AI prompts a memory-chip boom — and electronics inflation. Get used to it.
Even though investors are getting wary of chip stocks, prompting a two-day tech selloff this week, memory-chip maker Micron had a monster quarter and its shares jumped almost 16% Thursday. On top of that, South Korean memory chipmaker SK hynix filed for a U.S. IPO.
The flip side of memory’s latest boom: Most electronic devices suddenly cost more, especially Apple’s and Microsoft’s — and that’s going to continue for years.
Investors are betting a gang of Nvidia wannabes can steal a march on the AI chip leader. OpenAI revealed Jalapeño, a custom chip to be made by Broadcom that it will use to power its AI inference. Qualcomm also announced two Dragonfly new data center chips, a CPU and a machine learning accelerator. Meantime, AI chipmaker Groq raised $650 million. But AI chipmaker Cerebras sank, the downside of now being a public company.
Moore’s Law may be dead, but advances in chipmaking sure aren’t. This week IBM and Applied Materials both moved chipmaking forward, as IBM unveiled what it says is the world’s first sub-one-nanometer chip technology — in technical terms, really teeny-tiny — and Applied debuted more advanced chipmaking gear for 3D stacking architectures that AI chips will require.
