Apple Discloses Acqui-Hire of Agentic Data Engineering Firm Ascend.io

Apple have disclosed details (except deal value) of their acquisition of Ascend.io, a startup in Silicon Valley founded in 2015, building agentic data engineering technology, from Ascension labs. The deal closed on June 30, 2026.

Ascend.io uses AI agents to automate routine data engineering work, with clients that include News Corp, HarperCollins, Mattel and Marist.

The deal terms include the right to "make employment offers and hire certain employees" and a "non-exclusive license to Ascend's IP rights" and assignment of certain patents.

Pundits speculate the deal is as much about talent and technology as finished products.

Walmart Tops the 2024 Fortune 500

Top companies are Walmart, Amazon and Apple. The threshold to make the 2024 list was $7.1 billion in revenue. The Fortune 500 makes up two thirds of US GDP. US GDP was 25 trillion in 2022.

Apple Becomes A $2trillion Company

This follows a $1tr market cap in 2018, doubling in two years. It is 42 years since Apple was founded and the $2tr milestone is a first on Wall Street. Saudi Aramco was briefly valued at this level following its stock market debut. 59 year old Tim Cook presides over Apple as CEO.

Avengers: Endgame Boosts Disney Share Price to $140

Disney's share price rose to $140 following news of the success of Avengers: Endgame, its latest release in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

To date, the top 10 Marvel films have brought in  more than $1bn each on average, supporting Disney's decision to acquire Marvel in 2009 for $4bn. Marvel was founded in 1986 as a subsidiary of Cadence Industries (it was subsequently taken over several times, and was described as a "mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property" by Greensboro-born American businessman,  Ron Perelman, who won $1.5bn from Morgan Stanley in legal claims, a decision which was later reversed).

After Marvel, Disney later acquired Lucasfilm (2012) from founder George Lucas for $4bn (citing "substantial pent-up demand" for Star Wars movies, and 21st Century Fox (2019) (which owns in turn Star India, and majority owns Hulu, a low-cost streaming media subscription service and Fox Deportes, formerly Fox Sports en Espanol).

Disney Plus, a new streaming service, is also set to be launched late 2019, featuring the entire Star Wars series plus a range of Disney-owned content.

ABC Television alumnus Robert ("Bob") Iger has been CEO of Disney for over a decade, succeeding Michael Eisner in 2005, having been five years in the COO position.

Bob went to Ithaca College in New York (Tompkins County).

Bob earned a whopping $65m for being CEO in 2018. He also joined the Board of Directors of Apple in 2011 (chaired by American businessman and former CEO and later Chairman of Genentech, Arthur Levinson).

Apple's Big DC Plans - $10bn over 5 Years

Apple is investing big in US DCs.

This includes plans to build a 133 acre campus in Austin, Texas and another build-out in Waukee, Dallas County, Iowa. Tax breaks are helping incentivise investment.

Existing capacity in Maiden, North Carolina; Mesa, Arizona and Sparks, Nevada will be expanded.

Outside of the US, back in July 2017, Apple announced it was building a second DC in Denmark, after their initial one in Viborg (166,000 square metres), with go-live in Q2 2019, shortly after Facebook a similar announcement in January. The DC will be located in Aabenraa in Southern Denmark near the border with Germany and will be powered 100% from renewable energy from day one. The Danish Foreign Ministry was said to have worked with Apple for three years in line with its Invest in Denmark program prior to its investment.

Apple's additional DC capacity will be used to power the iTunes store, Maps, iMessage and Siri.

Bringing Hardcore Tech In House - Apple Consumes PMIC Supplier

Apple is buying a portion of Dialog Semiconductor for $300m, a manufacturer of power management ICs (PMICs) taking control of its Swindon site as well as offices in Livorno, Italy and Nabern (where Daimler also have a research facility) and Neuaubing in Germany.

For this price, Apple will also acquire Dialog's patents and also take on its chip engineering workforce.  Apple will also prepay $300m to Dialog for products to be delivered over the next 3 years, creating an outlay of $600m for Apple.

