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Worldwide Quarterly ODM and Direct Infrastructure Market Update, 2Q26

Leon Kao — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Presentation provides an overview of the development of the global ODM-to-OEM and ODM-Direct infrastructure market for the second quarter of 2026.

AMD validates the importance of world models for physical AI with the acquisition of World Labs

Dan Everett — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AMD's $8.2B all-stock acquisition of World Labs, about 64% above the $5B valuation reported for the company's February funding round, is a bet that physical AI is the next growth cycle and that spatial intelligence and world models are what make it work. Physical AI systems have to predict how physical objects move and what their actions will cause, and AMD is paying a premium to get a leading world model company and research team to address this need.

AMD's $8.2 billion World Labs deal is a bet that model research belongs inside its hardware roadmap

Jeff Janukowicz, Brent Ellis — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

AMD announced a definitive agreement on September 28, 2026 to acquire World Labs, the spatial-intelligence lab led by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion and expected to close by the end of 2026, with Dr. Li joining as executive vice president and chief scientist reporting to Lisa Su. IDC believes the deal deepens AMD's open AI ecosystem and extends its shift from component supplier toward a full-stack AI infrastructure provider, with the main payoff being closer ties between leading-edge model research and systems and silicon design, so AMD can build emerging workload needs into its hardware, software, and systems roadmaps sooner.

Acumatica 2026 R2: Intelligence for the Mid-market with Embedded AI

Mickey North Rizza — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Acumatica released R2 2026 today. The new GA product release brings Acumatica to the AI levels of many of their peers. While these AI updates may appear late, Acumatica clients find this new AI journey well timed, as told to IDC earlier this year. Many organizations, while trying AI, are leery of it and would prefer to walk before they run. With this next release, Acumatica is enabling their clients to do more at their own pace and with greater confidence.

The R2 2026 updates bring mid-market businesses embedded AI, modern analytics, a streamlined user experience and industry specific enhancements that are designed to help organizations improve productivity, make faster decisions, and scale more efficiently. The R2 2026 release brings forward new capabilities:

AI Assistant and AI Automation: Mid-size businesses will find a huge uplift with quicker and faster business answers, anomaly detection, the automation of repetitive tasks, and trigger prompt-driven workflows within Acumatica.

Modern user interface: As organizations move to R2 they will automatically transition to Acumatica’s modern user interface which provides a more consistent and intuitive experience across the Acumatica platform.

Modern Analytics for Faster Decision-Making: Acumatica R2 2026 lays the foundation for a unified, always-current view of the business with a high-performance governed data source that surfaces everywhere teams need it — in dashboards, financial statements, and now in the AI tools they already use. There are two advances anchoring this shift:

Native Data Warehouse: Reporting and analytics now run against a dedicated, performance-optimized copy of ERP data instead of the live transactional database, so reports don’t compete for system resources with day-to-day order entry, invoicing, and approvals. This foundational layer of centralized ERP data and performance optimization will be enhanced in future updates.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Connection: Organizations can securely connect Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other MCP-compatible AI tools directly to their Acumatica data without exporting, uploading, or duplicating information in a separate AI workspace. Role-based permissions, inherited security, and field level data masking automatically carry over, allowing teams to use the AI tools they already rely on while IT retains centralized governance and auditability for every query. Together with existing capabilities such as InsightXL, which connects live Acumatica data directly to Excel, these advances extend Acumatica's analytics so the same governed data reaches finance and operations teams through whichever surface the moment calls for — a dashboard, spreadsheet, AI assistant, or AI tool of their choice.

EFI and Agfa DPS Join Forces

Roberto Alunni, Tim Greene — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

At the end of September EFI and Agfa’s Digital Printing Solutions (Agfa DPS) division announced a plan to merge, forming a joint venture. EFI and Agfa DPS are both strong players in the industrial inkjet printing market, with a wide range of capabilities and products that compete in the wide format graphics, textile, packaging, and interior décor markets. This deal builds on a cooperation between Afga’s DPS division and EFI that started in 2024.

