Microsoft's gaming business shrank again in the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year, which ended on September 30: Xbox revenue came in at $5.38 billion, down 2% from $5.51 billion a year ago, while Microsoft as a whole grew revenue by 19% to $92.3 billion. Content and services revenue fell 2%, and hardware dropped a bigger 14% on a lower volume of consoles sold. CFO Amy Hood said the overall Xbox decline was driven by third-party content and Xbox Game Pass, partly offset by growth in first-party games. Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma claimed console sales are being held back by supply, with demand currently outpacing the number of consoles available, and said Xbox is working to get more units out to players, partly through an expanded refurbishment program. She also noted the 2% decline is much smaller than the 10% drop a quarter earlier, that margins improved, that Minecraft and World of Warcraft Forever posted record results, that Modern Warfare 4 is Call of Duty's most acclaimed release in over a decade, and that PC platform revenue grew by double digits.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple, once one of the most powerful buyers in the NAND flash market, is losing some of its negotiating leverage as AI-driven demand gives memory suppliers greater pricing power. Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon have signed long-term supply agreements with Kioxia this year at higher prices, strengthening the chipmaker's negotiating position. Separately, South Korean outlet Economy Tribune reports that Apple has reportedly turned to a long-term NAND supply agreement, with market watchers identifying Kioxia as the likely partner; the terms remain undisclosed and this is a reported plan. The report adds that Apple may also pursue long-term agreements with Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron to secure future LPDDR5X and LPDDR6 supplies. According to TrendForce, memory's share of the 256GB iPhone Pro's bill of materials rose from around 10% a year earlier to 34% in 3Q26 and could exceed 40% in 1H27; TrendForce also estimates the iPhone 18 Pro's total BOM cost could rise 38% YoY, potentially forcing Apple to sacrifice margins to maintain shipments.
NAND flashLPDDR5XLPDDR6Apple, Kioxia and 5 totalTrendForcePrice Movement
Related manufacturers
Apple, Kioxia, Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, Micron
Microsoft reported Q3 2026 results with $92.3 billion in revenue, up 19% year-over-year, but the Windows 11 OEM licensing and Surface PCs segment generated $3.6 billion this quarter, a significant drop from the $4.6 billion last year, a 22% year-over-year decline, making it the only business unit, alongside Xbox, to experience a downturn. The causes stated in the source include: a drop in consumer PC demand caused by rising prices, which directly resulted in fewer Windows 11 licenses sold to major PC OEMs like ASUS, HP, Dell, and Lenovo; Surface PC shipments have seemingly declined, as these products are historically priced for mid-tier to high-end buyers; and recent increases in memory and storage supply chain costs affected Microsoft's procurement, general price increases followed, and consumers are opting to wait for another opportunity to purchase a PC.
Windows 11 OEM licensingSurface PCsmemoryMicrosoft, ASUS and 5 totalTechPowerUp
According to Financial News, Samsung expects demand for its 8nm-and-below processes to exceed capacity, with utilization projected to surpass 100% in 2027; per Yonhap News, the number of 2nm projects secured in 2026 is expected to more than double YoY. According to Yonhap News, Samsung secured additional 2nm projects from major cloud service providers and AI/HPC customers in 3Q26, building on wins in the previous quarter. Per Seoul Economic Daily, Samsung plans to begin mass production of its second-generation 2nm mobile chip, the Exynos 2700, in 4Q26, while ramping up 4nm NPUs for a major customer. Per Central News Agency, Taiwanese ASIC firm Faraday said on October 27 that it had secured a U.S. cloud AI chip project using 2nm gate-all-around (GAA) technology, valued at tens of millions of dollars; Samsung will handle wafer fabrication, with Taiwanese foundry UMC and memory manufacturers also participating. Per Yonhap News, Samsung expects HPC to account for over 50% of its foundry revenue in 2027; as background, TSMC's HPC segment contributed 68% of total revenue in 3Q26. With advanced-node demand outpacing capacity expansion, Samsung is considering investments in new fabs in the U.S. and South Korea; per Green Economic Daily, Samsung plans to continue expanding 8nm, 4nm, and 2nm capacity, and the first Taylor foundry fab in the U.S. remains on schedule, with cleanroom operations underway and equipment installation and wafer runs in progress; per The Guru, the company is reportedly preparing to break ground on its second Taylor fab in November, with mass production targeted for 2030. Samsung expects double-digit foundry revenue growth and further earnings improvement in 4Q26. Per Digital Today citing Kiwoom Securities, the combined operating loss of Samsung's foundry and System LSI businesses is projected to shrink from KRW 6.742 trillion in 2025 to KRW 3.921 trillion in 2026, with quarterly losses estimated to have eased to KRW 777 billion in 3Q26.