Apple's hardware chief Johny Srouji, who reports to CEO Tim Cook, praised Dialog's "deep expertise in chip development" and alluded to their engineers having a long track record supporting Apple from the early days of the iPhone.

Johny joined Apple in 2008 to lead development on the A4, the first Apple-designed System on a Chip, having previously held senior positions at Intel and IBM. He has Bachelors and Masters from Technion which has close links with Intel.

The announcement caused Dialog's shares to surge 30% given the certainty the deal places over its future. The uncertainty (which at one point led to a 20% drop in the share price) was triggered by both Dialog's dependence on Apple (from whom it gets 75% of its revenue), and Apple's decision to drop Imagination Technologies in favour of developing its GPUs in-house, creating anxiety amongst suppliers (Imagination threatened legal action against Apple before being bought out by Canyon Bridge).

Dr Jalal Bagherli, who joined Dialog as CEO in 2005 (and has also worked as CEO of Alphamosaic, a Cambridge startup building video processing chips for mobile, sold to Broadcom in 2004 for $123m), and has a PhD in Electronics from Kent University, said the deal was "in the best interests of employees and shareholders".

Dialog's financial advisors were Qatalyst Partners (the advisory firm led by George Boutros and Frank Quatrrone) and legal counsel Linklaters.

Dialog's competitors in the Smartphone PMIC market are Qualcomm (with about 40% market share), TI (20% market share),  Maxim and formerly ST-Ericsson.

Amazon Markets ACK to OEMS Targeting Home Automation

Amazon is marketing a board with chip and antenna to OEMs looking to integrate with Alexa in the home automation space. They call it the ACK. The cost of the chip will be only a few dollars. This puts Amazon in the driving seat of home automation, alongside the likes of Google (which purchased Nest Labs in 2014), Apple and Microsoft. Hamilton Beach and Proctor and Gamble are partnering with Amazon on this. The value of Amazon's offering is not in the chips themselves, but in binding consumers to their platform, and owning the data generated off of it.

ARM to be bought by Softbank (IoT Big Driver)

Cambridge, UK based Smartphone-chip-maker ARM Holdings confirmed it is to be bought by Japan's Softbank (a recognised investor in "technology paradigm shifts") for £24bn (or 31bn USD), a premium of 43% on its traded market value. ARM's customers include Samsung and Apple. However, an earlier acquisition of Sprint Telecom is weighing heavy on Softbank's finances who will take a loan from Mizuho Bank to finance the acquisition of ARM for just under one-third of the deal value. Growth in the "Internet of Things" (and the evolution from the mobile Internet) is believed to be one of the prime motivations behind the acquisition.

CTO-ville: From Adobe to Apple

Illinois Graphics Guy Hits Big at Apple (Cloud Computing Could be Brewing)

• Kevin Lynch, Adobe's Chief Technology Officer for five years, is moving to become vice president of Technology at Apple.  Well done Kevin, and hope you can leverage your Adobe technology experience to improve products at Apple!

Kevin studied Interactive Computer Graphics at the University of Illinois. Some of his influences can be read from his web page, including American electrical engineer's Vannevar Bush visionary article of 1945.

Steve Jobs was known for criticising Adobe Flash. Adobe's most recent quarter bagged $1bn in revenues. Now the time has come for those from Adobe to come to Apple.

The wider world of CTOs

What about other companies with a technology-driven culture? Take behemoth Microsoft.

• Eric Rudder is Microsoft's CTO/CSO (Chief Technical/Strategy officer) 

Eric has management responsibility over Microsoft Research. He's a graduate of Brown University (Rhode Island, East of Connecticut). He was the architect of Visual FoxPro 3.0 and has also managed developer outreach at Microsoft.

The CTO World Congress is one way to network with CTOs.

Nokia's War on iPhone - Patent Lawsuit Looks Weak

Nokia on Thursday 22 October lobbed a lawsuit versus Apple pleading patent infringement. "They should spend their money on R&D rather than lawyers" accused one disgruntled observationist.