“Chips” is now the “C” in CES
While the focus of CES 2026 remained on consumer electronics, this year felt different. More expansive, with the semiconductor industry dominating the pre-show with overlapping announcements that reveal diverging strategies for AI workload acceleration, manufacturing sovereignty, and market expansion beyond traditional computing segments.
Research Note: Improving Inference with NVIDIA’s Inference Context Memory Storage Platform
At NVIDIA Live at CES 2026, NVIDIA introduced its Inference Context Memory Storage (ICMS) platform as part of its Rubin AI infrastructure architecture. NVIDIA’s ICMS addresses KV cache scaling challenges in LLM inference workloads.
The technology targets a specific gap in existing memory hierarchies where GPU high-bandwidth memory proves too limited for growing context requirements while general-purpose network storage introduces latency and power consumption penalties that degrade inference efficiency.
Research Note: Qualcomm Acquires RISC-V Player Ventana
Qualcomm Technologies this week announced the acquisition of Ventana Micro Systems, a developer of high-performance RISC-V CPU designs for datacenter and enterprise applications. The acquisition brings proven RISC-V engineering talent and existing chiplet designs into Qualcomm’s portfolio, complementing its custom Arm-based Oryon CPU development.
Research Note: Marvell to Acquire Silicon Photonics Player Celestial AI
Marvell Technology recently announced a definitive agreement to acquire Celestial AI for $3.25 billion in upfront consideration ($1 billion cash plus $2.25 billion in stock), with potential earnout payments of up to an additional $2.25 billion based on revenue milestones through fiscal 2029.
Research Note: Dell Adds 20+ Features to its AI Factory
Dell Technologies announced more than 20 updates to its AI Factory portfolio ahead of next week’s SC25 event, spanning compute, storage, networking, and cooling infrastructure. The announcements center on three primary themes: expanded support for NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs across multiple server platforms, introduction of AMD MI355X-based systems, and deeper integration of automation tools across the infrastructure stack.
Call Notes: Q4 Semiconductor Tracker
We’re in a moment that’s less about individual chip performance and more about processing-at-scale. It’s all about sprawling AI racks, optics, interconnect, and custom silicon hungry for scale, speed, and a story.
Research Note: Marvell Solidifies CXL Leadership w/ Ecosystem-Wide Interoperability
The CXL ecosystem is moving quickly from concept to deployment as hyperscalers, OEMs, and chipmakers seek new ways to address the memory bottlenecks that limit AI, cloud, and high-performance computing workloads. In this environment, interoperability is not a checkbox—it is the foundation that determines how quickly new architectures can reach scale.
Intel’s Networking Exodus: A Strategic Rebirth or a Sign of Decline?
Intel’s foray into networking didn’t start with flashy switches or routers. Its foundational contribution dates back to 1980…
Quick Take: UALink & OCP Join Forces
The Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation and the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Consortium have announced a strategic collaboration to standardize and deploy high-performance, open scale-up interconnects for next-generation AI and HPC clusters.
NAND Insider Newsletter: April 21 2025
Each week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, April 21, 2025.
NAND Insider Newsletter: April 6 2025
Each week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, April 6, 2025.
NAND Insider Newsletter: March 30 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, March 30, 2025.
NAND Insider Newsletter: March 24, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, March 24, 2025.
MWC 2025 Playbook: Enterprise IT’s Big AI & 5G Moment
If you blinked, you might have missed the tidal wave of AI, 5G, and cloud announcements at Mobile World Congress 2025. But don’t worry—we’ve got the cheat sheet.
Liquid Cooling is Front & Center at GTC 2025
One thing was clear at the just-wrapped NVIDIA GTC event: the race to cool the next generation of HPC and AI systems is intensifying.
Let’s take a quick look at some of our favorite announcements.
Quick Take: Ambient IoT Alliance
The newly launched Ambient IoT Alliance aims to develop and promote a global ecosystem for ambient IoT, which refers to battery-free, energy-harvesting devices that seamlessly connect to existing wireless networks. These devices can track real-time data such as location, temperature, humidity, and more—all without requiring traditional power sources.
NAND Insider Newsletter: January 21, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers. Below is an excerpt from this week’s.
Research Note: UALink Consortium Expands Board, adds Apple, Alibaba Cloud & Synopsys
The Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium (UALink), an industry organization taking a collaborative approach to advance high-speed interconnect standards for next-generation AI workloads, announced an expansion to its Board of Directors, welcoming Alibaba Cloud, Apple, and Synopsys – joining existing member companies like AMD, AWS, Cisco, Google, HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft.
