Jane, Author at Small Island Research Notes

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So far Jane has created 94 blog entries.

How Taiwan’s Supply Chain Reshapes Global Laptop Landscape

Jane2025-09-01T16:49:33+08:00March 6th, 2025|Categories: Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: Compal, Innolux, Inventec, Pegatron, Policy and Tariffs, Quanta, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, Wistron|

Executive Summary Amid the U.S.-China trade war, global supply chain restructuring, and tightening environmental and social responsibility regulations, Taiwanese laptop ODMs have steadily shifted production from China to Vietnam, Thailand, and other countries. This marks a structural shift in the global supply chain from a “China-centric” model to a more diversified, multi-polar framework. While Taiwanese factories in China still hold irreplaceable technological advantages in the short term, the real competitive edge lies in the industrial

Microsoft Strategic Shift: 2025 AI Market and Fungible Data Center

Jane2025-08-30T13:10:58+08:00March 1st, 2025|Categories: Featured Notes, Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Amazon and AWS, Edge AI, Google, Market Sentiment and Reflexivity, Meta, Microsoft, Platform and Business Model|

Executive Summary Microsoft’s recent capital expenditure adjustments underscore a pivotal shift in the AI market, as the primary focus transitions from model training to inference. Distributed inference is emerging as a significant yet underappreciated demand driver. The company’s decision to delay certain data center construction projects signals a strategic recalibration in response to evolving market structures, a trend mirrored by Google, Amazon, and Meta. However, Microsoft’s fungible data center concept stands out as a key

AI Chip Market Evolution Part 2: Edge AI Training, Inference and Market Trends

Jane2025-09-19T11:46:04+08:00February 19th, 2025|Categories: Future Scenarios and Design, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AMD, DeepSeek, Edge AI, NVIDIA, Platform and Business Model, Supply Chain and Manufacturing|

Introduction to Part 2 Following our previous discussion on the cloud AI training and inference market, this article will focus on the on-premises AI chip market for training and inference. Compared to the cloud market, on-premises AI solutions offer distinct advantages in low latency and data privacy. As emerging applications such as autonomous vehicles and smart devices grow, on-premises AI training and inference are expected to be key drivers of future market expansion. This article

AI Chip Market Evolution Part 1: Cloud AI Training and Inference

Jane2025-08-30T12:59:50+08:00February 18th, 2025|Categories: Future Scenarios and Design, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: Amazon and AWS, AMD, Cloud AI, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, Platform and Business Model, Qualcomm, Supply Chain and Manufacturing|

Executive Summary The AI chip market is undergoing significant transformations, which can be understood through two key dimensions: deployment environments (cloud vs. edge) and market segments (training vs. inference). Cloud-based training currently dominates the market and is expected to maintain strong growth in the future. Training is critical for AI model development, requiring immense computational power to process vast amounts of data, which is why it is primarily concentrated in cloud data centers. NVIDIA is