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Author: Natan Solomon

Aditi Consulting Achieves Anthropic Select Tier After Putting Claude Into Production Across Its Business and Client Environments
The milestone follows Aditi’s broader effort to reshape its business, client delivery, and engineering workforce.

BELLEVUE, Wash., Oct. 6, 2026 — Aditi Consulting has achieved Select Tier status in Anthropic’s Claude Partner Network, Anthropic’s program for consultancies and specialized AI firms that help enterprises adopt and implement Claude.

The designation follows results from work already underway:
- Inside Aditi: Claude now supports production workflows across engineering, delivery and business operations. Month-end margin analysis went from hours to under two minutes. Reconciliation, close and payables automations are in production, and an AI-enabled delivery command center catches issues before they create downstream problems.
- With clients: Aditi and Advarra moved from an initial concept to a working application in six weeks.
- Across its workforce: 82 engineers in Aditi’s first two cohorts are developing the technical judgment, business context and accountability required to apply AI in real delivery environments.
That work has shaped how Aditi approaches AI transformation with clients. As AI becomes more capable, the challenge is no longer the technology itself. It is deciding where AI can create value, engineering it into the business and building the capability to sustain it.

“Access to increasingly capable AI isn’t the hardest part of transformation anymore,” said Carrick Carpenter, chief technology and AI officer at Aditi Consulting. “The harder question is whether the organization around it is ready — the systems, governance, workflows and people. We chose to work through those questions inside our own business first, and that experience now shapes how we help clients put AI into production.”

Aditi is applying that experience in client environments. At Advarra, a clinical research technology company, Aditi worked alongside Advarra’s teams using Claude and AI-assisted development. Within seven working days, Advarra and its end customer had a working experience they could use to validate the direction.

“Driving value for our customers is our North Star,” said Brian Hart, chief technology officer at Advarra. “We’re building an approach that brings together Advarra’s unique data and context, an architecture designed to adapt as technology changes, and strategic partners with specialized AI capabilities. That allows us to accelerate our product roadmap and bring meaningful innovation to market faster.”

For Aditi, the shift also changes what engineering capability looks like. The company is developing engineers not simply to use AI tools, but to combine them with technical fundamentals, business context, judgment and accountability in real delivery environments. Engineers from those cohorts are already working on live client engagements.

“AI is changing what organizations can build and how they build it, but technology alone doesn’t create an outcome,” said Raja Narayana, CEO of Aditi Consulting. “The opportunity is to use AI to create greater leverage while keeping human judgment and accountability where they matter most. That’s the model we’re building inside Aditi and bringing to our clients.”

For more information about Aditi Consulting’s work with Anthropic and Claude, visit Aditi’s Anthropic partnership page.

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About Aditi Consulting

Aditi Consulting is a global technology partner helping enterprises transform with AI by combining outcome engineering with the capacity to execute. The company brings together AI, engineering expertise and global engineering talent to meet customers where they are—whether they need a partner to engineer the path to an outcome or the specialized skills and scale to execute a strategy already in place. From modernizing what exists to building what’s next, Aditi helps organizations turn what’s possible into measurable impact, while amplifying what people do best. Building a Digital World with Human Spirit.

Learn more: https://www.aditiconsulting.com/

Media Contact

Stevi Rex
stevi.rex@aditiconsulting.com
+1 805.368.9024
October 8, 2026
Gremlin Launches Foresight AI to Proactively Fix Reliability Risks
The pioneers of Chaos Engineering built Foresight AI on top of a decade of real-world data around how systems fail and recover. Gremlin Foresight AI identifies and fixes reliability concerns before they become incidents, empowering enterprises to move confidently at AI speed.

DENVER, CO — October 7, 2026 — Gremlin, the company founded by Amazon and Netflix engineers that pioneered Chaos Engineering, today announced the general

availability of Gremlin Foresight AI. Following a successful beta, Gremlin Foresight AI has proven it can identify and address reliability risks before they become incidents, helping engineering teams move at AI speed without compromising the resilience of mission-critical production systems.

