The [boom in data center construction](https://www.fastcompany.com/91534619/data-centers-are-breaking-the-electric-grid-meet-the-6-billion-startup-and-its-genius-ceo-solving-the-problem) is taking up much of the supply of high-tech components, especially processor and memory chips. This demand is squeezing consumer device makers, which are [having trouble acquiring enough chips](https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/memory-prices-shortages-affecting-apple-iphones/). This is happening even though data center servers and smartphones [use different types of chips](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/measuring-distortions-in-international-markets_8fe4491d-en.html). The key distinction between consumer electronics and data centers is what they need chips to be optimized for. Smartphones and PCs require low power use, thermal efficiency, and tight integration. Data centers that run [AI](https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence) systems such as large language models, or LLMs, require maximum compute power, memory bandwidth, and storage throughput. To meet these needs, consumer devices tend to rely on systems-on-a-chip—chips that combine processing and storage—with dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and NAND, a type of nonvolatile memory. In contrast, AI servers rely on graphics processing units, or GPUs, or other accelerator processors combined with high-bandwidth memory chips. [I](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=7j4s7kYAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate) [study global supply chains](https://www.darden.virginia.edu/faculty-research/directory/vidya-mani) and how businesses respond to market constraints within these supply chains. The reason for the consumer electronics supply crunch has to do with the nature of the chip market: its concentration, high costs, and how it responds to boom-and-bust cycles. AI is not replacing consumer electronics; it is reorganizing the chip market around new priorities for specific chip characteristics. Data centers are pulling capital and scarce memory capacity toward the production of accelerator processors and high-bandwidth memory and the data handling and electronics equipment that surround them. _Chipmaking explained._ Chip manufacturing behaves less like a competitive commodity market and more like a layered oligopoly. Scale matters because the leading firms can reinvest in research, improve yields, secure equipment, and deepen customer relationships. In the case of graphics processor chips, designers such as NVIDIA, which has [85% market share](https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/01/25/nvidias-85-gpu-market-share-faces-growing-competit/), depend on advanced semiconductor foundries such as TSMC, which has [more than 70% market share](https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-semiconductor-foundry-market-share), to manufacture chips using extreme ultraviolet lithography machines from ASML, [a monopoly](https://www.economist.com/business/2020/02/29/how-asml-became-chipmakings-biggest-monopoly). Expand to continue reading ↓

After losing a boardroom power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley, Steve Jobs was exiled to a small building across the street from Apple’s headquarters. It was May 1985. He and his colleagues called his new office “Siberia.” Corporate reports stopped flowing to his desk, and executives stopped calling, leaving him bored and lonely. “It was amazing to see how ostracized he was in the Valley,” recalled Susan Barnes, a Macintosh financial controller who had previously reported to him. “It was really cruel.” Jobs is remembered as the visionary who returned to Apple, the company he cofounded, in 1997, and saved it from near-bankruptcy. But before the comeback, he made a series of leadership decisions that destabilized the company and left it drifting toward death. An overlooked truth: the instincts that made Jobs extraordinary, his perfectionism, his force of will, his refusal to compromise, also nearly destroyed Apple in its early years. After he left, Jobs spent twelve years failing at a company called NeXT, and those failures laid the foundation for Apple’s resurgence with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Here are five times Steve was wrong and learned from his mistakes: By early 1985, Apple had splintered into warring factions. Jobs undermined Sculley to colleagues and challenged his every decision. “I am the board,” Jobs, Apple’s chairman, told one executive. Sculley’s supporters stormed the human resources department to complain. As one executive observed, no one knew who was really running the company. The civil war paralyzed Apple at the worst moment. Macintosh sales were declining, IBM and its clones were eating market share, and for the first time in its history Apple laid off employees, more than 1,200 of them, and announced its first-ever quarterly loss. The company secretly entered talks to sell itself to General Electric. Expand to continue reading ↓