IDC Survey: AI-Enabled EHS Management Trends, 2026

Bjoern Stengel — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Survey treats environment, health, and safety (EHS) as an umbrella spanning three separate items from IDC's 2026 AI and Sustainability Survey: employee health, well-being, and safety (the primary, workforce-focused lens); hazardous materials/waste management; and air quality measurement (the two environmental lenses). Together they show EHS isn't one trend but three moving in different directions. Employee health, well-being, and safety is named a top AI-for-sustainability priority by 28.5% of respondents (n = 463), up 20.3% from a 23.7% baseline in 2024. Hazardous materials/waste management is growing even faster (30.2%, up from 23.4%, 29%+ relative growth) — the fastest-growing of the three. Air quality measurement, by contrast, is the only one in decline (17.7%, down from 20.3%, a 13% fall).

Buyer psychology is unusually balanced across the complex: Mitigating AI's own social/governance impact (35.0%) and accelerating sustainable transformation (32.9%) run nearly neck and neck as the top drivers, and 79.7% of respondents hold direct decision-making authority. Budget ownership shifts meaningfully by lens, too — sustainability/ESG's share of budget control more than doubles between the employee safety lens (6.2%) and the hazardous materials lens (14.1%), meaning vendors need a different buying committee conversation depending on which lens a prospect actually prioritizes.

Industry demand is led by government (52.3%) and financial services (securities and investment) (44.0%), with healthcare, manufacturing (process), construction, and transportation (freight and logistics) rounding out the case-study set.

Market Share: Asia/Pacific Fabless Shares, 2025: Top 10 Ranking and Vendor Insight

Galen Zeng — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC study examines the 2025 market shares of the leading vendors in the Asia/Pacific fabless market.

In 2025, the Asia/Pacific integrated circuit (IC) design (fabless) market continued to grow steadily driven by three forces: AI demand, a recovery in consumer electronics, and China's self-sufficiency policy. The market reached US$90.1 billion in 2025, up 13.9% year over year (YoY). AI infrastructure and intelligent edge applications have moved from an investment boom into volume production, becoming the core engine behind overall market growth.

"The Asia/Pacific fabless market showed strong momentum throughout 2025, driven by both the surge in AI compute demand and ongoing recovery in consumer electronics," says Galen Zeng, senior research manager, IDC. He adds, "China vendors, in particular, delivered better-than-expected growth, catalyzed by domestic substitution and AI demand, whereas Taiwan vendors continued to deepen their positions in AI applications and advanced process technology, reinforcing their global competitiveness. Looking ahead to 2026, against a backdrop of intensifying U.S.–China technology competition and continued tariff policy uncertainty, the Asia/Pacific IC design market remains resilient. IDC expects the market to reach US$102.7 billion in 2026, which will be a 14.0% YoY growth."

NATO's Quantum Technology Roadmap: Strategic Competition Does Not Wait for Technological Certainty

Heather West, PhD — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

NATO's Quantum Technology Roadmap moves quantum beyond research priorities by establishing a structured path for evaluating, testing, securing, and integrating quantum capabilities across the Alliance. IDC expects this approach to accelerate demand not only for quantum technologies, but also for the broader infrastructure and integration capabilities needed to translate quantum advances into operational value.

2Q26中国竞争力分析报告——成像与打印外设市场（历史+预测）2Q26 China Compete Imaging ─ HCP Market Summary (Historical + Forecast)

Donna Wang — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

IDC市场竞争报告对喷墨、A3&A4激光市场进行了详细分析，总结了打印外设数据收集的核心洞察。该报告包含高价值的营销洞见、市场核心趋势以及厂商市场份额分析。以下是报告涵盖的主要内容：

执行概要
市场综述
产品分析
竞争分析
细分市场分析
渠道分析
市场预测

本报告中引用的数据和观点来自IDC《全球打印外设市场季度跟踪报告》（2Q26）。

All Roads Lead to AI: What the NSSTS's Own Priority Map Actually Tells IT Vendors

Alan Webber — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This IDC Market Perspective examines the August 2026 National Security Science and Technology Strategy (NSSTS) through the lens of IT vendors. It traces what the strategy actually changes — acquisition mechanics, research security, foreign investment screening, export controls, and the updated Critical and Emerging Technologies (CET) list — and provides an original analysis of the Appendix B mission alignment matrix, ranking each CET area by mission breadth to show where the government's own technology priorities concentrate. It closes with guidance for IT vendors, the Defense Industrial Base, and allied governments navigating this environment over the next 12–24 months.

"The NSSTS Appendix B is a relevance map, not a resourcing map. It tells vendors where a technology matters to the government, not how much money follows it," said Alan Webber, program vice president, National Security, Defense, and Intelligence at IDC. "Vendors who read the matrix as a funding signal will misjudge their own pipeline."