“AI-driven development means shipping code at 10X velocity; it also means 10x the opportunity for bugs, risks, and failures,” said Kolton Andrus, CEO and Founder of Gremlin. “While the rise of AI SRE tools are great for helping teams respond to incidents faster, it’s still cleanup after something breaks. Gremlin Foresight AI finds risks proactively, delivers the fix, and verifies the fix worked by rerunning the test. This provides teams with the assurances needed to move confidently.”

Gremlin Foresight AI is built on top of the company’s proprietary Failure Atlas, which incorporates more than a decade of cause-and-effect data around how online systems fail. This specialized foundation means every recommendation is grounded in real-world failure patterns and operational experience, not generic best practices. Every fix is validated against the test that surfaced the risk, closing the loop between identifying a weakness and proving it’s resolved.

Key features of Gremlin Foresight AI include:
- Proactive risk detection: Identify potential weaknesses and failure conditions before they become incidents.
- Guided remediation: Recommend and deliver the specific fix as a configuration patch or infrastructure-as-code change.
- Continuous validation: Re-run the originating test to confirm each fix performs as intended, and repeat testing as systems change.
- Measurable resilience: Track reliability scores across services and teams to quantify improvement and prioritize further investment.
Before founding Gremlin, Kolton Andrus was responsible for the uptime of Amazon’s retail site. He then joined Netflix to build the company’s second generation of fault-injection tooling, following the popularity of their open source project Chaos Monkey. Gremlin has since pushed the discipline of Chaos Engineering beyond one-off fault-injection experiments into a comprehensive approach to world-class reliability management.

The Gremlin platform enables teams to run planned experiments, control the blast radius, and use continuous automated testing to verify that fixes remain effective over time. Reliability scores make that progress measurable across the whole organization, giving every team a shared standard to work toward, as well as giving leaders the visibility to direct investment and hold teams accountable.

“Gremlin has always tried to help engineering teams improve the resiliency of their applications by running experiments proactively to identify weaknesses in their distributed systems, but many teams didn’t have the time or expertise to do that consistently,” said Mike Dauber, General Partner at Amplify Partners. “Foresight AI is like a trainer who does the reps for you. Your systems get stronger without your team doing all the manual work.”

Gremlin Foresight AI extends their proactive philosophy into today’s AI-driven world, delivering agentic resilience by automatically identifying reliability risks earlier and automating fixes where appropriate to avoid outages, degraded services, and negative customer impact. Gremlin Foresight AI is generally available starting today. To learn more or request a demo, visit gremlin.ai.

About Gremlin

Gremlin is the reliability management platform trusted by the world’s largest enterprises to build resilience across everything they ship and run. Gremlin combines failure testing, passive risk detection, dependency mapping, and agentic resilience to give engineering teams the predictive data they need to systematically measure, manage, and improve their reliability. Learn more at gremlin.com.

Media Contact

Adam LaGreca

10KMedia

adam@10kmedia.co
October 7, 2026
Avalara Ushers in New Era of Agentic Tax and Compliance with Avalara Aviator 
Avalara’s new agent hub brings together specialized AI agents to execute complex tax and compliance workflows while keeping people in control of the decisions that matter.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — September 23, 2026 — Avalara, Inc., the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance, today unveiled Avalara Aviator at its CRUSH customer and partner conference. The new agent hub for tax and compliance turns days of manual work into minutes of oversight, with an audit-defensible record for every action.

As businesses expand across markets, channels, and business models, tax and compliance requirements are becoming more interconnected, more digital, and increasingly real-time. For years, tax software has automated individual compliance tasks, but much of the work between those tasks has remained manual and siloed. Avalara Aviator is designed to close that gap with intelligent agents that can understand context, coordinate work, monitor variance, and take action. Humans delegate the work while remaining in control of the decisions.