8nm-and-below processes2nm4nmSamsung, Faraday Technology and 4 totalTrendForceCapacity Change
Microsoft Corp. announced results for the quarter ended September 30, 2026 (referred to as Q3 2026 in the press release title): revenue was $92.3 billion, up 19% versus the corresponding period of the last fiscal year; operating income was $45.9 billion, up 21% (up 22% in constant currency); net income was $36.6 billion, up 32% on a GAAP basis, and $36.4 billion, up 18% (up 19% in constant currency) on a non-GAAP basis; diluted earnings per share was $4.92, up 32% on a GAAP basis, and $4.89, up 18% (up 19% in constant currency) on a non-GAAP basis. Non-GAAP results exclude the impact from investments in OpenAI. The source does not state the cause (the press release contains no causal explanation).
This is an opinion/analysis article arguing that AI processing, specifically inference, remains mostly cloud-centric but is shifting toward edge devices, and that storage and memory requirements will keep rising in both cloud and edge scenarios. According to the article, data center build-outs are redirecting supplies of SSDs (and HDDs) and DRAM, while the required capacities in PCs, smartphones and the like for today's edge AI processing are increasing in lockstep: the Gemini AI models embedded in latest-generation Chrome browser installs take up at least 4 GBytes of storage space; Apple Intelligence included with iOS 27 is now required versus optional with the version 26 predecessor and uses up to 14 GBytes; the required-by-default AI model suite included with MacOS 27 is 12-30 GBytes in size. PrismML compressed Alibaba's Qwen3.8 27B open-source model by 9-10x while still matching 98% of Qwen's aggregate benchmark scores, but the resultant model was still 5.9 GBytes; Perplexity's Portable Computer for local on-computer model storage and processing uses 20 GBytes. The article also states that the training run for OpenAI's latest-generation "Astra" GPT-6 fully consumed more than 100,000 GPUs, and argues that hybrid approaches (local base-level inference with cloud tapped as needed) will become increasingly common, with the decode portion of inference being memory-intensive from both capacity and bandwidth standpoints, rationalizing advanced HBM approaches. All points are the author's analysis; the source reports no price changes.
Microsoft is encouraging US owners of unused Xbox Series X and Series S consoles to trade them in through Best Buy, offering up to $375 and $200 respectively in store credit. The source states the campaign follows successive price increases driven by rising memory and storage costs and is intended to make second-hand consoles available to other customers.
Microsoft reported its fiscal year 2027 first-quarter financial results: total revenue was US$92.3 billion, a 19% year-over-year increase. The performance was heavily anchored by the Microsoft Cloud division, which surpassed US$63 billion in revenue and saw its growth rate accelerate to 30% compared to the same period last year. The source attributes the robust performance to strong Copilot and Azure growth (the title states results surged past expectations). This is company earnings background information; the event status is reported actual results.
Microsoft's latest results suggest that enterprise demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence is supporting stronger operating earnings, even as some infrastructure capacity arrives later than planned. Management said spending below the company's forecast reflected delivery delays, not a retreat from its expansion plans; the source does not state any other cause.
