EDA & Semiconductor IP

Synopsys unveiled a $1 billion multi-year deal with Amazon and a multi-year agreement with OpenAI, sending its shares up 12.78 percent on Thursday to close at $490.54 apiece. The Amazon agreement expands Synopsys' silicon IP business, with Amazon as its lead customer, and the two will also collaborate on applying AI across silicon-to-system engineering workflows. The OpenAI deal covers development and delivery of the GPT-Synopsys model for chip design, combining OpenAI's frontier AI with Synopsys' EDA tools, under a revenue-sharing arrangement and go-to-market collaboration. The deals bolstered Synopsys' revenue growth outlook for fiscal year 2027, with the company targeting revenues between $11 billion and $11.2 billion, an implied increase of 13 percent to 15 percent from the $9.715 billion midpoint target for full fiscal year 2026, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $19.04 to $19.12 versus $15.07 guidance for the year earlier. Analysts raised price targets after the news, including Deutsche Bank to $640 from $590, Rosenblatt to $620 from $570, KeyBanc to $605 from $600, and Bank of America to $600 from $500.

Synopsys announced partnerships with OpenAI and Amazon at its investor day, positioning the chip designer as a major player in the AI boom. CEO Sassine Ghazi said the OpenAI partnership combines frontier intelligence and reasoning with Synopsys's domain-specific tools to help chip designers achieve better performance, power, and reliability faster. On the Amazon side, Ghazi said the company committed a billion dollars for next-generation chips to use Synopsys's new application optimized IP, a new business category aimed at the custom silicon market. Amazon is the lead customer for that emerging business, but Ghazi said Synopsys signed a number of other contracts as well, without naming them. He noted that companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are all building their own chips, driving demand for Synopsys software and interface IP that connects chips to each other and to systems.

Synopsys has been rated Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), with the consensus estimate for the current quarter standing at $4.10 per share, a year-over-year change of +41.4%, though that figure has moved -1.9% over the last 30 days. For the current fiscal year, the consensus earnings estimate of $15.13 indicates a year-over-year change of +17.2% and has changed -0.5% over the last 30 days, while the next fiscal year's estimate of $17.43 points to a change of +15.2% and has edged up +0.1% over the past month. On the revenue side, the consensus sales estimate of $2.56 billion for the current quarter points to a year-over-year change of +13.5%, with estimates of $9.72 billion and $10.74 billion for the current and next fiscal years indicating changes of +37.8% and +10.5%, respectively. In its last reported quarter, Synopsys posted revenues of $2.48 billion, up +42.4% year over year, and EPS of $3.91 versus $3.39 a year earlier, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2.44 billion by +1.68% on revenue and by +6.54% on EPS, and the company has topped consensus EPS and revenue estimates in each of the trailing four quarters. Synopsys is graded D on the Zacks Value Style Score, indicating it trades at a premium to its peers.

Cadence Design Systems and Analog Devices announced a collaboration on September 15 to integrate Cadence's Tensilica DSP architecture into ADI's latest generation of SHARC automotive audio processors, aiming to enhance in-vehicle infotainment with advanced digital signal processing. For Cadence, the partnership strengthens its IP business, a segment that grew over 40% year-over-year in Q2 2026, and adds to its record $8.1 billion backlog, underpinning a raised 2026 outlook projecting 19% revenue growth of $6.26B to $6.34B and $2 billion in operating cash flow. For Analog Devices, the deal expands its addressable edge-processing market and follows Q3 2026 revenue of $4.02 billion, trailing twelve-month free cash flow of $4.9 billion, or 36% of revenue, and $1.7 billion returned to shareholders in Q3 alone. Both companies face risks: Cadence must sustain operational spending on domain-specific processors while navigating export-control regulations, and ADI remains exposed to auto production cycles, working-capital needs and long automotive qualification timelines.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing expanded its chip design partnership with Synopsys, strengthening the tools customers can use to design chips for TSMC's upcoming A14 process. The September 23 announcement covers AI-assisted design, automated chiplet layouts, power analysis for advanced packaging and verification for co-packaged optics, and Synopsys also reported progress on interfaces for HBM4, PCIe 7.0 and Ethernet. TSMC has scheduled A14 volume production for 2028. The U.S.-listed shares fell about 0.9% to $446.57 at 11.48am ET on September 28, a level 22.79% above the $363.69 GF Value. Better design tools could help customers get chips ready sooner, but they do not guarantee orders, and investors still need to see customer designs reach production, strong yields and fabs running at capacity.

