
Welcome to 2025. The western New Year saw some key shifts in the electronics market, not least with a new administration taking over in the US and talking about chip tariffs as high as 100%. There are also structural shifts in Europe, with TTTech Auto joining NXP Semiconductor and eVTOL maker Volocopter heading for bankruptcy. At the same time u-blox in Switzerland shut down its cellular IoT module business after failing to find a buyer.
But amid the gloom and January forecasts of a fragile semiconductor market in 2025, there are 18 fabs around the world starting construction to prepare for the upturn in 2026 and beyond.
Pison is emerging as an interesting player in the AI sensor market with backing from Samsung and deals with STMicroelectronics and Timex.
Imagination Technologies has also had a tumultuous month, with the results of an employment tribunal for former CEO Ron Black and current CEO Simon Beresford-Wylie announcing his retirement. The company also cut is RISC-V design teams to focus on GPUs.
Another company facing tumult is Intel after Pat Gensinger ‘retired’ in December and investing in UK AI startup Fractile. But the company has picked up two military customers for its 18A Intel Foundry Service.
Despite its rollercoaster ride in recent days courtesy of DeepSeek, Nvidia is the darling of the stock market as the world’s most valuable company. It launched a desktop AI computer with a new chip, the GB10, with 20 ARM processor cores. The company is at pains to point out that this is a specialist appliance for running models like DeepSeek locally and not a general purpose desktop machine.
Another interesting AI processor is Izanagi, being developed by ARM-owner Softbank. Softbank is also leading the $100bn Stargate project to build out datacentres in the US.
SoftBank’s Izanagi AI processor could arrive in 2025, says report
Stargate, backed by OpenAI, Oracle and Microsoft, marks a shift away from the support for semiconductors in the US CHIPS and Science Act. The last few weeks of the Biden administration saw a flurry of announcements to push through deals across the country to boost domestic production.
But it was the taping out of the Nvidia B300 Blackwell GPU that captured the imagination in January. On a 4nm process at TSMC< the chip is expected to have a power consumption of 1.2kW, up form 1kW for the B200 but with 50% higher performance, which will also keep our coverage of datacentre cooling technologies busy as the year progressed.
In the meantime, happy lunar New Year to all our readers in China.
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