The May-25 edition mentioned a silicon renaissance. It turns out it is shopping season in Semiland with four acquisitions in two weeks. Earlier this month, Qualcomm announced the $2.4bn acquisition of Alphawave, a UK firm that specializes in chip design IP, especially silicon photonics and chiplets. AMD acquired 3 firms: Untether AI — an AI edge/inference chip designer, Brium — an AI software and compiler firm, and Enosemi — a silicon photonics and co-packaged optics firm.

With Alphawave, Qualcomm hopes to offset its weakness in HPC and AI accelerators by offering an alternative to Nvidia's tightly integrated monolithic dies and NVLink. Together, Qualcomm + Alphawave could deliver a disaggregated, scalable and power efficient alternative. As for AMD, its acquisitions suggest it is trying to replicate Nvidia's integration moat (GPU, interconnect, software) via M&A focused on inference + photonics + software stack.

Among the potentially threatened companies, Lambda's current edge in offering customizable GPU infrastructure for AI researchers will erode if AMD/Qualcomm offer better software + hardware integration. Nvidia may continue to secure demand via CUDA and DGX, making it harder for Lambda to differentiate.

Companies like SiMa.ai (MLSoC) and d-Matrix (digital in-memory compute) are now in the spotlight and are likely the next targets for acquisition or strategic partnership. Companies like Tenstorrent might attract more strategic investment as AMD and others diversify ISA and execution models. Expect rising valuations and more activity around firms building alternatives to Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem.