Quest for AI Leadership Pushes Microsoft Further into Chip Development

I'll be brief: There's tons of low-hanging fruit in the semiconductor industry, starting with manufacturing.

You might read about how competition among chipmakers is fierce, and ask why any company from the Valley would make a foray into taking that kind of risk. The thing is, that's only true if you ignore the obvious; which is to say, take all the chipmakers and keep letting them do what they're doing, and sure, that line about competition will remain true.

But there's a world of difference between how things operate in a fab versus the environment that any software dev or executive will be used to. Things run at an efficiency that no engineer from the software world would tolerate for very long.

It's hard to say this without it seeming like bluster, but it's not, I promise: Any of the aforementioned Valley giants could buy up some chipmaker who's for sale, install one of their own executives at the top, and with a team of, like, six people (junior-level, even) from the same parent company, by the start of the fourth quarter following the buyout they would be virtually guaranteed to be on trajectory that would eventually destroy the competition.

You really, really have no idea how low this fruit hangs.

> In a May speech [Nadella] touted the idea of using AI to track industrial equipment, telling the user things like where to find a jackhammer

Quaint.