By Bolaji Ojo

Taiwan’s presidential and national legislative elections will take place Jan. 13. At stake is the independence, economy and political future of the island – and for many in the electronics industry, the future of its role in the semiconductor market and in the technology value chain.

By Fred Ohwahwa

Technology is changing everything in Africa.

Even the nature of how many people work throughout the continent is evolving. Technology innovators, enterprises and investors should be closely monitoring the new generation that never experienced the dynamics of the workplace that prevailed on the continent even as recently as 10 years ago.

To Westerners, some of the changes may have a whiff of catch-up. But that’s where the investment opportunities are springing up. In Africa, leapfrogging technology nodes has become the norm, so much so that young entrepreneurs on the continent are setting the pace for the rest of the world in finance, banking and communications.

By Peter Clarke

What’s at stake?
With the arrival of Generative AI in the mainstream, in platforms such as ChatGPT in Microsoft’s Bing and Bard within Google, and with billions of dollars of AI processor chip sales, AI was seen to have enjoyed a breakout year in 2023. Well, it’s going to be even bigger in 2024.

What has been a showcasing of Generative AI – as a somewhat whimsical extension of the tools at the disposal of artists and creative professionals – is going to become much more focused and about following the money saved and the profits generated.

By Bolaji Ojo

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. has become too big to fail. And that is a problem for the entire electronics value chain.

It is the preferred foundry – and too often the only viable – partner for the world’s biggest fabless chipmakers; Intel Corp., the troubled MPU vendor that was once the global No. 1 semiconductor vendor by revenue and capitalization, found solace in TSMC’s arms while Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable chip vendor, credits the foundry with its survival.

That’s all good, justifiable and even admirable. But even TSMC has its Achilles heel. Except, unlike Hercules, TSMC has more than one major weakness. We have all just been too enamored of its ascent to realize the foundry may now represent the Weakest Link in the electronics supply chain. 

By Jon Peddie

Being in the right place at the right time is one way to success (assuming you’re smart enough to recognize the opportunity). Anticipating a market developing is another way, and creating a market is yet one more way to success. Nvidia has done all that and more with AI.

Before Large Language Models (LLMs), transformers, and generative AI exploded on the scene, Nvidia was already seeding what was called then “accelerated-compute,” or GPU-compute, and used its CUDA C++ like programming language as a catalyst and gateway to exploiting the power of parallel processing with a GPU. GPUs are complex devices and getting multiple threads of data to behave properly and in sync is a tricky process. CUDA took a lot of the drudgery out of that work and the payoff was so good that hundreds of developers in large organizations took advantage of it and built up a huge library of proprietary and open programs that ran on Nvidia GPUs.