“Our customers need a system they can trust to get real work done,” said Hugo Sarrazin, Chief Executive Officer at Avalara. “Avalara Aviator fulfills that need. It’s built on more than 22 years of closed-loop compliance data, which informs every calculation, every filing, and every report. And that’s what enables us to turn days of manual compliance work into minutes of confident oversight.”

A Turning Point for Compliance

For years, tax software has automated discrete compliance tasks, such as calculating taxes, filing returns, and managing exemption certificates. While that sped up each task, finance professionals have been left bridging the gaps between them, such as having to manage configurations, interpret reports, chase approvals, and understand how to construct business logic to meet their requirements.

Avalara is the first company to bridge these industry-wide deficits by bringing specialized AI agents, tax and compliance workflows, and Avalara’s trusted compliance technology into a connected agent hub. This helps customers move from understanding what needs to happen to getting the work done.

Customers interact with Avalara Aviator in plain language through Avi, its orchestrator AI agent. Avi can orchestrate by reaching out to “lead agents” that oversee key areas like research, certificates, and returns. The agents validate, reconcile, proactively surface insights, and execute compliance work, while keeping people in control of decisions requiring judgment and oversight.

The initial Avalara Aviator experience supports compliance operations, including capabilities that help customers:
- Map products to tax codes
- Report transaction and tax liability data
- Validate exemption certificates
- Auto-generate tax matrices
- Analyze results across multiple applications
- Configure custom rules
For example, a customer can describe a needed tax rule in plain language. Avi then drafts the rule, simulates its impact on past transactions, and flags any conflicts with other rules. The customer reviews and approves the change before Avi activates the rule.

Avalara Aviator is initially being delivered to existing customers at no additional cost. Over time, Avalara plans to extend agentic capabilities across more of the compliance lifecycle and into the ERP, e-commerce, finance, and collaboration platforms customers already use. The goal is to make Avalara’s trusted tax and compliance platform available wherever work is happening.

Built for Trust, Accuracy, and Control

Generic AI tools can struggle with complex, multi-step workflows that require context, accuracy, and continuity over time. They can’t connect to critical business systems fast enough to be useful, and they aren’t purpose-built for the accuracy that business-critical workflows demand.

In contrast, Avalara Aviator combines agentic AI with the compliance infrastructure Avalara has built for more than 22 years. That includes proprietary data and learnings from the market’s most trusted tax and compliance platform.

The result is an agentic experience designed to go beyond plausible answers and deliver source-backed, explainable, and expert-verified outcomes customers can understand, trust, and defend.

Preya Chandan, Senior Tax Accountant with Singer Equipment Company, Inc., a distributor of foodservice equipment and an Avalara Aviator beta customer, said the technology has changed how she approaches her work.

“As a tax accountant focused on audit readiness, I need tools that go beyond answering questions to help me think about the ones I haven’t asked yet,” Chandan said. “Avalara Aviator does that in one place, explaining taxability in plain language, surfacing considerations I might have missed, and providing trusted research I can rely on for detailed, defensible work.”

Industry analysts say that a combination of usefulness and defensibility is particularly important as AI moves deeper into regulated business processes.

“Agentic AI adoption in finance has moved well beyond exploration, and the question is now about how to broadly scale its use,” said Kevin Permenter, Research Director at IDC. “Finance teams are prioritizing agentic AI because they see it as an important operational capability. Scaling that impact depends on security and compliance, data quality and governance, and reliable outputs. That’s why many finance organizations lean toward agent capabilities that sit directly alongside their core SaaS systems, where existing security controls and financial data models are already established.”

The Next Era of Agentic Tax and Compliance

Avalara Aviator advances Avalara’s broader vision for agentic tax and compliance: intelligent systems that find and manage risk before it finds you. It’s designed to not only monitor but proactively recommend actions. Upcoming enhancements will include features such as self-healing, in which agents examine changes to your business and recommend fixes to root discrepancies before they can turn into filing liabilities. It will be able to catch anomalies unloading a traditional human review onto an agentic worker.

