Latest issue
The Circular Economy of AI Chips: When Your Customer Needs You to Finance Their Purchase
8/1/2026
A 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit Kumamoto Prefecture on July 28. TSMC evacuated workers, ran structural inspections, and resumed operations the same day. The construction site was unaffected. That's the kind of operational resilience that doesn't make PowerPoint slides — it just ha…
Recent posts
Three weeks ago, I wrote about how $265 billion in pledges don't build fabs — construction schedules do. TSMC's CFO just handed us the clearest illustration of that gap yet. After…
The number landed with the force of a policy victory: TSMC will invest $265 billion in the United States, building 12 advanced semiconductor and packaging facilities in Arizona. Th…
The numbers coming out of the semiconductor industry this week are genuinely staggering. Micron committed $250 billion in U.S. investment through 2035, up from $200 billion announc…
The Biden-era export control regime was built on a simple theory: cut off Chinese chipmakers from American customers, and those chipmakers wither. Apple is now testing that theory…
The CHIPS Act was built around a single anxiety: the United States makes almost none of its own leading-edge chips. Pour enough money into Arizona and Texas, the theory went, and t…
For years, the semiconductor lobbying apparatus treated export controls like a slow-moving flood: something to manage, redirect, and quietly drain. So when six companies signed a l…
A customs seizure in Keelung changed the calculus. Earlier this month, Taiwanese authorities found roughly 50 AI servers loaded with high-end Nvidia chips, allegedly routed through…
Two stories broke this week that, on the surface, look unrelated. One is about export controls. The other is about memory chips. Together, they describe the same underlying problem…
No sources were available for this week's issue. Per editorial policy, that means writing shorter and saying less rather than dressing up inference as fact. What follows is analysi…
The European Union sanctioned a Chinese semiconductor supplier. Then, weeks later, moved to unsanction it. The timeline here is not a typo. Bloomberg reported that the European Com…
Seven months from now, a construction deadline expires that no one in the chip industry wants to talk about publicly — because the moment they do, they have to explain why they hav…
The Trump administration recently approved Nvidia's H200 GPU for export to China — a chip one tier below the restricted H100 — while simultaneously watching Beijing instruct state-…
The CHIPS Act was always a bet. The federal government would front billions in grants and equity to domestic chipmakers, and in return, those companies would deliver the manufactur…
TSMC spent years telling investors that High-NA EUV was the inevitable next step in chipmaking. Then, on April 22nd, the company quietly revised that story: it can produce its next…
The Bureau of Industry and Security just handed Applied Materials a $252 million penalty for illegally routing semiconductor manufacturing equipment through South Korea to a Chines…
The standard excuse for any delayed fab project is complexity: American labor rules, local permitting, supply chain friction, the sheer difficulty of transplanting semiconductor ma…
The most telling detail in this week's semiconductor news isn't a yield number or a funding announcement. It's a booking pattern: TSMC's Arizona Fab 4, which won't produce chips un…
The semiconductor industry runs on one reliable constant: things take longer than promised. Fabs slip. Yields disappoint. Governments announce funding that arrives years late, if a…
The most telling data point in semiconductor industrial policy right now isn't a milestone hit. It's a divergence: one company is accelerating, one is stalling, and the third is si…
