Source Financial Times article
Summary
Demand for artificial intelligence-enabled smartphones could help to protect parts of the semiconductor industry from a “vicious” downturn if investment in data centres slows, said the chief executive of the world’s largest provider of chip testing machines.
A fall-off “may not last long and then it may go right back up, but because of the concentration [of hyperscalers] right now in the market, any slowdown in the data centre buildout is going to have big reverberations in the supply chain”, said Lefever.
In contrast, demand for AI smartphones was “kind of slow” but could take off rapidly, Lefever said.
Demand for AI phones is slow because the AI bubble is a crock of crap.
The uses for AI on personal devices are not currently compelling, just as the AI industry as a whole is struggling to find ways to make money. So people are not rushing out to buy devices that specifically have AI chips.
Maybe it will come, but at the moment it’s just a bubble.
The mobile sector is not going to save the overvalued companies supplying AI chips - companies like Nvidia. The market is saturated and big tech companies are at some point going to stop stockpiling unused chips to “stay ahead”. This is a typical boom and crash scenario.
AI isn’t going anywhere but the overinflated expectations will.
When they run out of datacenter investment, they will run large AI queries across millions of mobile devices; Like a shitty, unsolicited, reverse SETI@Home