Avalara Aviator will be generally available following next month’s Avalara CRUSH Europe event.

About Avalara

Avalara is the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance. For more than two decades, Avalara’s trusted tax content, deep compliance expertise, proprietary data, and technology have helped customers succeed on a global scale. Avalara now pairs that foundation with agentic AI to help businesses execute complex compliance work while keeping people in control. Avalara processes more than 54 billion AvaTax API calls annually and supports millions of businesses worldwide. For more information, visit Avalara.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding Avalara’s product plans, technology capabilities, and expected availability dates. These statements describe Avalara’s intentions as of the date of release and are subject to change without notice.

Media Contact
John Pascarella
media@avalara.com
September 23, 2026
JFrog’s swampUP 2023: Ready for Next

In the ever-changing landscape of technology and software development, staying ahead is essential. JFrog has led a pioneering effort to transform DevSecOps since its founding in 2008. Micheline Nijmeh has been chief marketing officer for the past three years, and in that time, she said JFrog has steadily tackled critical issues across the industry.

“JFrog really started off addressing a pain point, which involved being a software supply chain platform that simplifies the DevSecOps processes by automating the entire software build and release process for large enterprises,” Nijmeh said.

On Sept. 13, JFrog will host its marquee event: swampUP. For those anticipating this year’s event, this is more than just a conference. The people heading to San Jose, California, are dedicated to advancing the DevSecOps landscape, and the event is designed to foster a holistic environment for collaboration and learning, Nijmeh said.

“It really brings everyone together. Whether you’re a DevOps practitioner, security practitioner, as well as leaders and managers, all in one place,” Nijmeh said.

Image from swampUP 2022 courtesy of JFrog

This year’s theme, “Ready for Next,” captures JFrog’s dedication to continuous growth, she added. Nijmeh explained that organizations are always evolving and transforming, and that they need a partner that can grow with them.

Among the numerous topics that will be discussed at JFrog’s ninth swampUP event is security and DevSecOps, Nijmeh said, adding that “security is top of mind as always.”

Several keynote speakers will focus on security, including Bruce Schneier, a security guru and New York Times best-selling author of 14 books.

And although security will always be a hot topic, DevOps is expected to generate buzz as well.

“We have John Willis, who’s known as the godfather of DevOps. We’re also having folks from Riot Games, Fidelity, Netflix, CapitalOne and others representing their use cases on how they are addressing not just DevOps, but DevSecOps, in some cases,” Nijmeh said.

With a star-studded roster of speakers, expectations are sky-high. Furthermore, Nijmeh explained that the show has continued to evolve and has grown to be much more comprehensive.

“It’s not just about DevOps, it’s [also] about security. All the way from the left to the right. From development to deployment,” Nijmeh said.

For attendees, JFrog has placed focus on actionable insights, as it aims to provide information and tools that can actually be implemented within their organizations right away. SwampUP aims to provide attendees with practical know-how. Although the goal is to be ‘ready for next,’ it’s vital that practitioners and leaders understand what they can do today as well.

“Anything that we announce at swampUP will be available to our customers,” Nijmeh said. We’ll be sharing some partner announcements and some new innovations that no one has ever seen before.”

Image from swampUP 2022 courtesy of JFrog

September 1, 2023
Top 10 US States for a Coding Career

Coding jobs are in high demand and the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that computer and information technology employment will grow 13% by 2030. Alongside the increasing demand, coding has emerged as a highly flexible career option with room for growth.

If you’re looking to build a lucrative career in coding, researchers at Scrapfly.com pulled together a list of the top 10 states for coders and what the average salary is in those states.

Scrapfly.com, a web scraping API, calculated each state’s job openings per 100,000 people, as well as the median annual wage. Delaware came out on top with 759 coding jobs per 100,000 people, with a median wage of $108,440. Behind it is Vermont with 519 jobs per 100,000 people and a median wage of $99,210.

