Broadcom, makers of networking equipment, is exploring a deal to acquire mobile technology giant Qualcomm in a USD $100 billion deal, which could be the largest ever acquisition value of a chip-maker. The resulting company could be the world's largest chipmaker, combining Broadcom's IP with networking PHYs and IoT infrastructure, and Qualcomm's SoCs powering IoT devices besides smartphones, tablets, and ultra-portable notebooks. Broadcom is looking to raise a cash+stock bid consisting of shares valued at $70/share. Besides networking infrastructure equipment, Broadcom made its fortunes on the back of Apple iPhone's success, as it supplies its networking chips.

AMD's stock on Monday took a relatively steep dive in value, following a report by Morgan Stanley that pegs cryptocurrency-fueled graphics shipments to decline by 50% next year (a $250 million decline in revenue). "We believe that AMD's graphics surge has been caused by a sharp increase in sales of graphics chips to cryptocurrency miners. We expect this to meaningfully decelerate next year," Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore said. At the same time, the report expects video game console demand to decline by 5.5% in 2018, which led Moore towards lowering his price target for AMD shares to $8 from $11, a 32% decline from Friday's close.

As a consequence of the report, Morgan Stanley reduced its rating on AMD shares from equal-weight to underweight, which reduced confidence in the market, and triggered a sell-off - and following the mechanism of availability and demand, a descent in stock pricing was already painted on the wall. A 9% fall isn't something to scoff at - especially when the economics surrounding it are attributed to a single - as of yet - report. AMD stock fluctuations aren't new; the company's stock has been particularly volatile in recent times - especially when compared to its peers (and competitors) Intel and NVIDIA.

NVIDIA has been on a roll lately with their market capitalization and share valuation, which could very well send the company soaring past the $100 billion dollar mark today. Whether or not that happens (and if it does, it will be a historical milestone for the company), NVIDIA's growth of almost $25 billion dollars since May 13th is nothing short of jaw-dropping.

The "sudden" market valuation on NVIDIA comes on the heels of the company's strong graphics execution and increasingly entrenched position in the high performance GPU computing market for machine learning. The company's Volta architecture, which was showcased by Jensen Huang at their GTC keynote on May 10th, boosted confidence in the company significantly. Since then, the company's market cap has increased from the $75 billion dollar it was at shortly after GTC, towards its $96.31 billion rated market cap today. More recently, with the recent rise of the crypto wave craze, NVIDIA's GPUs have been talked about as real alternatives to AMD's previously (and perhaps hurtful for the company) grasp on this kind of workloads.