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SoftBank acquires US semiconductor design company Ampere for $6.5 billion SoftBank Group (SBG) announced on March 20 that it will acquire US semiconductor design company Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion. Following ARM in the UK, SoftBank Group has added another cutting-edge semiconductor-related company to its portfolio. SoftBank will accelerate its strategy of advancing its commitment to the Trump administration to invest more than 70 trillion yen in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in the United States and develop generative AI in Japan. Ampere is currently held by the US investment fund Carlyle Group with 59.65%, Oracle of the United States with 32.27%, and an affiliate of ARM in the UK with 8.08%. SoftBank Group will acquire all shares through a subsidiary. The transaction is expected to be completed in the second half of 2025. Ampere was founded in 2017 and is considered to have advantages in large-scale data processing and AI. The company complements ARM's design capabilities and develops semiconductors for data center equipment, including related data, to technology companies and foundry companies. SoftBank Group spent about 3.3 trillion yen in 2016 to acquire British semiconductor design giant ARM and listed it in the US market in September 2023. SoftBank Group still holds about 90% of ARM's shares and regards it as the core of its AI strategy. In January, SoftBank Group announced that it would join hands with the US OpenAI company to invest $500 billion to build infrastructure for AI development across the United States. It plans to build data centers across the United States and set up power generation facilities to meet its electricity needs. In February, SoftBank Group and OpenAI established a joint venture to develop generative AI and sell it to Japanese companies. Masayoshi Son, chairman and president of SoftBank Group, said, "The future of super artificial intelligence (ASI) requires unprecedented computing power. Ampere's expertise will accelerate the realization of the vision." Renee J. James, founder and CEO of Ampere, pointed out, "We can advance the development blueprint for high-performance ARM processors and AI." In the global AI investment boom, large-scale mergers and acquisitions continue. SoftBank Group announced on the 18th that Google has agreed to acquire Wiz, an American cybersecurity company funded by SoftBank through the Vision Fund, for US$32 billion.

1. In Q4 2024, the global foundry industry revenue increased by 26% year-on-year 2. The global foundry industry revenue increased by 26% year-on-year and 9% month-on-month in Q4 2024, mainly driven by strong AI demand and the continued recovery of the Chinese market. 3. Driven by the demand for AI and flagship smartphones, the capacity utilization rate of advanced processes remains high. 4. Driven by the demand for advance stocking related to US tariffs and the demand related to Chinese subsidies, non-AI demand is gradually recovering, mainly in application areas such as consumer electronics and PC semiconductors. 5. The demand for advanced packaging is strong and stable. TSMC's expansion focuses on CoWoS-L, which effectively alleviates the market's previous concerns about CoWoS capacity and order adjustments. According to Counterpoint Research's "Wafer Foundry Quarterly Tracking Report", the global wafer foundry industry's revenue in Q4 2024 increased by 26% year-on-year and 9% quarter-on-quarter, mainly driven by strong AI demand and the continued recovery of the Chinese market. Capacity utilization of advanced processes remains high, mainly driven by AI and flagship smartphone demand, especially TSMC's N3 and N5 processes. At the same time, mature process wafer foundries around the world (excluding China) are still facing low capacity utilization difficulties, with overall utilization hovering between 65% and 70% this quarter. Among them, the recovery momentum of 12-inch processes is stronger than that of 8-inch processes, which are more affected by sluggish demand in the automotive and industrial sectors. However, non-AI demand is gradually picking up, especially in consumer electronics and PC semiconductors, thanks to pre-production demand related to US tariffs and demand driven by Chinese subsidies, which brings some optimism to the stability of the broader market. As AI and high-performance computing (HPC) continue to drive demand for advanced processes, advanced packaging plays a key role in supporting industry growth. TSMC's aggressive expansion of CoWoS-L and CoWoS-R capacity further reinforces this trend and eases the market's previous concerns about capacity and order adjustments.

Spring 2025 saw a wave of price increases in the global NAND flash memory market. In this wave of price increases, internationally renowned memory manufacturers SanDisk and Micron took the lead in announcing price increases of more than 10% for their NAND flash memory products from 1 April. According to channel feedback, the Cheung Kong storage retail brand to the state will also be from April for the channel to raise the price of goods, the range may be more than 10%. As early as last month, early signals of price increases have already appeared in the market, especially for small-capacity eMMC and some SSD products, with some channel low-priced resources already taking the lead. At the recent CFM|MemoryS 2025 conference, industry experts noted that demand for computing power is exploding, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which in turn is driving a rapid rise in demand for storage capacity. A key point discussed at the conference was the early arrival of the high-capacity era, especially in enterprise applications, where 32TB SSDs have begun mass production, while demand for 64TB and 128TB storage is also growing rapidly. In addition, AI phones and AI PCs are expected to see significant technological advances this year, further increasing demand for high-capacity storage products, which will help to consume existing storage capacity.

Global semiconductor sales up 17.9% in January Global semiconductor sales in January rose 17.9 per cent year-on-year to $56.52 billion, according to data released by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). U.S. demand for generative AI-related semiconductors pushed up sales to a record high in January. Compared with the same period a year earlier, sales increased for the 15th consecutive month. The above data is aggregated by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS), a group of major semiconductor manufacturers, and published by SIA. By region, sales in the Americas rose 50.7% from a year earlier to $19.54 billion, pulling the overall growth. AI-related purchases, such as data centres, continued to be strong. Japan was up 5.7 per cent to $3.91 billion and China was up 6.5 per cent to $15.55 billion. Asia-Pacific and other regions excluding China and Japan were $13.43 billion, up 9.0 per cent. On the other hand, Europe was $4.1 billion, a decrease of 6.4 per cent. Global semiconductor sales maintain year-on-year growth from the beginning of 2020, but semiconductor sales turn to a downward trend from the autumn of 2022 due to the current decline in consumption of personal computers and smartphones as a result of the counteracting demand for homes amid the new crown epidemic. Since then, in addition to robust AI-related demand centred on the U.S., and factors such as tightening supply and demand due to production cutbacks by semiconductor memory makers, semiconductor sales have returned to the positive growth range. However, on a year-on-year basis, sales in January declined 1.7% from December 2024, the second consecutive month of decline.The SIA revealed that the main products pulling sales in 2024 were logic and storage semiconductors, and that in storage semiconductors, DRAMs used for short-term storage of data showed significant growth. 2022 to 2025 Summary data of global semiconductor sales in January: January 2022: $50.7 billion January 2023: $41.3 billion January 2024: $47.6 billion January 2025: $56.5 billion

Microsoft has announced that its instant messaging service Skype will officially cease operations on 5 May of the same year. The once popular communication tool ended its 22-year history, and users will gradually migrate to Microsoft Teams, another Microsoft collaboration platform.After the news was released, a large number of users emerged on social media lamented: ‘another tear of the era’. In May 2025, Skype will be discontinued,’ Microsoft said. This change will affect free and paid Skype users, but will not affect Skype for Business. Skype users will have the option to migrate to the free version of Microsoft Teams, which offers many of the same core features and more. After signing in to Teams Free with your Skype account, your chats and contacts will show up in the app so you can pick up where you last left off. This feature will be rolled out gradually over the next few days, starting with Skype and Teams Preview Experience members on the latest app version. If you do not wish to use the free version of Microsoft Teams, you can export your Skype data.

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