BNP Paribas analyst Andrew DeGasperi upgraded Synopsys to Neutral from Underperform with a $420 price target, citing easing headwinds and more limited downside risk. The company's Design IP business returned to year-over-year growth in the third quarter of fiscal 2026, and Synopsys posted third-quarter revenue of $2.477 billion, up from $1.740 billion a year earlier, prompting management to raise its fiscal 2026 revenue outlook to approximately $9.715 billion at the midpoint. Management expects approximately $2.98 billion of Ansys revenue in fiscal 2026 and has targeted $400 million of cumulative annual synergies by the fourth year following the acquisition. Synopsys has been expanding agentic AI capabilities, including autonomous workflows developed with partners such as Microsoft and Advanced Micro Devices, with early evaluations reportedly cutting design cycle times by approximately 25% to 40%. Hedge fund positioning was relatively stable, with 85 funds holding stakes in the second quarter versus 84 in the first, while short interest rose to approximately 5.71 million shares as of August 31 from 4.36 million as of July 31, or about 2.98% of shares outstanding.

HSBC upgraded Synopsys to Buy from Hold and raised its price target to a Street-high $700 from $490, sending the chip design software company's shares up 1.81% intraday as of 10:20 a.m. ET. The new target implies over 60% upside from current levels and is based on 35 times HSBC's fiscal 2027 earnings-per-share estimate of $20.01, rolled forward from 33 times fiscal 2026. That estimate sits 13% above consensus and is the highest on Wall Street, according to the firm. HSBC expects Synopsys' shift toward a royalties-based business model to drive earnings growth, and sees agentic AI lifting demand for electronic design automation tools. The call follows a strong fiscal third quarter in which Synopsys earned $3.91 a share on a non-GAAP basis on revenue of $2.48 billion, beating estimates of $3.67 and $2.44 billion, and raised its full-year outlook.

Synopsys reported third-quarter fiscal 2026 non-GAAP earnings of $3.91 per share, up 15.3% year over year and ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 6.5%, while revenues rose 42.4% to $2.48 billion. The company raised its fiscal 2026 revenue guidance to $9.69-$9.74 billion, with the midpoint up $50 million, and lifted its fiscal 2026 non-GAAP earnings guidance to $15.04-$15.10 per share, a 31-cent increase at the midpoint. Ansys contributed approximately $711 million to total quarterly revenues and is now expected to contribute about $2.98 billion for the full fiscal year, up $20 million from the previous outlook. Backlog stood at $10.9 billion, and the non-GAAP operating margin was 41.6%, with fiscal 2026 non-GAAP operating margin now projected at about 41.5% at the midpoint, up 50 basis points. For the fourth quarter, Synopsys projects revenues of $2.53-$2.58 billion and non-GAAP earnings of $4.10-$4.16 per share, with management expecting EDA revenue growth to accelerate to double digits.

Cadence Design Systems introduced its RTL Generation Agent, extending the ChipStack AI Super Agent platform for chip design automation. The new agent automates front-end digital design and verification, turning natural language prompts into optimized RTL code for power, performance, and area. Early evaluations, including work with Honda on advanced automotive projects, report strong productivity and efficiency gains from the AI-assisted workflows. The launch pushes Cadence's agentic AI thesis further into front-end design, expanding ChipStack from checking designs to writing and refining them, and connects to earlier moves such as the GUC AI accelerator work and the InnoStack alliance with Rapidus. Cadence's AI-driven design and verification tools, including the Cadence Cerebrus AI solution and SimAI, are expected to drive future revenue growth as adoption increases.