Microsoft and Nvidia publicly released the Surface Laptop Ultra on October 7, built around the application processor originally referred to as the N1X and now renamed the GB10. The chip was co-developed by NVIDIA (which contributed the Grace Blackwell GPU subsystem) and MediaTek (which supplied the multi-core CPU cluster and reportedly also handled full SoC integration duties); it was originally intended for—and may eventually still show up in—Arm-based Windows PCs, but repeated development hurdles reportedly delayed both SoC and system shipment plans, and lingering functional bugs precluded Windows compatibility (explaining the DGX Spark's Linux OS foundation). The machine comes in two versions sharing the same NPU core: 5120-core GPU with 18-core CPU, and 6144-core GPU with 20-core CPU; system memory ranges from 24 GB to 128 GB of LPDDR5x unified memory; SSD options start at 512 GB (PCIe Gen 4) with 1 TB and 2 TB (PCIe Gen 5) configurations; pricing is $2,599 baseline up to $5,899.99 top-end, with delivery promised 'later this year'; an RTX Spark-based developer platform at $5,999.99 and up is also available for pre-order. In the same period, Amazon launched its latest-generation Alexa-branded (no-longer-Fire) tablets in 8-inch, 11-inch and 12-inch 'Pro' flavors, running 'vanilla' Android with a return to the Google Play Store, priced from $299 up to $679.99 (not including cases or the high-end model's optional pen and keyboard accessories). Apple's week began Monday with a new-generation iPad mini (now with the A20 Pro, a slightly larger 8.5-inch display switched from LCD to OLED, priced from $699 and up; the 2024 entry-level 128 GB Wi-Fi-only model was originally $499 but was bumped to $599 in June of this year), Tuesday brought a 14-inch entry-level MacBook Pro now running the M6 SoC (versus last year's M5) plus a 24-inch iMac making a two-generation jump from the M4 to the M6, and today Apple unveiled its first touchscreen-augmented MacBook Pro laptops in both 14-inch and 16-inch displays with ProLED XDR panels and both M5 Pro and Max SoC options, priced from $2,899 to $14,549.
Nvidia RTX Spark N1X (GB10) application processorApple A20 Pro SoCApple M6 SoCApple, Microsoft and 6 totalEDN
Marvell is reportedly considering acquiring Lumentum to expand its product portfolio. Lumentum produces optical communication lasers and optical transceiver modules and currently has a market capitalization of approximately US$83 billion, compared with Marvell's US$221 billion; Lumentum has also attracted a US$2 billion investment from NVIDIA. A potential acquisition would further broaden Marvell's product portfolio, fill gaps in its optical component offerings, and strengthen its ability to compete with Broadcom. Bernstein analysts cautioned that the potential deal's size could raise concerns over financing and integration, noting Marvell may be unable to fund it entirely with cash; as of its latest quarter Marvell held approximately US$3.92 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Background: earlier this year Marvell acquired photonics company Celestial AI, gaining access to its Optical Multi-Chip Interconnect Bridge (OMIB) technology, and reached a chip agreement with Google granting Google the right to purchase up to US$12.2 billion worth of Marvell shares. The deal remains at a reported, considering stage and is not confirmed as agreed or completed.
Trillium Asset Management, a financial advisor specializing in sustainable and responsible investing, is urging Microsoft shareholders to vote for Proposal 4 at the annual meeting scheduled for December 8. The proposal, set out in an SEC filing, asks Microsoft to disclose additional information illustrating how it will manage climate commitments, with disclosure going beyond existing disclosures, at reasonable cost, omitting proprietary information, and made annually. Microsoft set its goals in 2020: to be "carbon-negative" by 2030 and to have removed the equivalent of all the carbon it has ever emitted by 2050. Figures from Microsoft's most recent Environmental Sustainability Report show emissions rose from 13 million tons of CO2 equivalent in 2020 to 20 million tons in 2025; Microsoft estimates that without the carbon reduction initiatives already in place, emissions would now be near 34 million tons. The increase is largely accounted for by Scope 3 indirect emissions from datacenter construction and provisioning, but 2025 saw a growing contribution from Scope 2 (generation of purchased energy), representing 13 percent of total emissions, up from 2 percent in 2024. The proposal states that emissions are now 62 percent above the 2020 baseline. Microsoft has recommended in another SEC filing that shareholders vote against the proposal, arguing it fails to show that existing disclosures are insufficient and that the requested disclosures go beyond legal, regulatory and voluntary climate-reporting requirements. The proposal has not yet been voted on. As background, Microsoft's cloud division made $214.4 billion in revenue for the fiscal year 2026 ended June 30, a 27 percent year-on-year increase.
