Market consolidation coming as suppliers grow….

New entrants mean the number of suppliers is now 100+ to meet essential acceleration

Strong AI, Strong SuppliersThe realization of strong AI – the point where a machine's intellectual capability is functionally equal to a human's – is a future state but for semiconductor vendors, the top-10 AI chipset suppliers are already strong, with combined market shares exceeding 90% of the total in 2019. This is despite unprecedented investment in start-up players which has driven the number of AI chipset vendors to over 100.

Shrewd semiconductor suppliers can and do benefit from strategically planning and executing AI chipset endeavors that are aligned to their target markets and to fast-growing adjacent markets. Follow-on, synergistic traditional semiconductor revenue and market share increases plus natural innovation and research & development awards await those vendor who invest in AI-enabled microchip offerings.

“NVIDIA’s planned $40bn acquisition of Arm represents a drive by the graphics processing unit (GPU) vendor to integrate its technology into Arm’s mobile, embedded, and edge computing systems-on-chips (SoCs).

With Arm under its wing, NVIDIA hopes to cross-license and cross-sell its technology everywhere Arm does, making use of both the enormous scale of the Arm-based mobile and embedded computing market and the similarly large developer community. However, this will create a string of complex and awkward “co-opetition” relationships with major vendors, notably Apple and Qualcomm.”

Kelson Astley
Research Analyst
Embedded Processors

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