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Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom (L) and former CEO of Intel, Pat Gelsinger.

Reuters | CNBC

It was a big year for silicon in Silicon Valley — but a brutal one for the company most responsible for the area’s moniker.

Intel, the 56-year-old chipmaker co-founded by industry pioneers Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce and legendary investor Arthur Rock, had its worst year since going public in 1971, losing 61% of its value.

The opposite story unfolded at Broadcom, the chip conglomerate run by CEO Hock Tan and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, about 15 miles from Intel’s Santa Clara campus.

Broadcom’s stock price soared 111% in 2024 as of Monday’s close, its best performance ever. The current company is the product of a 2015 acquisition by Avago, which went public in 2009.

The driving force behind the diverging narratives was artificial intelligence. Broadcom rode the AI train, while Intel largely missed it. The changing fortunes of the two chipmakers underscores the fleeting nature of leadership in the tech industry and how a few key decisions can result in hundreds of billions — or even trillions — of dollars in market cap shifts.

Broadcom develops custom chips for Google and other huge cloud companies. It also makes essential networking gear that large server clusters need to tie thousands of AI chips together. Within AI, Broadcom has largely been overshadowed by Nvidia, whose graphics processing units, or GPUs, power most of the large language models being developed at OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Amazon and also enable the heftiest AI workloads.

Despite having a lower profile, Broadcom’s accelerator chips, which the company calls XPUs, have become a key piece of the AI ecosystem.

“Why it’s really shooting up is because they’re talking about AI, AI, AI, AI,” Eric Ross, chief investment strategist at Cascend, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” earlier this month.

Broadcom's AI story is driving its stock prices: Strategist

Intel, which for decades was the dominant U.S. chipmaker, has been mostly shut out of AI. Its server chips lag far behind Nvidia’s, and the company has also lost market share to longtime rival Advanced Micro Devices while spending heavily on new factories.

Intel’s board ousted Pat Gelsinger from the CEO role on Dec. 1, after a tumultuous four-year tenure.

“I think someone more innovative might have seen the AI wave coming,” Paul Argenti, professor of management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, said in an interview on “Squawk Box” after the announcement.

An Intel spokesperson declined to comment.

Broadcom is now worth about $1.1 trillion and is the eighth U.S. tech company to cross the trillion-dollar mark. It’s the second most valuable chip company, behind Nvidia, which has driven the AI boom to a $3.4 trillion valuation, trailing only Apple among all public companies. Nvidia’s stock price soared 178% this year, but actually did better in 2023, when it gained 239%.

Until four years ago, Intel was the world’s most valuable chipmaker, nearing a $300 billion market cap in early 2020. The company is now worth about $85 billion, just got booted off the Dow Jones Industrial Average — replaced by Nvidia — and has been in talks to sell off core parts of its business. Intel now ranks 15th in market cap among semiconductor companies globally.

‘Not meant for everybody’

Following the Avago-Broadcom merger in 2015, the combined company’s biggest business was chips for TV set-top boxes and broadband routers. Broadcom still makes Wi-Fi chips used in laptops as well as the iPhone and other smartphones.

After a failed bid to buy mobile chip giant Qualcomm in 2018, Broadcom turned its attention to software companies. The capstone of its spending spree came in 2022 with the announced acquisition of server virtualization software vendor VMware for $61 billion. Software accounted for 41% of Broadcom’s $14 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter, thanks in part to VMware.

What’s exciting Wall Street is Broadcom’s role working with cloud providers to build custom chips for AI. The company’s XPUs are generally simpler and less expensive to operate than Nvidia’s GPUs, and they’re designed to run specific AI programs efficiently.

Broadcom is at a segment of the AI market where we're addressing several hyperscalers: CEO Hock Tan

Cloud vendors and other large internet companies are spending billions of dollars a year on Nvidia’s GPUs so they can build their own models and run AI workloads for customers. Broadcom’s success with custom chips is setting up an AI spending showdown with Nvidia, as hyperscale cloud companies look to differentiate their products and services from their rivals.

Broadcom’s chips aren’t for everyone, as only a handful of companies can afford to design and build their own custom processors.

“You have to be a Google, you have to be a Meta, you have to be a Microsoft or an Oracle to be able to use those chips,” Piper Sandler analyst Harsh Kumar told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Dec. 13, a day after Broadcom’s earnings. “These chips are not meant for everybody.”

