US semiconductor giant Qualcomm is to buy UK-based Alphawave IP Group, AKA Alphawave Semi. The $2.4bn deal will see Qualcomm take control of the UK target’s “high-speed wired connectivity and compute technologies,” which Qualcomm said would complement its Oryon CPU and Hexagon NPU lines. Qualcomm said Alphawave Semi’s IP, custom silicon, connectivity products and chiplets “drive faster, more reliable data transfer with higher performance and lower power consumption.” Needless to say, all that IP will come in useful in AI focused datacenters. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.
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Micron is pouring an extra $30 billion into expanding its semiconductor manufacturing and R&D operations in the US. The investment bumps the vendor’s totally investment in boosting US capacity to $200 billion which will be spread across sites in Idaho, New York, and Virgina. Three quarters of the overall cash will be focused on “leading edge memory manufacturing” with the rest going on R&D. The investment was co-announced with the Trump administration which has been pushing for increased manufacturing in the US, and for maintaining the US’s edge in AI. Micron’s investment will be focused on high-bandwidth memory, “which is essential to the AI market”.
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Hitachi Vantara this week launched its EverFlex AI Data Hub as a Service. This is a managed “infrastructure consumption service” targeted at AI data preparation challenges. Hitachi said the offering provides a modern data lakehouse and integrated workbench capabilities for AI, BI and broad data needs. The service is built on Hitachi’s Virtual Storage Platform One infrastructure.
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Dell’Oro Group has pegged server and storage component revenues to grow at 18 percent CAGR over the next five years to hit over $200bn, as investments in AI infrastructure continues to surge. Revenue growth for server and storage components in the first quarter stood at 62 percent, it said, with surging demand for accelerators, HBM and NICs underpinning record expansion across the AI infrastructure stack.
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Microsoft has agreed a collaboration deal with UK-based Carruthers and Jackson to provide support for organisations embarking on data and AI transformations. The deal will see Microsoft being the sole partner for the consultancy’s Summer School for Data Leaders. More broadly, the companies will work together to jointly guide customers through data transformations by developing and integrating scalable data strategies, improving data governance, and ensuring access to quality data across all areas of a business.