The National Semiconductor and Advanced Electronics Industry Policy Committee, chaired by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Ekniti Nitithanprapas, has approved the first national strategy for developing the semiconductor and advanced electronics industry, as disclosed by Narit Therdsteerasukdi, Secretary-General of the Board of Investment, or BOI. The strategy sets out a three-phase roadmap toward the goal of Made-in-Thailand chips, targeting more than 500 billion baht in investment by 2030 and 2.5 trillion baht by 2050, while pushing industry revenue to 5 trillion baht per year and creating more than 230,000 new jobs. The first phase, by 2030, will upgrade the existing chip assembly and testing base to advanced packaging and lay the foundation for upstream chip production. The second phase, by 2040, focuses on attracting major investors in chip design and wafer fabrication. The third phase, by 2050, aims for Thailand to have a complete semiconductor supply chain and to build Thai companies into local champions. It will focus on three main semiconductor groups: photonics, power semiconductors and sensors, driven through five main mechanisms: incentives and tailored investment support packages, high-skilled workforce development, technology and research infrastructure, readiness in electricity, water and clean energy, and regulatory improvement. Meanwhile, the Siam Silica plan aims to produce and develop a total workforce of 86,600 people by 2030, comprising 84,900 high-skilled personnel and about 1,700 senior research personnel. Infineon Technologies, a major chipmaker from Germany, is preparing to open its first plant in Thailand in Samut Prakan province on October 1, 2026, as a base for advanced power module production along with a research and development center, and when fully operational the project is expected to create more than 5,000 jobs for Thai personnel. In addition, several global technology companies have chosen Thailand as a production base, such as Analog Devices, Foxsemicon, ZDT, Terahop and MPI. BOI data shows that from 2023 through June 2026, there were 879 projects applying for investment promotion in the semiconductor and advanced electronics industry, with investment value of more than 909 billion baht.

Synopsys announced new collaborations with TSMC spanning A14 design enablement, AI-assisted engineering workflows, CoWoS support for multi-die designs, and unified multiphysics signoff. The companies said Synopsys has achieved A14 certification across digital and analog flows and enabled agentic AI capabilities, giving customers a methodology spanning implementation through signoff to accelerate design convergence on TSMC A14 technology. In analog design, Synopsys is collaborating with TSMC on device routing enablement on A14, a key milestone for advanced analog place-and-route automation. Synopsys said its 3DIC Compiler platform now enables designers to co-design and simulate integrated voltage regulators on TSMC CoWoS technology in a unified environment, and that it continues to work with TSMC on co-packaged optics design on TSMC COUPE technology. On TSMC's N2P process, Synopsys achieved key IP enablement and tape-out milestones for AI and HPC designs including PCIe 7.0, HBM4, LPDDR6/5X/5, 224G Ethernet PHY, UCIe, OTP, and advanced SLM process, voltage, and temperature monitoring IP, and recently completed 64G UCIe IP tape-outs on both 2nm and 3nm process nodes.

24/7 Wall St. issued a buy recommendation on Synopsys with a $490.29 price target, about 27.36% above the recent quote of $400.70, citing AI-driven chip design complexity. The firm reported 90% confidence in the call even as Synopsys shares have fallen 14.69% year to date and 16.54% over the past year, within a 52-week range of $362.55 to $539.48. In Q3 FY2026, Synopsys revenue reached $2.48 billion, up 42.4% year over year, and non-GAAP EPS came in at $3.91 versus $3.67 consensus, while management raised full-year revenue guidance to $9.69 billion to $9.74 billion and non-GAAP EPS guidance to $15.04 to $15.10. CEO Sassine Ghazi said AI is driving unprecedented complexity and increasing demand for silicon IP and engineering solutions, and the company logged more than 30 full-flow technical wins in a single quarter with agentic EDA being evaluated by 20 customers across more than 25 specialized AI agents. Synopsys carries an $11 billion backlog, the Ansys deal carries a reiterated $400 million revenue synergy target, and long-term debt jumped to $13.46 billion after Ansys, with GAAP profitability compressed by roughly $404 million per quarter of intangible amortization. Synopsys trades at roughly 28x forward earnings versus 30x for Cadence Design Systems, which has a $77.9 billion market cap and an analyst target of $402.12, while Broadcom trades at 19x forward earnings with a $1.71 trillion market cap and 85.5% quarterly revenue growth. The Street's average analyst target sits at $545.93, and the September 30 Investor Day could confirm Ansys synergy timing and agentic EDA monetization.