Surprisingly, the least populous state in the U.S., Wyoming, rounded out the top three with 488 jobs per 100,000 people.

“As you can see by the data, it’s a common misconception that you have to get a job in one of the more populous states in order to get the dream job as a software developer. Wyoming is a great example of a state that is small in population but is really pushing the boundaries in terms of creating jobs within the tech industry,” Scrapfly.com researchers said.

Despite having the fourth-highest annual salary, Alaska placed seventh on the list with 443 jobs per 100,000 people. Behind it, Massachusetts had the highest median wage at $128,160 per year.

Numbers seven through 10 on the list all bring in at least $100,000 per year, on average, with New Hampshire and Rhode Island providing 411 and 395 jobs per 100,000 people.

Furthermore, Montana, South Dakota and North Dakota come in at numbers four, five and six with their median wages varying between $80,000 and $78,000. In those states, between 458 and 475 jobs per 100,000 people were recorded.

“Whether you’re already established in the coding world or looking to kickstart your career journey, there are plenty of states that provide ample opportunity to flourish,” said Sparkfly.com’s research team.

Although many people don’t have a coding background, it is easier than ever to learn the skills necessary to get a job in coding. Indeed.com advised learning a programming language like JavaScript, Python or Swift and taking a coding class. It also touched on the importance of contributing to open source, building projects and expanding your portfolio.

“This research demonstrates that a career in tech and coding is more accessible than many believe. We can see this not only by the sheer number of job openings across the states but by the attractive average salaries too,” the researchers said.

November 29, 2022
DevOps World 2022: Using SBOMs to Secure the Software Supply Chain

As supply chain attacks become increasingly prevalent, visibility is emerging as a necessity in cybersecurity. One way to improve visibility and secure your software supply chain is with a software bill of materials (SBOM).

An SBOM is a list of all the components within a codebase. By providing insight into open source and third-party components, SBOMs improve overall visibility and are integral to the identification of security or license threats. To properly secure the software supply chain, organizations must have an understanding of all the components in their applications; it is especially important to do so with containerized applications and those built using cloud-native, microservices-based architectures. That’s why SBOMs are becoming a cornerstone of a comprehensive application security strategy.

The Need for Visibility

Gartner’s recent report Innovation Insight for SBOMs emphasizes the need for constant visibility into the software development life cycle and how SBOMs can help organizations and developers achieve that goal. While Gartner recognizes that open source software is a foundational component of modern software development, it also noted that it can be a major contributing factor in software vulnerabilities.

“While reusable components and open source software have simplified software development, this simplicity has exposed a critical visibility gap: Organizations are unable to accurately record and summarize the massive volume of software they produce, consume and operate,” the report said. “Without this visibility, software supply chains are vulnerable to the security and licensing compliance risks associated with software components.”

To mitigate the associated risks, Gartner’s report not only emphasizes the importance of SBOMs but the need to automate the SBOM creation and validation process. To achieve supply chain security at scale, organizations should automatically generate and verify SBOMs and use that data to constantly evaluate oncoming risks.

This ties directly into the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) process, which uses SBOM data and assessments to ensure threats don’t slip under the radar and wreak havoc. You can more easily identify security vulnerabilities at any stage in the pipeline and remove them—because an SBOM gives you more granular visibility.

The importance of SBOMs has even been noted by the U.S. federal government. As stated in president Biden’s Cybersecurity Executive Order 14028, any company that sells software to the federal government will be mandated to provide a complete SBOM.

The initiative has also spread to other branches of the government, with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency also emphasizing the significance of SBOMs.

“CISA will advance the SBOM work by facilitating community engagement, development, and progress, with a focus on scaling and operationalization, as well as tools, new technologies, and new use cases,” said CISA in a statement on its website.

SBOM Requirements

The U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) have outlined the minimum elements required. For one, data fields with baseline information about each component are required. Also, automation support is needed, as SBOMs necessitate machine readability for support at scale. Finally, the need for practices and processes was outlined, calling for frequent SBOM generation, including transitive dependencies and widespread availability of this information to those who need it.

