After a rough couple of years, 2024 felt like the beginning of better days. In many ways, it was return to normal life. COVID is finally behind us. Tech layoffs are tapering off slowly but surely. And the economy seems to be in an ever so slightly better health.
But the effects of a period of economic upheaval still linger on. Although inflation cooled off in the final year of Biden’s administration, and a series of Fed rate cuts brought a glimmer of hope, people are still sore from annual price increases, and geopolitical escalations are significant. And now with a new administration on the way to take over, once again, the future is uncertain.
With some happy surprises and wild setbacks, 2024 was quite a year in tech. Here’s a roundup of the some of the highlights.
Intel’s Struggles Get Real
For the entire year, speculations were rife that the Silicon Valley titan is struggling. Amid tumbling stocks and billions of dollars of losses from its chip foundry business, Intel had presumably lost its edge.
In December, as Pat Gelsinger announced his retirement, it left no room for doubt. Intel truly is in an irrevocably difficult spot.
The company continued cost cutting measures and layoffs quarter after quarter but insofar, has failed to reach a turning point from where it can return to its vaunted position up top. It seems more than ever now that it has ceded the market to NVIDIA.
A Fortuitous Year for NVIDIA
While the wheels fell off for Intel, its biggest competitor, NVIDIA, grew the business empire overnight becoming a $3.2 trillion dollar company banking on AI gold rush.
The California-based chip designer rose to the second position in the list of most valuable companies by market cap value in 2024.
NVIDIA’s stocks have been on an upward swing since the beginning of the year, gaining by a mind-blowing 200%. It crossed the $2 trillion mark in February, and shocking everybody, hit a $3 trillion within just the second quarter.
As the AI fever rose, NVIDIA availed its first-place advantage in the GPU market to seize market share formerly owned by Intel and AMD.
VMware under Broadcom
Late in 2023, Broadcom acquired VMware in a staggering $69 billion deal. The acquisition sent shockwaves across the IT community, and had many customers worried over possible price changes.
Broadcom made sweeping changes post-acquisition, overhauling the former operations and strategies which impacted both VMware’s products and pricing. One of things that got flak from customers widely is a changeover from perpetual licensing to subscription-based licensing. VMware infrastructure products being a standard across IT made the change hugely impactful for companies.
Another key development was the discontinuation of ESXi Hypervisor free edition which was canceled mid-February further affirming Broadcom’s determination to enforce a subscription-based business model across the company.
Changes too were made to the Unit Model wherein customers now require a license for every core, and the minimum license capacity is 16 cores.
Broadcom also discontinued VMware’s partners program making it invitation only. The program follows a selective method of choosing based on a company’s ability to qualify Broadcom’s baseline spend requirement.
An Uptick in Chinese Cyberattacks
No annual roundup in tech is complete without an explosive cybersecurity story, and this year’s big story was the Salt Typhoon attack. 2024 saw an alarming number of high-profile cases that included two big back-to-back breaches in June – the Ticketmaster breach and the Snowflake data breach, but among them the Salt Typhoon attack in September clearly stood out.
According to officials, a Chinese hacking group named Salt Typhoon which is suspected to have links with the Chinese government, launched a cyberespionage campaign targeting 8 major telecom networks in the US, including AT&T and Verizon.
Reports revealed that metadata of a large number of Americans, including many senior politicians like that of President-elect Donald Trump and VP-elect J.D.Vance, were taken.
Senator, Marco Rubio, described the incident as “the most disturbing and widespread incursion” into telco networks in the world history.
According to Futurum Intelligence‘s recently launched CIO Insights dataset, 63.9% IT leaders has cybersecurity as the top priority for IT investment in 2025.
Be sure to watch the special year-end episode of Gestalt IT Rundown for a complete checklist of all the hottest tech stories from 2024.
