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According to Tom's Hardware, Taiwan-based memory manufacturer Macronix is phasing out its ROM business to focus on producing NOR and NAND flash chips for AI data centers. This strategic shift was highlighted by analyst David Gibson on X and corroborated by the Taipei Times. Gibson noted that Macronix's ROM sales dropped to 5% of total revenue in Q3, down from 26% the previous year, and stated there will be no new ROM products.

Macronix is a key supplier of ROM chips used in Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 game cartridges. As manufacturing capacity shifts toward high-margin AI infrastructure, Nintendo faces potential pressure to increase prices on physical games or rely more heavily on Game-Key cards (which hold download keys rather than full game data), accelerating the transition to digital sales. While ROHM Group companies still supply ROM chips to Nintendo, making an immediate full digital shift unlikely, the exit of a major supplier tightens the supply chain for physical media.

The move poses significant risks for fabless chip design company MegaChips. MegaChips designs ROM chips for Nintendo but lacks manufacturing capacity, outsourcing production to Macronix. According to MegaChips' 2022 annual report, Nintendo accounted for 87.8% of its sales, while Macronix represented 67.8% of its outsourced manufacturing purchases. The report previously warned that if Macronix ceased ROM manufacturing, "MegaChips’ operating results may be impacted." It remains unclear what contingency plans MegaChips has in place for this emerging risk.

Macronix's decision reflects the massive demand pull from AI data centers. The company allocated its entire NT$37.8 billion capital expenditure budget to NOR and NAND flash, leaving none for ROM. This reallocation not only alters investment logic in the semiconductor industry but also ripples through to consumer electronics, demonstrating how AI infrastructure buildout is impacting the cost and availability of everyday gaming hardware.

U.S.-based semiconductor and infrastructure software company Broadcom Inc. has announced an expansion of its VMware portfolio, focusing on simplifying artificial intelligence workload deployment, strengthening infrastructure security, and offering lower-cost virtualization options. The updates span the flagship private cloud platform, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and a new product aimed at smaller customers, vSphere Express.

Regarding AI deployment, Broadcom introduced "AI Infrastructure Quickstart," an automated capability that consolidates vCenter cluster deployment, vSphere Supervisor activation, and VMware Kubernetes Service cluster provisioning into a single workflow. According to Prashanth Shenoy, Broadcom’s vice president of marketing for cloud platform, infrastructure, and solutions, this change allows users to complete initial configurations in minutes, replacing previously manual processes. Additionally, multitenant model sharing, already available in VCF 9.1.1, enables different business units to use centrally deployed AI models while maintaining separate security boundaries, thereby reducing GPU requirements and total cost of ownership (TCO).

To broaden its market reach, Broadcom also released vSphere Express, a low-cost virtualization platform based on vSphere 9 designed for environments with up to 128 processor cores. The product includes essential features like live virtual machine migration, high availability, and distributed networking but omits the complex components of larger private cloud platforms. Shenoy stated that many customers need only basic virtualization without purchasing expensive comprehensive platforms, and vSphere Express provides an upgrade path as their requirements grow. While specific pricing was not disclosed, officials indicated it would be substantially less expensive than higher-end offerings.

Other updates include native S3-compatible object storage through VMware vSAN to support AI applications dependent on unstructured data, as well as integrated disaster recovery and confidential computing support within the core VCF. These moves reflect Broadcom’s strategic intent to position VCF as a unified infrastructure platform for traditional virtual machines, containers, and increasingly demanding AI workloads.