Anthropic disclosed details of its computing partnerships with Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and other providers in its S-1 filing for an initial public offering (IPO), revealing distinct cooperation models and chip technologies across its partner ecosystem. Per the title, Anthropic's surging compute demand fuels ASIC prospects, favoring Broadcom over MediaTek.
At its Las Vegas event, Oracle announced an expanded partnership with Google and plans to bring Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), with the chips available for selection within OCI beginning in 2027 and capacity increasing over the course of several years; Oracle says the deal will make it the first hyperscale cloud platform outside Google's own cloud services to offer the chips, though it did not mention the quantity of TPUs to be available next year or beyond. OCI president Mahesh Thiagarajan said different AI workloads have different compute needs and that bringing Google TPUs to OCI gives customers the flexibility to choose the right infrastructure for the performance, throughput, and economics of each AI workload. Alongside the TPU plan, Oracle announced on Tuesday the general availability of Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems and Nvidia Vera CPUs, plus plans to introduce HGX Rubin NVL8 systems without specifying when those would become available, as well as new ChatGPT integrations, Oracle AI Workspace, Oracle AI Security Mesh, and a deal with Snowflake. Oracle also posted record earnings in the quarter ending August 31, with revenue up 30 percent year over year.
Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systemsNvidia Vera CPUsOracle, Google and 3 totalThe RegisterPartnership/M&A
Reuters reported that Microsoft is launching a voluntary buyout program that could be available to as many as 60,000 employees, covering more than a quarter of its global workforce. Eligible employees span multiple divisions, including teams developing AI solutions, Copilot, Windows and devices, as well as finance, human resources and Xbox; the offer applies to eligible employees in participating teams in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States at level 70 and below, as Microsoft said on Monday (October 27, 2026). Microsoft Chief People Officer Amy Coleman wrote in an internal memo that the offer gives eligible employees a new choice to transition outside the company with support. Microsoft forecasts capital expenditure of $175 billion for the full year 2026, primarily for artificial intelligence infrastructure, and the buyout program is intended to help reduce operating costs while freeing up resources for further technology investments. According to Microsoft's annual report, the company employed 223,000 full-time employees worldwide as of June 30, 2026, and not all eligible employees are expected to accept the offer.
Microsoft launched a time-limited Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO) for approximately 60,000 employees in the US, Canada, the UK and India, as the company reshapes its workforce around rising investment in artificial intelligence. The offer applies to eligible employees in participating teams at Level 70 and below and covers about one-quarter of Microsoft's global workforce of approximately 223,000 employees as of the end of June 2026. The source only states the launch of the offer and does not indicate that any employees have actually exited.
Anthropic's IPO filing reveals an infrastructure strategy extending far beyond conventional cloud procurement: the Claude developer has locked in hundreds of billions of dollars of compute capacity across Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Broadcom, and a growing roster of GPU infrastructure providers, spanning TPUs, GPUs, and dedicated data centers. This is a capacity commitment arrangement disclosed in the IPO filing; the source does not state the cause.
The 13th Criminal Division of the Seoul Southern District Court held the fourth hearing on Oct. 22 in the case against Fadu executives over alleged violations of the Capital Markets Act, with former CEO Lee Ji-hyo, current CEO Nam Yi-hyun and executive vice president Won Jong-taek attending as defendants. Prosecutors disclosed internal Microsoft Teams conversations from March 2023 — including 'If we can't go public, we'll have a funding hole' and 'So we'll just go under in July' — arguing Fadu pressed ahead with its IPO despite knowing revenue would plunge; Fadu went public in August 2023. Prosecutors also alleged Fadu used earlier order forecasts for its securities registration statement despite knowing major customers including SMART Modular, SpaceX and SK hynix had postponed or suspended orders for the second half of 2023, with Fadu having projected shipments of 3,200 SSDs for SpaceX satellite servers in Q4 2023. According to prosecutors, former CEO Lee Ji-hyo instructed staff on May 18, 2023 to 