Timothy Prickett Morgan

Everybody has been expecting for Cerebras Systems, one of the second-generation of AI hardware startups that has been trying very hard to compete with Nvidia on AI compute for years, to launch its latest systems, dubbed the CS-4, sometime this summer.

The Hot Chips 2026 conference kicked off with half-day tutorial sessions on Sunday, and

As the financial results have come out from the major suppliers of server components, we are getting a sense – finally – of how much larger demand is than supply. And in Nvidia's discussion of its second quarter of fiscal 2026 results, Nvidia gave us some hints in its fiscal 2027 and 2028 years for everyone to contemplate and build their models.

Another day, another big deal that pairs a tech titan with a chip shepherd or a chip supplier – sometimes both at the same time – that covers tens of billions or more for GenAI infrastructure.

One a decade for the past six decades, Big Blue launches an effort to converge its diverse system architectures. It almost never works, with the exception of the launch of the System/360 mainframes in April 1964 and the AS/400 minicomputers in June 1988. And to be fair, the AS/400 was itself based in part on technologies created in a failed convergence effort.

Way back in the dawn of time, there were two rival future I/O schemes for PCs and servers, and as the Dot Com boom roared along, they buried the hatchet and made a compromise that resulted in the InfiniBand ports and switched fabric as the I/O bus for all of computing.

The datacenter has become the dominate factor in driving the business of chip maker and chip shepherd Marvell, and the growth in this business is almost exclusively coming from components for AI clusters. While it is exciting that Marvell has big deals with Amazon Web Services, Google, and others for custom chips, this business is still relatively small. Optical components for networks as well as switching are still driving the bulk of the sales.

It may have taken many years and what we presume was a certain amount of patience as Michael Dell watched his custom server maker rivals working for the hyperscalers and clouds get the vast majority of GPU allocations, but AI is a driving force for the company that bears his name.

The GenAI wave is indeed lifting almost all of the boats. While Dell has become the largest original equipment manufacturer in the world – a title that the original Hewlett Packard used to have after it bought Compaq in 2001, which had previously eaten Tandem and Digital Equipment Corp to embiggen itself –

Back in March, when looking out into the future of the custom XPU and networking ASIC chips as well as the other chippery that Broadcom sells that goes into AI clusters, I posited that