On many fronts, SBOMs have become non-negotiable throughout the software industry. In order to effectively detect and respond to threats, organizations must take preemptive steps to ensure visibility is maximized, and SBOMs accomplish just that.

Want to learn more about this and other related topics? Join CloudBees for DevOps World 2022, held in Orlando, Florida, at the World Marriott Center. Use discount code DW22 when registering and get access to all the fantastic offerings, including keynotes, sessions, training and other interactive activities. We can’t wait to see you there for the DevOps Remix!

September 8, 2022
DevOps Institute Releases Upskilling IT 2022 Report

DevOps Institute, a professional member association working to advance the humans of DevOps, announced the release of its Upskilling IT 2022 report. In its fourth year, the Upskilling IT report highlights the need to close the DevOps skills gap and identifies emerging job roles within the industry.

Through data collected in the Upskilling IT 2022 survey, DevOps Institute introduced a new four-report system which includes: the Global Report, Americas Regional Report, EMEA Regional Report and APAC Regional Report. With the help of 2,476 survey respondents across 120 countries, the report helps IT professionals accelerate transformations.

Managing Technical and Talent Debt

“Strong human skills like collaboration, communication and social adeptness remain essential to the DevOps journey,” said Jayne Groll, CEO of DevOps Institute. “In 2022, upskilling is as much an individual endeavor as it is an organizational responsibility.”

One key finding is that insufficient IT resource skills are a major challenge globally. In fact, 40% of survey respondents said that the resource and skills shortage is one of their top three challenges.

The report also found that addressing technical debt must be paired with addressing talent debt. The importance of technical skills is apparent throughout the findings, but without the necessary human skills, innovation and transformation are disrupted.

“The 2022 data shows that managing talent debt alongside technical debt maintains competitiveness and drives organizational growth,” said Eveline Oehrlich, DevOps Institute’s chief research officer.

Another major takeaway is that upskilling is a professional and organizational imperative. Continuous learning must be prioritized by individuals and organizations to tackle the issues faced throughout the industry.

“As leaders manage the shortage of skilled individuals, they must embrace a continuous learning environment to expedite organizational transformation and remain competitive in the market,” said Oehrlich.

The 2022 report is available to download for free.

May 18, 2022
The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Lasting Impact on Tech

The COVID-19 pandemic created major opportunities for innovation and ushered in new technology solutions, but even as the danger subsides, this tech may still serve a purpose.

Whether it be face mask detection, temperature checks, facial recognition or AI surveillance, technology crafted to combat COVID-19 is here to stay. This may present a number of benefits, but there are ethical issues that persist.

Throughout the pandemic, school districts sought ways to mitigate the risk of outbreaks and ensure students were complying with safety regulations. AI-empowered cameras, for example, were one of the first pieces of technology implemented, allowing schools to monitor which students weren’t wearing masks.

“I think it’s helpful for COVID-19 stuff, but it seems a little intrusive,” said Noa Young, a 16-year-old junior from Atlanta’s Fulton County school district. “I think it’s strange that we were not aware of that.”

Although students knew cameras were monitoring them, they weren’t informed about the extent of the surveillance. The cameras have the capability to scan for body temperature and can also determine if a student is wearing their mask correctly.

In addition to monitoring for compliance, these cameras have the ability to assist with contact tracing. They can scan students’ faces and determine who they’ve been in contact with, enabling schools to retrace the steps of someone who contracts COVID-19. This is just one example of pandemic tech’s continued development, but as adoption and use spreads to other sectors and it’s used for other purposes, security and privacy concerns begin to pile up.

Courtenay Brown, 31, works in an Amazon warehouse and explained the scrutiny she is under throughout her workdays. Amazon uses similar AI surveillance to keep tabs on worker productivity, notifying management if someone deviates from their assigned task for too long. Many believe this level of surveillance creates an inhumane work environment.