While 2024 has been a breakout year for Broadcom — AI revenue increased 220% — the month of December has put it in record territory. The stock is up 45% for the month as of Monday’s close, 16 percentage points better than its prior best month.

On the company’s earnings call on Dec. 12, Tan told investors that Broadcom had doubled shipments of its XPUs to its three hyperscale providers. The most well known of the bunch is Google, which counts on the technology for its Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, used to train Apple’s AI software released this year. The other two customers, according to analysts, are TikTok parent ByteDance and Meta.

Tan said that within about two years, companies could spend between $60 billion and $90 billion on XPUs.

“In 2027, we believe each of them plans to deploy 1 million XPU clusters across a single fabric,” Tan said of the three hyperscale customers.

In addition to AI chips, AI server clusters need powerful networking parts to train the most advanced models. Networking chips for AI accounted for 76% of Broadcom’s $4.5 billion of networking sales in the fourth quarter.

Broadcom said that, in total, about 40% of its $30.1 billion in 2024 semiconductor sales were related to AI, and that AI revenue would increase 65% in the first quarter to $3.8 billion.

“The degree of success amongst the hyperscalers in their initiatives here is clearly an area up for debate,” Cantor analyst C.J. Muse, who recommends buying Broadcom shares, wrote in a report on Dec. 18. “But any way you slice it, the focus here will continue to be a meaningful boon for those levered to custom silicon.”

Intel’s very bad year

Intel announces two new board members to strengthen semiconductor experience

Prior to 2024, Intel’s worst year on the market was 1974, when the stock sank 57%.

The seeds for the company’s latest stumbles were planted years ago, as Intel missed out on mobile chips to Qualcomm, ARM and Apple.

Rival AMD started taking market share in the critical PC and server CPU markets thanks to its productive manufacturing relationship with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Intel’s manufacturing process has been a notch behind for years, leading to slower and less power-efficient central processing units, or CPUs.

But Intel’s most costly whiff is in AI — and it’s a big reason Gelsinger was removed.

Nvidia’s GPUs, originally created for video games, have become the critical hardware in the development of power-hungry AI models. Intel’s CPU, formerly the most important and expensive part in a server, has become an afterthought in an AI server. The GPUs Nvidia will ship in 2025 don’t even need an Intel CPU — many of them are paired to an Nvidia-designed ARM-based chip.

As Nvidia has reported revenue growth of at least 94% for the past six quarters, Intel has been forced into downsizing mode. Sales have declined in nine of the past 11 periods. Intel announced in August that it was cutting 15,000 jobs, or about 15% of its workforce.

“We are working to create a leaner, simpler, more agile Intel,” board Chair Frank Yeary said in a Dec. 2 press release announcing Gelsinger’s departure.

A big problem for Intel is that it lacks a comprehensive AI strategy. It’s touted the AI capabilities on its laptop chips to investors, and released an Nvidia competitor called Gaudi 3. But neither the company’s AI PC initiative nor its Gaudi chips have gained much traction in the market. Intel’s Gaudi 3 sales missed the company’s own $500 million target for this year.

Late next year, Intel will release a new AI chip that it codenamed Falcon Shores. It won’t be built on Gaudi 3 architecture, and will instead be a GPU.

“Is it going to be wonderful? No, but it is a good first step in getting the platform done,” Intel interim co-CEO Michelle Holthaus said at a financial conference held by Barclays on Dec. 12.

Holthaus and fellow interim co-CEO David Zinsner have vowed to focus on Intel’s products, leaving the fate of Intel’s costly foundry division unclear.

Before he left, Gelsinger championed a strategy that involved Intel both finding its footing in the semiconductor market and manufacturing chips to compete with TSMC. In June, at a conference in Taipei, Gelsinger told CNBC that when its factories get up and running, Intel wanted to build “everybody’s AI chips,” and give companies such as Nvidia and Broadcom an alternative to TSMC.

Intel said in September that it plans to turn its foundry business into an independent unit with its own board and the potential to raise outside capital. But for now, Intel’s primary client is Intel. The company said it didn’t expect meaningful sales from external customers until 2027.

At the Barclays event this month, Zinsner said the separate board for the foundry business is “getting stood up today.” More broadly, he indicated that the company is looking to remove complexity and associated costs wherever possible.

“We are going to constantly be scrutinizing where we’re spending money, making sure that we’re getting the appropriate return,” Zinsner said.

