, soaring 120% from its April lows and delivering an astonishing 500% return over the past three years. This meteoric rise is fueled by Broadcom's strategic pivot into artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in data centers, where its custom AI chips and networking solutions are in high demand. The company reportedly ( controls around 70% of the custom AI chip market , serving hyperscale clients like major tech giants Google and Meta PlatformsNASDAQ:META) building AI infrastructure.

Nvidia is virtually unbeatable as a supplier of AI chips. Its Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are by far the most powerful, scalable, and easy to use, especially for training large language models. This has propelled Nvidia to a market value of over $4 trillion. Although AMD in particular touts a cheaper yet mostly similar equivalent, Nvidia's ecosystem of software layers and partners forms an impregnable fortress.

For the three months ended July 28, Nvidia beat analysts' already Brobdingnagian forecasts for sales, revenue, and guidance, though a shortfall in data-center sales proved a slight disappointment that sent shares around 1% lower in midmorning trading on Aug. 28. Some Wall Street analysts also expressed concerns over a disclosure in Nvidia's 10-Q that for its trademark franchise-chip sales to data centers-it's collecting 44% of its revenues from just two hyperscalers, assumed to be Microsoft and Meta Platforms.