Arm Holdings shares rose 17% to $323 after CEO Rene Haas told CNBC that demand for the company's technology was off the charts and that he is increasingly convinced Arm can surpass its $2 billion revenue target for its developing AGI CPU business. That goal has moved quickly: Arm began in March with an initial target of $1 billion, raised it to $2 billion in May, and by September Haas said the pipeline was above that level. Nvidia's Vera CPU, Google's Axion, Amazon's Graviton5, and Microsoft's Azure Cobalt all use Arm-based computation, tying the company to the expanding trend of CPUs paired with AI accelerators. Haas also pointed to supply restrictions on wafers, substrates and testing capacity that could take years to work through, a problem that nonetheless shows demand is outstripping available capacity. The larger story is Arm's effort to move away from its usual licensing arrangement and capture more value from the chips themselves, and Monday's surge suggests investors are increasingly focused on that opportunity.

Ceva is combining its Ceva-Waves UWB baseband intellectual property and software with LG Electronics' ultra-wideband radio-frequency technology to offer a complete, silicon-ready solution, and a major U.S. semiconductor company has already selected the combined platform. The next-generation UWB architecture supports the latest IEEE 802.15.4ab standard and delivers improved ranging in non-line-of-sight environments, extended range, low-power operation and interference resistance, while LG's RF technology supports TSMC's 22-nanometer manufacturing process. ABI Research expects worldwide UWB device shipments to rise from 597 million in 2026 to nearly 1.18 billion by 2030, expanding licensing and royalty opportunities for Ceva. Ceva's broader connectivity portfolio spans Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, UWB, cellular IoT and 5G, and the LG partnership strengthens its competitive position across automotive, industrial and consumer end markets. Ceva currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Meta Platforms launched Muse, an autonomous personal AI agent that shot to the top of the Apple App Store within a week, and the agentic AI shift is driving gains for Arm Holdings and Advanced Micro Devices. In March, Meta and Arm announced a large-scale partnership to co-develop Arm AGI CPU and multiple generations of specialized silicon for Meta's data centers, and Arm CEO Rene Haas said Arm already has $2 billion of customer demand for its new AGI CPU. SoftBank, which owns roughly 90% of Arm's shares outstanding, said it would raise Arm's loan facility to $25 billion from $20 billion, and Arm shares rose more than 10% in early trading. Meta partnered with AMD to optimize Muse Glimmer, an open-source model designed to run locally on computers, and demand for agentic AI has pushed prices for AMD server chips up about 40%. AMD CEO Lisa Su said the server CPU market could exceed $120 billion by the end of the decade, a 35% CAGR, and AMD shares broke out to all-time highs as the company crossed the $1 trillion market cap landmark for the first time.

Jim Cramer said selling Arm Holdings early was a "big mistake," noting on the September 16 episode of Mad Money that the stock has fallen 46% from its June high of $452 to just under $244. Arm's fiscal first quarter 2027 results showed total revenue of $1.29 billion, up 22% year over year, with royalty revenue up 22% to $715 million and licensing revenue up 23% to $574 million, while data-center royalties more than doubled and the company posted a non-GAAP operating margin of 41% and $665 million in non-GAAP free cash flow. Management expects Q2 FY27 revenue of $1.38 billion with a $50 million margin of error, non-GAAP operating expenses of about $780 million, and non-GAAP fully diluted earnings per share of $0.47 with a $0.04 margin of error, with results due by November 4. The stock trades at around 110x forward earnings, and short interest stood at 11.52% of the public float as of August 31, while 52 hedge fund portfolios held a stake in the second quarter, up from 46 in the prior period. Cramer argued that panicking over steep pullbacks in dominant tech leaders is a losing game, calling short-term drops buying opportunities for patient investors given Arm's royalty growth and tight supply.

