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Intuit logo displayed on a phone screen and a laptop keyboard are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on October 30, 2021.
Hard Numbers: Intuit’s mass layoff, Very expensive flip phone, AMD’s Finnish acquisition, Taiwan’s millionaire class
1,800: Intuit, the company behind popular financial software Quickbooks and Turbotax, announced a mass layoff of 1,800 employees — about 10% of the company — with plans to rehire the same number with a renewed focus on AI. The firm has an AI-powered financial advice tool, called Intuit Assist, in which it plans to invest heavily. That new investment might be necessary: A recent Washington Post review of Intuit’s AI assistant called it “awful” — not only “unhelpful” but also “wrong” much of the time.
1,899: Samsung has a new line of AI-powered foldable phones — and they’re extremely expensive. The Galaxy Z Fold starts at $1,899.99, a $100 increase from last year’s model. This nouveau flip phone boasts AI tools such as voice recording transcription, translation, and summarizing and text suggestions across email and social media apps. AI isn’t exactly a new thing on mobile phones, of course — so hopefully for this price, these new features make Siri look like a bot of the past.
665 million: The chip designer AMD is buying a Finnish startup called Silo AI for $665 million. Silo bills itself as “Europe’s largest private AI lab.” This deal will get AMD into the AI development business — an expansion from its hardware focus — as it tries to compete with industry leader Nvidia.
1.16 million: There are plenty of new millionaires in Taiwan, thanks to AI. Taiwan is a global hub for the semiconductor industry, which has boomed in recent years due to demand for AI. TSMC, its leading firm, is a key global fabricator for computer chips of all kinds. Taiwan’s total number of US dollar millionaires was 790,000 last year and could grow to 1.16 million by 2028, according to a new estimate by UBS.AMD chairman and CEO Lisa Su delivers the first AI keynote speech in Computex in Taipei on June 3, 2024.
AMD’s big plans
AMD has big plans to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market. At a trade show in Taipei on June 3, AMD unveiled its MI325X accelerator chip, which will be available by the fourth quarter of the year. It also stated plans to launch two additional chips, one in 2025 and one in 2026.
Nvidia dominates the chip market with about 70% market share, but AMD along with Intel and other chipmakers, want to make a dent in their rival’s sales. Meanwhile, reports suggest that Meta and Google are building their own chips while OpenAI chief Sam Altman is trying to raise money for a chip venture of his own.Semiconductor chips are seen on a circuit board of a computer in this illustration picture taken February 25, 2022.
The great chip divide
The chip industry is surging on the back of insatiable demand for artificial intelligence. While AMD and NVIDIA have doubled and tripled their stock prices respectively in a single year, there’s reason to believe that AI’s rising tide isn’t lifting all ships.
Semiconductor industry analysts told the Financial Times that the chip boom is mostly focused on AMD and NVIDIA, which make high-powered graphics chips needed to run generative AI systems. That includes the companies’ suppliers, such as the chip fabrication company Taiwan Semiconductor, aka TSMC, and the server company Supermicro.
Meanwhile, Intel and Texas Instruments reported disappointing quarterly financial earnings last week, causing most of the sector’s stocks to droop. The culprit: weakened demand outside of AI. Not only was 2023 a down year for computers and smartphones, but there are new concerns about a pullback from automakers and industrial manufacturers.
It’s a far cry from just a few short years ago at the height of the pandemic when chip supply couldn’t catch up to ravenous demand, which made new cars and Nintendo Switches hard to come by.
But it may not be all smooth sailing for AMD and NVIDIA either: New reports indicate Amazon, Google, and Meta — who rely on AMD and NVIDIA chips to power their own AI chips — are investing billions to build their own. It’s not that there’s a chip shortage, really, but there’s a shortage of the right chips.