Apple’s new “Spaceship” campus exceeds its initial budget by $2 billion

Apple’s new campus, which is being built, was estimated to cost around $3 billion to the Cupertino giant. However spending is obviously not going according to plan as the budget is said to have risen from $3 billion to $5 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg Businessweek.

This means Apple Campus 2 will be more expensive than the under construction World Trade Center complex. The Cupertino’s project was expected to be completed by 2015, but it’s apparently running behind schedule and it’s not said to open doors not earlier than 2016. The additional time would give the architects and the partners to cut the unnecessary cost, preventing the construction cost from rising even further.

Apple’s Spaceship campus was announced way back in 2011 by the late Steve Jobs who wanted the new headquarter to be the best office building in the world. The exteriors of the campus is said to be made up of “six square kilometres of glass”.

The Apple Campus 2 will be a “net-zero energy” complex and is being built using the advanced skylights and an airflow design, which helps to keep the building cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Furthermore, the campus will have 700,000 square feet of solar panels, which will generate 8 megawatts of power. However, the power generated from the panels will not be sufficient to power the whole complex so Apple is said to be working on deals with solar and wind generated power suppliers.

Qualcomm fastest growing semiconductor company, Intel still on top says Gartner

Qualcomm, designers of the highly popular Snapdragon series of chipsets plus a wide variety of wireless tech, is the fastest-growing semiconductor company according to Gartner. The two companies at the top, Intel and Samsung, were both affected by stagnation in the market in 2012.

Intel’s revenue slipped 3.1% year over year, but the company retained its leadership position for the 21st year in a row. Market share dropped a hair to 16.4% (down from 16.5%).

Samsung’s DRAM and NAND markets took a hit, but other segments picked up and the South Korean company managed a 3.1% year over year growth.

Qualcomm jumped into third position, up from 6th, with a massive 31.8% growth in revenue. That’s 18.2% better than analysts’ expectations. The company displaced Toshiba, who ranked fifth with a revenue decline of 9.8%.

Rank 2011	Rank 2012	Vendor	2011 Revenue	2012 Revenue	2011-2012 Growth (%)	2012 Market Share (%)
1	1	Intel	50,669	49,089	-3.1	16.4
2	2	Samsung Electronics	27,764	28,622	3.1	9.5
6	3	Qualcomm	9,998	13,177	31.8	4.4
4	4	Texas Instruments	11,754	11,111	-5.5	3.7
3	5	Toshiba	11,769	10,610	-9.8	3.5
5	6	Renesas Electronics	10,650	9,152	-14.1	3.1
8	7	SK Hynix	9,388	8,965	-4.5	3.0
7	8	STMicroelectronics	9,635	8,415	-12.7	2.8
10	9	Broadcom	7,160	7,846	9.6	2.6
9	10	Micron Technology	7,643	6,917	-9.5	2.3
		Others	151,343	146,008	-3.5	48.7
		Total Market	307,773	299,912	-2.6	100.0

Other than Qualcomm, only NXP managed to beat analysts’ expectations by over 10%. There are several companies that performed worse than expectations by over 10% too: Freescale, STMicroelectronics and AMD.

Overall, Gartner gauged that the semiconductor industry declined 2.6% in total revenues in 2012 compared to 2011.