Bank of America estimates Meta Platforms could save roughly $8.5 billion in 2027 by running AI workloads on its own custom silicon instead of buying third-party chips, an outside analyst estimate rather than company guidance. The figure rests on a specific roadmap: Meta plans to deploy its third-generation MTIA 450 chip, code-named Arke, in the first half of 2027, followed by the higher-performance MTIA 500, or Astrid, later that year, both co-developed with Broadcom and aimed at AI inference workloads. BofA models Meta deploying 5 to 6 gigawatts of owned capacity in 2027 at a total cost of roughly $200 billion, assumes chips make up 60% of that spend, and pegs Meta's custom silicon as about 40% cheaper than third-party equivalents. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said custom chips optimized for a customer's own workloads outperform any GPU and can do so at half the cost, and confirmed Broadcom will deliver three generations of MTIA accelerators to Meta between now and the end of 2027. Meta's FY2026 capex guidance sits at $130 billion to $145 billion, narrowed from $125 billion to $145 billion, with total expense guidance raised to $165 billion to $169 billion, while Q2 2026 revenue reached $60.80 billion, up 27.96% year over year, on advertising revenue of $59.36 billion.

Microchip Technology said its Silicon Storage Technology subsidiary has secured AnalogAI as a customer for its memBrain SAGE intellectual property, a design win that expands the company's exposure to edge AI and neuromorphic computing. The technology combines analog compute-in-memory with ultra-low-power operation to support real-time AI inference and learning directly on edge devices, and AnalogAI plans to use it in processors targeting humanoid robots, drones and vehicles. The win builds on Microchip's technology-licensing momentum, with licensing revenues rising to $42.6 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2027 from $33 million a year earlier, and licensee revenues growing to $163.8 million in fiscal 2026 from $131.1 million in fiscal 2025. Microchip faces intensifying competition in edge AI from NXP Semiconductors, which said AI-enabled processors are expected to represent 15% of industrial and IoT processor revenues in 2026, more than doubling from 2025, and from Texas Instruments, which cited strong demand across robotics, industrial automation and energy infrastructure. Microchip shares have risen 9.2% year to date, trailing the broader Zacks Computer and Technology sector's 16.7% gain, and the stock trades at a forward 12-month price/earnings of 17.31X versus the sector's 20.32X. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Microchip's earnings stands at 92 cents per share, up a couple of cents over the past 30 days and implying 162.86% growth.

China has unveiled a new five-year development plan for manufacturing in electronics- and information technology-related industries, setting a target to raise revenue above 30 trillion yuan, or 4.5 trillion dollars, by 2030. The plan was drawn up jointly by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, or MIIT, and the National Development and Reform Commission, or NDRC. It covers the strategic framework from 2026 to 2030 and reflects the Chinese government's push for supply chain self-reliance, aiming for global leadership in strategically important emerging technologies from artificial intelligence to advanced computing, amid ongoing global competition. Beyond the revenue target, China also aims to raise research and development investment in the industry to 3.5% by 2030, setting out 17 missions covering nine key industry groups, from electronic components and materials, specialised manufacturing and measurement equipment, photonics, advanced computing, consumer electronics, power electronics, positioning and timing information technology, chips and AI endpoint devices, through to industrial electronics. The plan also drives technology development in the integrated circuit industry supply chain, while upgrading advanced electronic materials and smart sensors. In computing and memory, China will develop high-bandwidth flash memory alongside new forms of storage products such as Ferroelectric RAM, Resistive RAM and Magnetoresistive RAM, and aims to build very large-scale intelligent computing infrastructure supporting AI clusters equipped with hundreds of thousands of accelerator cards, while accelerating the deployment of space computing technology. The announcement of this sector-specific plan follows China's release on September 7 of its 15th five-year development plan for the information and communications industry, drawn up by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

