Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers. Below is a excerpt from this week’s:

Driving the Week

NRF, the National Retail Show, is happening in New York City this week. While there will be plenty of booths dedicated to the day-to-day business of retail, traditional enterprise tech companies will be there in force.

Overheard

Trouble in GPU-land? According to the impeccably-sourced The Information, some NVIDIA hyperscale customers may be seeing delays on racks of the new GB200. Sources tell the outlet that are “glitches” in the interconnect and some cooling issues. This is reportedly impacting AWS, Google and Meta.

NVIDIA hasn’t publicly responded to the reports. What we know is that new product launches on the scale of what NVIDIA is doing at the rack-level with GB200 (especially if new liquid cooling is involved) almost always arrives with some hiccups. Nothing reported seems like cause for too much concern.

Big hyperscale win: we don’t usually see much branded OEM gear landing in the big hyperscalers, but that might be changing. Last month Pure Storage announced a major deal with an unspecified hyperscaler, and now Bloomberg reports that HPE is following suit, closing a “$1 billion AI server deal” with Elon Musk’s Twitter (sometimes called “X”), beating out Dell and Supermicro for the win. No one involved has commented.

Is Arm buying Ampere Computing? Maybe, at least according to the scoop-happy Bloomberg, who reports that Arm and majority-owner Softbank are looking into taking over the scrappy Arm-based server processor vendor. Ampere, in which Oracle has a 29% stake, found early success bringing Arm into the public-cloud world.

In the time since, nearly every top CSP followed AWS’s lead in developing their own Arm-based processors. This makes sense for the CSPs, who can reclaim margin that would otherwise flow to chipmakers, but it leaves Ampere in a tough spot. We’re not sure what the benefit would be for Arm, as Ampere directly competes against Arm’s customers. If true, it’d be an interesting move.

Policy Watch

The shift in US presidential administrations along with continued tensions with China are keeping the red eye between Silicon Valley and Washington DC filled up. Here’s the latest:

Controversial new AI export controls were put out over the weekend by the outgoing Biden Administration. The new policy creates a three-tier licensing system that’s designed to prevent circumvention of existing controls. It also arrives with criticism from multiple sectors, and no clear indication yet how the incoming Trump administration will view things,

The semiconductor industry says that the moves will hurt competitiveness and global supply chain. NVIDIA’s VP of government affairs, Ned Finkle, penned a blog that said in part, “the Biden Administration seeks to undermine America’s leadership with a 200+ page regulatory morass, drafted in secret and without proper legislative review.” NVIDIA’s blog went on to say that “global progress is now in jeopardy.”  There’s a lot of nuances on this one, so look for a blog from us delving into some of the finer points.

How much more expensive is that new laptop going to be? Tariffs exist to control trade imbalances, allowing a country to moderate the price of imports to protect native interests. The challenge with imposing tariffs on technology is that most of highest-tech products aren’t built on American soil, so any tariff is likely to impact consumer prices.

The Consumer Technology Association analyzed some of the tariffs proposed by the upcoming Trump administration, both China-specific and the 10-20% proposed tariffs on imports from all countries to model how that will impact consumer electronics. The CTA says that, should these tariffs go into effect, laptops and tablets will see a 46-68% price increase, gaming consoles will go up 40-58%, and smartphones by 26-37%. No word on the impact to enterprise infrastructure.

Careful how you treat your contractors: it’s been nearly a quarter century since Microsoft changed the face of tech contracting when it settled a long-simmering lawsuit that claimed the company illegally treated contractors as if they were employees, but without the benefits.

Now it’s Google’s turn, with the US National Labor Relations Board claiming that Alphabet’s Google is a “joint employer” of contractors from Accenture Flex after the contractors were allowed to join Alphabet Workers Union in 2023. A positive finding would force Google to bargain directly with its supplier’s employees. This one will have rippling impacts, so we’ll keep you updated.

By the Numbers

Last week we told you about Microsoft’s plan to invest $80 billion in AI-focused data centers. They’re not stopping. The company is ponying up an additional $3 billion over the next two years to expand its Azure cloud and AI capacity in India – it’s biggest ever investment in the country. Microsoft made it clear that this “on top of” the $80 billion previously disclosed.

AWS is now slouch either. The leading cloud giant announced plans to invest “at least” $11 billion to expand its footprint in the state of Georgia, creating about 550 jobs in the process. This follows a similar investment announced last summer to invest $11 billion in Indiana.

This tracks with new research from quant analyst firm Synergy Research Group, who says that hyperscale capacity is “set to triple” by 2030.

All those datacenters need chips, are continuing to drive strong growth in the semiconductor segment. New numbers from the Semiconductor Industry Association show that in November, the most recent month tracked, global semi sales hi $57.8 billion, up 21% year-over-year globally, and up a remarkable 55% in the Americas.

That’s the highest-ever monthly sales total for the segment, and the eighth consecutive month of growth.

Deal Watch

Observability giant Datadog is buying log search and indexing startup Quickwit for an undisclosed amount.

Semiconductor company NXP is buying Australian autonomous vehicle tech company TTTech Auto for $625 million in cash. TTTech specializes in software to enhance the safety of automated driving and ADAS systems.

Private equity firm Blackstone is investing $300 million in HPC and AI storage provider DDN, valuing the company at about $5 billion.

What We’re Reading

Referrals as a side hustle? Bloomberg’s piece, “The New $30,000 Side Hustle: Making Job Referrals for Strangers,” details how employees are using traditional platforms like Glassdoor and Blind, along with new targeted platforms like Refer Me and Refermarket, to sell employment referrals to strangers.

It can be a lucrative practice, as the first paragraph in the article points out:

“Copy, paste, refer. Over 18 months, that’s the simple process that helped one enterprising tech worker recommend more than a thousand job candidates to his employer. His efforts produced more than half a dozen successful hires for the company and roughly $30,000 in employee referral bonuses for him. No one seemed to mind, or even realize, that nearly every person he endorsed was a complete stranger.”

It’s a win-win for both the jobseeker and referring employee, as a referred candidate sees their odds of being hired move from 1-in-200 to 1-in-25 (internal candidates have even better odds, 1-in-5). It’s also a dangerous game, as a bad referral can impact the referrer’s credibility.