I think we can all agree 2020 has been, without a doubt, a complete and utter dumpster fire, punctuated by brief commercial breaks of happiness. That is unless you happen to be in the semiconductor industry.

The past six months go to show just how hot the semiconductor space has become. In what can only be described as a mergers and acquisitions feeding frenzy, chipmakers across the industry have been dropping tens of billions of dollars in cash and stock options to acquire rival chipmakers.

Intel Sells Off Flash, Buys In on AI Software

The most recent was Intel's acquisition of two artificial intelligence (AI) software startups: Cnvrg.io and SigOpt.

While Intel has discussed its plans to acquire SigOpt for an undisclosed sum, the company has been somewhat cagey about the acquisition of Cnvrg.io. In a statement, the company confirmed the acquisition, saying only Cnvrg would continue to operate as an Intel-owned subsidiary. Cnvrg.io specializes in helping data scientists manage, build, and automate machine learning, while SigOpt focuses on optimizing machine learning algorithms.

“Cnvrg.io has built a solid foundation of support across the industry and will be a strong addition to Intel’s software portfolio,” wrote Karl Freund, senior analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, in an email to SDxCentral. “Software is critical to the company’s strategy of domain-specific architectures.”

Intel has invested heavily in AI infrastructure in recent months. The company's third-generation Xeon Scalable chips and latest FPGAs both feature integrated capabilities. Meanwhile, the company has begun shipping its Habana inference chip to customers. Intel acquired the chipmaker in December for $2 billion before shuttering its own Nervana AI chip project.

Intel's AI push came a month after it announced it would sell its NAND flash business unit and fabs to SK hynix for $9 billion.

Nvidia Takes Arm Off SoftBank's Hands

Arguably the largest semiconductor buy of the year, if not the decade, came in September when Nvidia announced it would buy British chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank in a deal worth $40 billion.

According to Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, in an article contributed to Forbes, the acquisition “fits like a glove.”

“The new Nvidia-Arm combination now plays in nearly every market segment in the data center, edge of data center, personal computers, smartphones, and IoT,” he wrote.

If the deal receives regulatory approval — something that is anything but certain given the Trump administration's efforts to starve Chinese tech companies of U.S. intellectual property — it will see Nvidia make much of it networking and graphics technologies available for license through Arm.

Arm chips power an overwhelming majority of connected devices today, including everything from IoT devices to smartphones, tablets, and even Apple's first Arm-based Macs. However, over the past year, Arm has seen strong adoption in the data center. Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle are all either actively using or plan to deploy Arm Neoverse-based CPUs in their cloud data centers.

AMD Goes After Intel With $35 billion Xilinx Acquisition

Meanwhile, AMD, riding high on the strength of its second-generation EPYC data center chips, celebrated its third-quarter earnings in October by splurging on FPGA maker Xilinx. The deal, valued at $35 billion, positions AMD to compete with Intel, which is the only other large FPGA manufacturer.

In another article contributed to Forbes, Moorhead called AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx a bold move.

“I do think AMD has a brighter, long-term future with Xilinx as it creates a larger entity that is more diversified across different markets and products while leveraging similar technologies,” he wrote.

Geoff Blaber, VP of research at CCS Insight, echoed Moorhead's sentiments. In a blog post, Blaber noted that the acquisition will position AMD to compete with Intel in networking and data center. AMD has already made considerable gains on the back of its EPYC CPUs.

"Intel's pedigree and heritage will make this a challenging task, but its manufacturing troubles coupled with the speed of AMD's rise in PCs are a reminder that the new AMD is a force to be reckoned with," he said.

Marvell Connects With Inphi

Less than a week later, Marvell announced its acquisition of Inphi for approximately $10 billion in cash and stock options.

Inphi is a U.S.-based chipmaker specializing in optoelectrical interconnects, commonly used in cloud data centers, where the company can provide up to 800 Gb/s of throughput.

“Marvel’s vision is to move, store, process, and secure the world’s data faster and more reliably than anyone else, and this acquisition significantly accelerates the move element of our vision,” CEO Matt Murphy said, referencing Inphi’s optoelectrical interconnect technologies, which he called highly complementary to the company’s existing physical layer (PHY) portfolio.

Sameh Boujelbene, senior research director at Dell'Oro Group, agreed with Murphy in a recent blog post, in which she drove home the opinion the acquisition was a strategic and complementary one, rather than opportunistic.

She argued that Inphi's was already well positioned in the electro-optics interconnect market. Inphi's "technology and addressable market complement Marvell’s storage, networking, processor, and security portfolio and accelerate its growth in cloud and 5G infrastructure," Boujelbene added.