M31 Technology has expanded its technology collaboration with Rambus Inc. to cover MIPI CSI and MIPI DSI Controller technologies, combining them with M31's silicon-proven MIPI PHY portfolio to offer a comprehensive MIPI subsystem solution. The Hsinchu-based silicon IP provider said the integration of high-speed MIPI PHYs with MIPI CSI and DSI controllers lets customers reduce verification and development risks tied to multi-vendor integration while accelerating time-to-market. M31 CEO Scott Chang said customers previously had to procure controllers separately and then rely on M31 for integration, but can now entrust the complete MIPI interface design to M31. As M31 moves from PHY-only offerings to complete subsystem solutions that include controllers, the average total contract value of related engagements is expected to increase compared with the previous PHY-only licensing model. The company cited rising demand across smartphones, automotive ADAS cameras, multi-display cockpit systems, and AI edge devices, and said industry analysts project the global interface IP market will reach approximately US$5.4 billion by 2029.

Meta Platforms is planning to increase its use of in-house-designed AI chips as it looks to reduce the cost of its vast infrastructure buildout. The company has invested billions in data centers, servers and accelerators as it builds more sophisticated models and rolls out AI features across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Custom silicon can be tuned around particular workloads rather than the wide range of tasks expected from general-purpose accelerators, making AI services cheaper and more efficient to run at massive scale. More internal chips would lower Meta's reliance on outside semiconductor providers for some tasks, even as sophisticated Nvidia accelerators remain core to its infrastructure. The move follows a wider trend among hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon that have developed specialized processors for AI and cloud computing, and Meta's next test is whether those chips can deliver considerable savings as its AI infrastructure spending keeps growing.

Arm Holdings shares surged approximately 3.1% to $246.64 Tuesday morning as AI-linked semiconductor stocks rebounded from Monday's selloff. The company reported record fiscal first-quarter revenue of $1.29 billion, up 22% from a year earlier, with royalty revenue climbing 22% to $715 million and licensing revenue rising 23% to $574 million. Data-center royalties more than doubled as cloud providers continued deploying Arm-based processors. Royalties accounted for roughly 55.4% of quarterly revenue, though the stock trades 27.67% above its GF Value estimate of $193.19.

Marvell Technology's data center revenue reached $2.17 billion last quarter, up 46% year-over-year and now accounting for 79% of total company revenue, as the chipmaker positions itself as a key player in the AI infrastructure buildout. Management raised its fiscal 2027 revenue outlook to roughly $12 billion and expects fiscal 2028 data center revenue to grow more than 60%, with custom silicon revenue set to over-double next year. The company's expanded Google agreement validates its custom XPU thesis, and Marvell called scale-up optics a massive new TAM. Wall Street's consensus price target sits at $284.64 with 89% bullish coverage, while fiscal 2028 EPS estimates have climbed from $6.1726 ninety days ago to $6.7209 today. Shares trade at $218.07, up 156.98% year-to-date, though the stock fell 7.64% in a single session as part of a broad chip-sector reset. CEO Matt Murphy said AI-related bookings remain exceptionally robust and expects revenue growth to accelerate further through the remainder of fiscal 2027.

Cadence announced that its Tensilica IP Group and Analog Devices collaborated to develop the latest generation of SHARC automotive audio processors, bringing Cadence's Tensilica DSP architecture into ADI's next-generation ADSP product family. ADI is introducing the new ADSP-SC84x/2184x platform, which transitions from 28nm to 16nm process technology and builds on the ADSP-SC59x/2159x family. A key innovation of the ADSP-SC84x family is the new SHARC-FX processor core, designed and built through a joint engagement with Cadence, which delivers 5X higher performance compared to the previous generation SHARC+ processor used in the ADSP-SC59x family. The SHARC-FX features a custom DSP architecture supporting a broader range of data types, an enhanced VLIW SIMD architecture, efficient cache operations, and an expanded instruction set optimized for modern signal processing and AI workloads, including support for optimized neural-network kernel routines for frameworks such as Google's LiteRT. The platform also adds an LPDDR4 memory interface, increased on-chip L2 memory, enhanced cybersecurity via a dedicated hardware security module, and two optional connectivity cores with mainline Linux support.

