Digital Infrastructure Monthly Insights

SK Telecom will simultaneously build and demonstrate AI-enabled RAN equipment from Samsung Electronics, HFR, Ericsson, and Nokia, indicating a multi-vendor evaluation of AI-RAN capabilities within its network environment in South Korea.

BMW Group awarded Qualcomm Technologies a long-term contract as lead compute silicon provider for its digital cockpit and next-generation automated and assisted driving systems, leveraging the Snapdragon Digital Chassis portfolio over the next decade.

Verizon disclosed a dark fiber agreement exceeding $1B to interconnect Google data centers and launched its AI Connect initiative. The company is repurposing dark fiber and retrofitting select central offices into small edge data centers to support AI inference workloads, with additional multi‑billion AI connectivity deals expected this year.

Arm reported record Q1 licensing and royalty revenue driven by accelerating AI data-centre demand. Management cut full-year royalty growth guidance to the high teens from ~20% due to smartphone weakness and rising memory prices, while issuing Q2 revenue guidance above market expectations; shares declined on the outlook.

SK Hynix and SK Telecom, under SK Group, will work with Nvidia by combining AI memory and operator-run AI infrastructure to develop large-scale AI infrastructure.

Bloomberg reports Meta may form a separate unit within Meta Compute to commercialize excess AI compute and provide access to its AI models for external customers, positioning it against neocloud providers like CoreWeave.

Fiscal Q3 revenue was $9.9B (-4% YoY), topping ~$9.7B consensus, while net income fell to $2.0B (-25% YoY). Results were constrained by a memory supply crunch weighing on the smartphone sector, with handset chip sales declining.

India broadened its semiconductor policy beyond manufacturing to add support for chip design, semiconductor equipment, research and development, and workforce development, aiming to establish an end-to-end domestic ecosystem.

The U.S. government has permitted ZTE to acquire Nvidia H200 (Hopper) accelerators, adding the Chinese telecom vendor to a list of Chinese firms—Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance—granted access to Hopper-based AI hardware under export controls.

AT&T and D-Wave Quantum report a live hybrid quantum-classical deployment for enterprise workloads, demonstrating production readiness for optimization tasks delivered via a quantum platform integrated with classical compute.

T-Mobile used AI-driven network optimization to balance capacity and maintain service quality during a large soccer tournament, leveraging analytics to manage traffic spikes and reduce congestion.

Chunghwa Telecom entered an agreement with Fujitsu and 1Finity to jointly develop All-Photonics Network (APN) and quantum technologies in Taiwan.

A notified framework allows national-level authorisation for infrastructure providers, digital connectivity infrastructure providers, internet exchange point providers, satellite earth station gateway operators, cloud-hosted telecommunication network providers, and mobile number portability providers.

Australia's new AI strategy introduces requirements for AI-focused data centers to underwrite their power needs so grid reliability and consumer energy prices are not adversely affected, and to address water consumption as part of facility planning and operations.

A fabless semiconductor startup announced new financing to develop switching silicon and systems targeted at edge, aggregation, and telecom infrastructure deployments.

Committed $250 million over three years to expand its Bangalore facility in India, aligned with its 20th anniversary in the country. The Bangalore site, established in 2006, is Marvell’s second-largest R&D organization globally.

Naver Corp. announced plans to establish an on-premises AI data center in South Korea, according to a report from Seoul.

TSMC will increase its U.S. advanced semiconductor manufacturing investment by an additional $100 billion, building on an existing $65 billion program.

TSMC increased its U.S. capex by $100B, bringing its Arizona commitment to $265B. The plan includes eight fabs already pledged and potential for up to four additional advanced manufacturing sites, driven by sustained AI technology demand through 2030.

India will invest an additional INR1.9 trillion (~$19.7B) to expand chip and smartphone production. The plan allocates about INR1.3 trillion for semiconductor state aid and INR625 billion for smartphones, building on the 2021 Semicon 1.0 program (~INR1 trillion).

Intel will invest €5B in its Leixlip, Ireland factory to expand capacity and accelerate Intel 3 wafer output targeting AI server processors.

Priced 177.9M American depositary shares at $149 each (1 ADS = 0.1 common share), targeting $26.5B in gross proceeds, with initial trading to begin on 10 July in New York; cited as the largest US first-time share sale by a foreign issuer.

Micron increased its US semiconductor manufacturing commitment by $50B to exceed $250B through 2035, targeting production of 40% of its DRAM domestically to meet sustained AI-driven memory demand and create US jobs.

Meta Platforms started construction of a CAD13B data centre in Alberta, Canada to run AI workloads. The facility will launch with 1GW capacity and can scale to 1.8GW. The project includes CAD60M for local infrastructure, ~3,000 construction jobs at peak, and 300+ operational roles.

Samsung Group outlined new funding to expand private 5G deployments, edge computing capabilities, and connected devices.

Counterpoint Research indicates the CPU market is now contested on four fronts: Nvidia entering as a merchant CPU vendor; Arm and Qualcomm introducing their own CPUs; hyperscalers scaling custom Arm-based chips (Amazon Graviton, Google Axion, Microsoft Cobalt); and x86 providers Intel and AMD defending share across cloud and data center workloads.