“They basically can see everything you do, and it’s all to their benefit,” said Brown. “They don’t value you as a human being. It’s demeaning.”

The implementation of this technology is one of the factors pushing Amazon workers to take a stand through unionization efforts.

“There’s no way we’re going to stop or let this bring us down,” said Derrick Palmer, co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union. “It’s going to do the complete opposite. We’re going to go 10 times harder.”

Another byproduct of the pandemic was the shift to remote work in organizations across the country and in every industry. This shift created the need for remote access to an organization’s tools, information, data and assets, which didn’t come without inherent security risks—especially since such access often needed to happen literally overnight.

One way companies adjusted was through adoption of identity and access management (IAM) solutions. IAM can be used to identify, record and grant access in the cloud, an integral part of secure functionality in hybrid or remote workplaces.

“In the game of cybercrime cat and mouse, one could argue there is no such thing as being over-resourced. A major breach can bring down a company,” said World Wide Worx CEO Arthur Goldstuck.

Although IAM proved to be a workable solution to the challenge of remote access management, cybersecurity threats are ever-changing and now cyberattackers have shifted focus—they may be attacking IAM solutions.

“Sophisticated threat actors are actively targeting identity and access management infrastructure, and credential misuse is now a primary attack vector,” Gartner described in its Top Security and Risk Management Trends 2022 report.

To keep data safe, companies will have to be ready for an even wider range of cyberattacks, including threats to IAM.

These are just two examples of technological breakthroughs that were originally seen as innovative solutions but which have evolved to have their own set of problems.

May 11, 2022
Semiconductor Shortage May Be Here to Stay

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has cautioned that the semiconductor shortage will last until 2024, a scary reality for manufacturers, businesses and consumers alike.

Semiconductor chips, or microchips, are essential for many digital consumer products. Anything that processes information uses these chips and with the exponential growth of technology, there has been a massive increase in demand.

“The rapid acceleration of the internet of things (IoT) to date and to come forever moves semiconductors ahead of oil as the world’s key commodity input for growth,” according to economic investment firm TS Lombard.

Although the U.S. leads the world in developing and selling semiconductors, manufacturing has shifted to Asia. Taiwan and Korea account for 83% of global processor chip production and 70% of memory chip output, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

In many of these Asian economies, harsh lockdown measures were put in place in response to COVID-19, causing bottlenecks in the supply chain. As a result, certain manufacturing tools are unavailable, limiting chipmaking capacity.

The shortage was originally projected to last until 2023, but Gelsinger now predicts that it will roll into 2024.

“The shortages have now hit equipment and some of those factory ramps will be more challenged,” Gelsinger explained.

Semiconductor Shortage Impacts More Than Just Tech

Semiconductors are especially important in the automobile industry. Microchips are an essential component of the modern-day car, and they enable many innovations within the industry.

As a result of the bottleneck, some automotive companies have limited or paused production. Tesla, for example, has halted production in 2022, citing supply chain issues as the limiting factor.

In response to the shortage, companies are urgently building new manufacturing facilities. Samsung is building a $17 billion semiconductor factory in Texas and Intel is spending $20 billion on two new factories in Arizona.

The shortage has also prompted legislative action in Florida and Texas that calls for increased funding for microchip and semiconductor factories.

“The more we have this capacity within our own country the more opportunities there’s going to be for people and the more secure both our economic supply chains will be and our national security,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis said of the measures he’s taking to combat the shortage.

No Definitive End in Sight

Although industry experts predicted the shortage will end in 2024, there is no definitive end in sight, prompting manufacturers and businesses to strategize accordingly.

Some companies, like Tesla, have resorted to alternative chips and software-based solutions to endure the shortage. Companies like Latent AI offer software packages that optimize alternative hardware, which could prove to be a technological lifesaver for the many companies affected by the shortage.

Although the current shortage is a byproduct of the pandemic, some of the alternative solutions that have arisen may be revolutionary in filling the ever-growing demand for semiconductors.

May 9, 2022