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Apple releases public preview of iOS 26, its biggest iPhone software redesign since 2013

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Apple releases public preview of iOS 26, its biggest iPhone software redesign since 2013

Apple announces a new design language for its operating systems called “Liquid Glass” during the annual Apple “Worldwide Developers Conference” (WWDC) at Apple Park, the corporate headquarters of Apple Inc., in Cupertino, California on June 9, 2025.

Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images

Apple released the public beta preview version of its next iPhone operating system, called iOS 26.

This software release on Thursday means that members of the public with recent iPhones can preview how the device’s interface will change in the fall when the software is formally released and pushed to users.

To try out iOS 26, iPhone users in the U.S. and other countries need to enroll on Apple’s website, then they can navigate to the settings menu, select General, then Software Updates and then Beta Updates.

This version of the Apple mobile operating system is one of the biggest changes to the iPhone’s user interface design since 2013, when Apple’s iOS 7 introduced a new, flatter look.

This year’s redesign is called “Liquid Glass,” and it replaces many of the iPhone’s familiar buttons and menus with versions that are translucent and show animations while the user navigates their apps. The buttons are supposed to mimic the look of glass that flows like liquid. Apple relies on public feedback of its betas to tweak and change some of the most radical interfaces it tries out.

Apple has also updated its operating systems for iPads, Mac computers, and Apple Watch to use the new user interface.

Besides the new look, Apple updated the Phone app to combine recent calls and voicemails into one screen. The company has also added more screening tools into the iPhone’s software to filter out spam calls and texts.

Noticeably missing from iOS 26, however, are the major updates to Siri artificial intelligence voice assistant that Apple promised back in 2024. Those features are not expected to arrive anytime before 2026.

Apple, though, has added several clever new features that use AI, including real-time translations inside iMessage and FaceTime, and the ability to visually search using the information inside a screenshot — for example, a user could highlight a lamp inside a screenshot of a news article to find where to buy a similar lamp to one seen online.

The company releases one major software update per year for its iPhones and other devices. They are announced in June, at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and software makers start tinkering with it then. Over the summer, Apple releases a public beta version for early adopters who want to help fix bugs and preview the new features.

Then, alongside new iPhone hardware in the fall, Apple pushes the new software to users, and most people’s phones automatically update to the new iOS.

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Trump says he won’t ‘destroy’ Musk’s companies by taking away subsidies

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Trump says he won't 'destroy' Musk's companies by taking away subsidies

Elon Musk receives a golden key from U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 30, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

Nathan Howard | Reuters

President Donald Trump on Thursday denied claims that he wants to wreck Elon Musk‘s companies and their work with the U.S. government.

“Everyone is stating that I will destroy Elon’s companies by taking away some, if not all, of the large scale subsidies he receives from the U.S. Government,” he said in a post to Truth Social. “This is not so! I want Elon, and all businesses within our Country, to THRIVE, in fact, THRIVE like never before!”

“The better they do, the better the USA does, and that’s good for all of us,” Trump wrote.

Trump’s response comes as the pair have continued a war of words that began with Musk’s opposition to the president’s signature spending bill, and evolved into the Tesla CEO attacking the president’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In June, the president threatened to cut some of Musk’s government contracts as the two clashed over the “Big Beautiful Bill” and their relationship unraveled.

Musk previously headed the president’s Department of Government Efficiency and funneled hundreds of millions into Trump’s re-election campaign.

On Wednesday, the tech CEO said on a second-quarter earnings call that Tesla could experience a “few rough quarters” due to tariff costs and the expiration of federal electric vehicle benefits at the end of September.

Read more CNBC tech news

Earlier in the day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested that the administration doesn’t want federal agencies to work with Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI.

Her remarks come after the Pentagon announced July 14 that it had awarded xAI and three other AI companies contracts worth up to $200 million each.

Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor SpaceX also has massive contract exposure in the US.

The re-usable rocket maker has received over $22 billion from work with the federal government since 2008, according to FedScout, which does federal spending and government contract research. That includes contracts from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, among others, but does not reflect contract revenue from confidential initiatives.

The Trump administration recently reviewed SpaceX federal contracts to see if there was potential for cuts, according to the Wall Street Journal. The review found most were critical.

Musk’s automaker, Tesla, has reported $12.24 billion in sales of “automotive regulatory credits,” or environmental credits, since 2015, according to an evaluation of the EV maker’s financial filings by FedScout CEO Geoff Orazem and CNBC.

