According to Forrester Research Telcos' IPTV Subscribers Will Barely Surpass 2 Million By 2009 -- "Telcos have jumped on the TV bandwagon, but it won't be an easy ride. Entering the market means spending billions in network upgrades, rolling out services with unproven IPTV platforms, and navigating the difficult content acquisition process. IPTV promises great content selection, more interactivity, and enhanced TV features, such as faster channel changing. But given telcos' lame track record with selling new services like DSL, we expect their TV efforts to get off to a slow start. With limited consumer interest in triple play and difficulty in creating product differentiation, telcos will remove profit from the TV services market as they launch price wars to grab consumers."
Few technology sectors sit as close to the center of gravity in today's artificial intelligence (AI) economy as semiconductor manufacturing. Every AI chip that trains a frontier model, every GPU that powers a data center inference workload, and every power management IC that keeps hyperscaler facilities running traces its origins back to the global Foundry ecosystem. IDC's latest market study throws that reality into sharp relief, projecting that the broadly defined Foundry 2.0 market will surpass $360 billion in 2026, a 17 percent year-over-year gain that would have seemed optimistic even two years ago. For anyone advising boards or investment committees on technology and AI infrastructure strategy, this growth trajectory demands careful consideration. Foundry 2.0 Market Development The umbrella term covers four distinct verticals: pure-play foundry, non-memory integrated device manufacturer (IDM) production, outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT), and photomask fab...