Qualcomm has struck a long-term partnership with Amazon under which Amazon could purchase as much as $60 billion of Qualcomm's AI data-center chips and related products. As part of the agreement, Qualcomm granted Amazon warrants worth roughly $4 billion, allowing Amazon to buy Qualcomm shares at $161.26 per share, with the warrants vesting as Amazon purchases Qualcomm products. The two companies will develop custom AI chips focused on AI inference, along with high-speed optical connectivity for data centers, and Qualcomm is targeting $15 billion in annual data-center chip revenue by 2029. Amazon joins Microsoft and Meta as major cloud customers working with Qualcomm on custom AI chips, though the $60 billion figure is a potential purchase commitment rather than guaranteed revenue, and Qualcomm still must commercialize chips that can compete with Nvidia. Amazon's annualized custom-chip revenue run-rate exceeded $25 billion at the end of the June quarter, and Reuters reported separately that Amazon was preparing its first sterling bond sale as hyperscalers seek funding for AI infrastructure costs.

Piper Sandler launched coverage of the artificial intelligence chip sector on Thursday, initiating five semiconductor stocks at Overweight as prime beneficiaries of surging AI compute demand. Analyst David O'Connor started Nvidia with a $300 price target, calling it the "outright leader in AI compute with 80% market share" and describing the stock as "among the cheapest in AI universe" at about 14 times fiscal 2028 estimates. Broadcom was initiated at $460 as the leader in custom ASIC chips with a 75% share, where O'Connor wrote that "demand is 2x supply" and noted line of sight to 12 gigawatts of demand in fiscal 2027. Advanced Micro Devices was started at $600, an "Agentic AI Sweetspot" with earnings forecast to grow at a 65% compound annual rate through 2030, while Marvell Technology was initiated at $270, citing a $120 billion Google agreement and an Oct. 6 analyst day as a potential catalyst. Arm Holdings rounded out the group at $320, with O'Connor highlighting its CPU intellectual property dominance and expansion into custom silicon and accelerator IP that he said could double earnings.

According to SNS Insider, the global Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor market is projected to grow from USD 685.00 million in 2025 to USD 2,283.00 million by 2035, at a CAGR of 12.8% from 2026 to 2035. Asia Pacific led the market with a 71.0% share in 2025, while North America is the fastest-growing region at approximately 16.5% CAGR, driven by CHIPS Act-backed fab investment. Within the U.S., the market is expected to rise from about USD 108.00 million in 2025 to USD 476.00 million by 2035. Nanosheet GAA transistors held the largest device-type share at 44%, with forksheet FET the fastest-growing type. Among technology nodes, 3nm/2nm nodes accounted for 40% of the market, while high-performance computing led applications with a 35% share, and foundries dominated end-users at 50%. Key players include TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and others, with TSMC ramping its N2 process and Intel advancing RibbonFET technology.

According to SNS Insider, the global semiconductor design market is projected to grow from USD 25.23 billion in 2025 to USD 69.43 billion by 2035, at a CAGR of 10.67% from 2026 to 2035. The market, which provides intellectual property, engineering expertise, and EDA solutions for logic, memory, and analog ICs, is forecast to reach USD 27.92 billion in 2026, driven by demand for AI accelerators and high-performance computing chips. Asia Pacific holds the largest regional share at approximately 39% in 2025 and is also the fastest-growing region, led by China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and India. Within the U.S., the market is expected to grow from USD 7.89 billion in 2025 to USD 20.75 billion by 2035, a CAGR of about 10.12%, supported by hyperscaler investments and government initiatives like the CHIPS and Science Act. Key developments include NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra GPU and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, both launched in 2025, while Synopsys enhanced its AI-assisted EDA suite in 2024.