This included $439 million in regulatory credit sales during the second quarter of 2025.

Such incentives were largely derived from federal and state regulations in the U.S. that require automakers to sell some number of low-emission vehicles or buy credits from companies like Tesla, which often have an excess.

Regulatory credit sales go straight to Tesla’s bottom line. 

In its quarterly financial filing on Thursday, Tesla mentioned the Trump-backed “One Big Beautiful Act” by name in its Risk Factors.

“The loss of previously available tax credits and carbon offset mechanisms may further negatively impact our financial results,” Tesla’s filing said.

The company added that “provisions of the OBBBA could affect battery cell expenses and impact costs for our consumers, negatively impacting demand.”

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Amazon venture fund backs startup developing fix for return fraud

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Amazon venture fund backs startup developing fix for return fraud

Packages ride on a conveyor belt during Cyber Monday at an Amazon fulfillment center on December 2, 2024 in Orlando, Florida.

Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Getty Images

Amazon is turning to the startup world to find a potential fix for one of its thorniest logistics problems.

Retailers of all sizes have in recent years struggled with an uptick in fraudulent returns. The scam involves shoppers requesting a refund, but instead of returning the merchandise, they keep the item and send back an empty package or a box of unrelated junk.

It’s become a costly nuisance for retailers, accounting for $103 billion in losses last year, according to Appriss Retail.

Cambridge Terahertz, a Sunnyvale, California-based startup, has developed a 3D imaging system that can see inside unopened packages, enabling retailers to more easily and quickly spot cases of return fraud.

The company has just closed a $12 million seed financing, led by venture firm Felicis, with participation from Amazon’s $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund and other investors.

Read more CNBC tech news

“Amazon handles a lot of boxes, as you can imagine,” Nathan Monroe, CEO of Cambridge Terahertz, said in an interview. “It’s a big problem just knowing what’s inside boxes, knowing how efficiently they’re packed, knowing if what you’ve returned to them is what you said it is.”

Amazon launched the Industrial Innovation Fund in 2022 with a goal of investing in businesses working on technology solutions that could apply to the company’s massive and complex operations network, from the middle mile to the last-mile portion of the delivery process.

Franziska Bossart, head of the fund, said in an interview that Amazon will typically plan to pursue a deeper “commercial relationship” with portfolio companies over time, ranging from piloting the technology to a potential acquisition.

Cambridge’s technology “aligns well with Amazon’s needs” and can have a real impact on its ability to screen inventory for damages and defects once it’s returned or before a package leaves the warehouse.

“The ability to see into boxes, identify contents, along with the compact nature of the system could allow for integration at various points in our operations,” Bossart said.

The fund has backed 20 companies so far. It also sourced Amazon’s acquihire and licensing deal with artificial intelligence robotics startup Covariant last August, Bossart added.

Amazon’s investment track record has come under scrutiny in the past. A 2020 investigation from The Wall Street Journal found the company’s Alexa Fund, which primarily invests in voice and AI technologies, used privileged information gained during meetings to launch its own competing products, citing people and startups familiar with the situation. Amazon previously denied any wrongdoing.

One of the Alexa Fund’s most notable investments was in video doorbell maker Ring, which Amazon later acquired in 2018 for $1 billion.

Cambridge connected with Amazon last year through a pitch competition focused on packaging visibility. Monroe co-founded the company in 2023 after researching terahertz imaging at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The company, which has 10 employees, says it shrunk airport-scale security scanners down to a chip-based system inside a pyramid-shaped device that can fit in your hand. The device was originally conceived as a way to detect concealed weapons by seeing through nonconducive materials, like clothing or packages, in an unobtrusive way.

Cambridge cofounders Nathan Monroe and Anand Dixit hold a custom chip and pyramid-shaped device that make up its 3D imaging system.

Cambridge Terahertz

Cambridge said it has since been approached by companies interested in how the technology can be used in supply chains, manufacturing, aerospace and medical applications.

The startup said it has secured four government contracts, and has had discussions with U.S. Customs and Border Protection around how the technology can be used to detect shipments of fentanyl at the border, a problem the Trump administration has zeroed in on through its crackdown on a near century-old trade loophole known as de minimis.

The capital from Amazon and others will enable Cambridge to ramp up hiring and “fully productize” its 3D imaging technology, Monroe said.

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Amazon weighs another multi-billion dollar investment in Anthropic

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