'assume no orders from SpaceX for now,' and the following day SpaceX informed Fadu there would be no additional POs before Q3 2024. EVP Won Jong-taek wrote in May 2023 that 'even if we lower the annual revenue target from 240 billion won to 150 billion won, actual results will likely be far lower.' Fadu's production plan from late May 2023 had removed H2 SpaceX orders, and contract manufacturer Quanta Storage demanded compensation for prolonged equipment downtime. The defense countered that the registration statement figures were conservative, worst-case estimates: Fadu included only about 50% of SMART Modular's anticipated order volume, excluded more than 30,000 additional units proposed by SMART Modular in late April 2023 and a 43,500-unit forecast from Hagiwara Solutions in May 2023; on the SpaceX suspension, the May 19 remark came from a SpaceX technical engineer rather than a purchasing official, and Lee Ji-hyo separately confirmed with SpaceX's sales organization the possibility of orders resuming within the year. Fadu resumed shipments toward the end of 2023, but supplied 2TB models for Falcon 9 rockets rather than the originally planned 8TB satellite models, with substantially smaller revenue contribution. Second witness Park Jong-hyun, head of Fadu's SoC business team, testified the sharp 2023 decline in SSD controller shipments for Meta stemmed from issues between SK hynix and Meta: SK hynix told Fadu in late 2022 it expected to supply about 900,000 controllers annually to Meta, but the forecast was abruptly cut to 350,000 units on Jan. 6 due to a dispute, and SK hynix discontinued the existing DRAM used in Meta SSDs and began redesigning. Fadu planned to cut the price of its third-generation SSD controllers from $43–$48 to around $30 to regain Meta's business, and included 434,000 controllers for Meta in its 2023 forecast — exceeding the 350,000-unit forecast — which appeared to contradict claims the estimates were conservative. Fadu ultimately failed to secure additional Meta orders through SK hynix; Meta switched its SSD supplier to SanDisk in 2024, and since 2024 Fadu has supplied SSD controllers to Meta through SanDisk.
SSD controllerssolid-state drives (SSDs)Fadu, SK hynix and 8 totalThe Elec
According to eeNews Europe, three previously closed US nuclear power plants are being prepared for recommissioning, potentially restoring a combined 2.25 GW of generating capacity. The restarts involve Holtec International, Constellation Energy and NextEra Energy, with Microsoft and Google among the companies supporting the projects (the source text is truncated regarding the means of support). The stated reason is that electricity demand from artificial intelligence and data centres continues to increase. This is background information on data-centre power supply, not directly tied to semiconductor component procurement, and the restarts remain at the preparation/planning stage with no indication of completion.
nuclear generating capacityHoltec International, Constellation Energy and 3 totaleeNews Europe
Related manufacturers
Holtec International, Constellation Energy, NextEra Energy
This is a roundup of the site's most popular articles from the last week. No. 5: Google and Synaptics have introduced the xMCU – an MCU combining heterogeneous, AI-native compute and acceleration with integrated high-bandwidth custom DRAM scalable to hundreds of megabytes; the Astra SR200 Series targets AI wearables and battery-powered sensing devices, enabling larger AI models and richer multimodal workloads entirely on-device. No. 4: According to the Data Centers Processor Market Monitor, Q3 2026, agentic AI is reviving datacenter CPU demand, with CPU revenues up 35%, ahead of AI ASICs (+23%) and GPUs (+13%); GPU and AI ASIC designers are scaling back their roadmaps, sometimes drastically, in response to the sharp rise in DRAM prices. No. 3: London neocloud startup Nscale has had another setback to its IPO plans as Microsoft pulled out of a deal to be the anchor tenant on Nscale's Loughton, Essex, datacentre; neither party gave any reason for the pull-out, but UK Power Networks has told Nscale it cannot supply enough power for the site until the early to mid 2030s. No. 2: Per the Seoul Economic Daily, Nvidia has asked Samsung, Hynix and Micron to use base dies made on TSMC's 3nm node for its custom HBM called NVHBM; the base die contains the logic layer at the bottom of the HBM stack that handles the memory controller and interface, and the source's report of Nvidia's reason is truncated. No. 1: According to a memo from CEO Cristiano Amon to employees seen by Reuters, Qualcomm is to lay off staff worldwide, with notifications to start next month; the number involved is not known, the company had 52k employees in September 2025, and the memo describes the lay-offs as "a performance-focused reduction after annual reviews".
xMCUNVHBM base dieHBMGoogle, Synaptics and 10 totalElectronics Weekly