PayPal, a pioneer in online payments, is facing significant challenges nearly three decades after its inception NEW YORK -- PayPal helped invent online checkout. Nearly three decades later, it’s struggling to defend its turf. The iconic online payments company is facing its biggest challenge in nearly three decades of existence. Its core business of customers using the app to check out when shopping online is barely growing and new management has bluntly warned investors that “significant changes” will be needed to fix the company’s problems. One of the biggest success stories of the original dot-com era, PayPal has seen its territory steadily conquered by new and existing competitors, particularly Apple, Shopify, the buy now, pay later companies like Affirm and Klarna, and peer-to-peer money transfer services like Cash App and Zelle, particularly in the past five years. As a result, PayPal’s stock has fallen nearly 40% in the past 12 months. The stock, which soared during the pandemic as millions of Americans started shopping online for groceries and other necessities, has plunged roughly 80% in the past five years as investors worried that PayPal missed an opportunity to leverage its name recognition and dominance in online payments and allowed its competitors to take market share that will be hard to recover. Investors’ concerns are not about profitability, although PayPal did warn investors that 2026 profits would be down from the previous year. The concerns lie more with how will PayPal grow and maintain its market with increasing competition. PayPal said in its first-quarter earnings report that branded checkout — the company’s most profitable business by margin — grew just 2%. While the company noted there had been a slowdown in its European division and other discretionary purchases, a growth of only 2% in one of the fastest growing industries alarmed investors and shares dropped nearly 8%. The pressures on PayPal's business have led to some dramatic changes at the top of the company. The board [ousted CEO Alex Chriss in February](https://apnews.com/article/paypal-hp-lores-chriss-venmo-dorman-ai-5f613ba3c6fa408f13873f8fce9c3a2b) and replaced him with Enrique Lores, the former president and CEO of HP Inc., and a member of PayPal’s board. Lores announced a cost-cutting plan that includes reorganizing the company into three divisions and relying more on artificial intelligence. He told investors at May’s shareholder meeting he expects to update them on the company’s turnaround plan “in a few months." The biggest threat to PayPal’s dominance has been Apple and its Apple Pay service. Apple rolled out Apple Pay in 2014, which allowed Apple customers to store virtual credit and debit cards on their devices to pay online. The company also integrated tap-to-pay technologies into iPhones and the Apple Watch to allow Apple users to pay for items at stores in person. [  ](https://abcnews.com/Politics/federal-court-blocks-alabama-effort-gop-friendly-congressional/story?id=133314583) [  ](https://abcnews.com/US/woman-killed-patio-umbrella-dining-south-carolina-restaurant/story?id=133296071) [  ](https://abcnews.com/Sports/wireStory/new-york-back-nba-finals-time-1999-after-133302715) So, while PayPal has embedded itself as a checkout button on countless merchant websites, that checkout button has become less useful when a customer can store their payment information on their phone and pay using a fingerprint or a glance of their face, analysts said. This has caused customers to drift away from PayPal as a default payment method. PayPal in 2019 controlled roughly 9% of e-commerce in the U.S. and globally, with Apple Pay having a 3% market share, according to analysts at UBS. Six years later, Apple overtook PayPal as the dominant checkout option, and its market share is expected to continue to grow as Apple rolls out Apple Pay to non-iOS users. There is also the growing popularity of buy now, pay later companies such as Klarna and Affirm. While PayPal now offers buy now, pay later services like its pay-in-four plan, and longer-term monthly payment plans, it lags its major competitors including Affirm, which was founded by one of PayPal’s founders, Max Levchin. “PayPal has had a lot of trouble evolving from being just a way to pay on your desktop computer,” said Sanjay Sakhrani, an analyst who covers credit cards and payment methods at investment bank Keefe Bruyette & Woods. Going forward, investors worry that if the branded checkout business continues to lag behind it competitors, it could spell future trouble for PayPal. Wall Street analysts have questioned whether Venmo or Braintree may be spun off from the company, noting that Lores was previously responsible for spliting HP into two separate companies. Earlier this year, PayPal's stock jumped briefly on unconfirmed reports that the payments company Stripe was interested in acquiring all or parts of PayPal.