Quick Take: AMD Data Center Group Earnings – Q3 2024
AMD this week announced significant revenue and earnings growth in Q3 2024, driven primarily by exceptional performance in the Data Center segment. AMD’s Data Center revenue increased by 122% year-over-year, reaching a record $3.5 billion and marking over half of AMD’s total revenue this quarter. CEO Lisa Su, on the earnings call, attributed this growth to the success of the EPYC CPUs and MI300X GPUs, which experienced strong adoption across cloud, enterprise, and AI applications.
Quick Take: Intel Gaudi 3 on IBM Cloud
IBM and Intel announced a partnership to integrate Intel’s Gaudi 3 AI accelerators into IBM Cloud, which will be available in early 2025. This collaboration aims to enhance the scalability and affordability of enterprise AI, focusing on performance, security, and energy efficiency. IBM Cloud will be the first cloud provider to offer Gaudi 3, which […]
Research Note: UALink Alliance & Accelerator Interconnect Specification
UALink is a new open standard designed to rival NVIDIA’s proprietary NVLink technology. It facilitates high-speed, direct GPU-to-GPU communication crucial for scaling out complex computational tasks across multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) or accelerators within servers or computing pods.
Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based VMs
At its 2024 Microsoft Build Event this week, Microsoft announced the preview of new Azure Virtual Machines powered by Microsoft’s previously announced in-house-design Arm-based processor, the Cobalt 100
Quick Take: Intel FQ1 2024 Earnings Results
Intel announced solid Q1 earnings, with revenue meeting expectations and EPS exceeding guidance. The company’s results reflect a disciplined approach to cost reduction and steady progress toward long-term goals.
Research Note: Intel Gaudi 3
Intel announced its long-anticipated new Intel Gaudi 3 AI accelerator at its Intel Vision event. The new accelerator offers significant improvements over the previous generation Gaudi 3 processor and promises to challenge Nvidia’s current generation accelerators in training and inference for LLMs and multimodal models.
Research Note: MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results
MLCommons released the results of its MLPerf Inference v4.0 benchmarks, which introduced two new workloads, Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL.
Since its inception in 2018, MLPerf has established itself as a crucial benchmark in the accelerator market. The benchmarks offer detailed comparisons across a variety of system configurations for specific use cases.
Research Note: Intel Edge & AI/RAN MWC Announcements
Intel announced a new edge platform and highlighted its momentum in AI-assisted vRAN/O-RAN acceleration at the recent MWC conference in Barcelona.
Quick Take: Intel’s Big Automotive Play
At the CES show in Las Vegas, Intel outlined a bold strategy to expand its AI capabilities into the automotive sector. This includes an agreement to acquire Silicon Mobility, a company specializing in system-on-chips (SoCs) for EV energy management, marking a significant step in Intel’s pursuit of automotive market growth.
Research Note: Inside Intel’s 4Q 2023 Data Center & AI Earnings
The latest earnings release from Intel Corporation offers a comprehensive overview of the company’s current trajectory and outlook, underscoring significant strides in its ambitious IDM 2.0 transformation.
This Research Note focuses primarily on Intel’s Data Center & AI Group (DCAI) and those elements that impact enterprise infrastructure.
Quick Take: Intel’s New Emerald Rapids Processor
Intel unveiled its new Emerald Rapids processors, part of its 5th-Gen Xeon Scalable lineup. The new processors arrive with multiple features designed to enhance performance across workloads, including AI and HPC.
Research Note: Intel’s New Automotive Push
Intel outlined a bold new strategy to expand its AI capabilities into the automotive sector. This includes an agreement to acquire Silicon Mobility, a company specializing in system-on-chips (SoCs) for EV energy management, marking a significant step in Intel’s pursuit of automotive market growth.
Research Note: Intel “Emerald Rapids” 5th Generation Xeon Processor
Intel unveiled its new Emerald Rapids processors, part of its 5th-Gen Xeon Scalable lineup at its recent “AI Everywhere” event. The new processors arrive with multiple features designed to enhance performance across workloads, including AI and HPC.
Intel Details New Processors & Looks to the Future @ Intel Innovation
Intel made a sweeping set of announcements at its recent Intel Innovation event, including detailing next generation Xeon processors.