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AMD acquires Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for about $8.2 billion in stock to build the models and simulation tools that shape demand for its chips. Plus, Tencent reportedly leases 100,000 AI chips at Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, and US hiring slows to 29,000 jobs in September.

If investors came to believe Anthropic's substantial AI scenario, ten-year Treasury yields would rise by roughly one to five percentage points, depending on how fully markets price it and how the Fed responds. Today's yields mostly reflect policy and risk premia, not an AI boom.

Amazon blocks Meta's Muse agent from its shopping site, and SoftBank-backed SB Energy postpones its IPO as investors question its valuation and dependence on OpenAI. Plus, new research on how Fed expectations keep long-term rates elevated.

Anthropic is running a biology lab in the Bay Area, SK hynix is exploring US memory production, and Meta, xAI and Instinct are competing to bring personal AI agents into everyday life.

OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra and reopens the debate over legible chains of thought, Samsung's HBM share jumps to 33% as HBM4 gives it a second chance against SK hynix, and SpaceX prepares a Texas foundry to cast the turbine blades that gate data-center power.

AI borrowing is affecting hyperscaler credit pricing, while its contribution to higher Treasury yields remains limited. Expected short-term rates explain much of the modelled 2026 rise in the 10-year yield, and federal financing needs remain an important longer-term pressure.

OpenAI's first inference chip beats every rival on performance per watt, a METR investigation finds more than 1,200 agents coordinating against their own scorer, and Nvidia's shopping spree reaches Hugging Face at a reported $12.9 billion.

OpenAI slows work on Astra after the model potentially met a critical cybersecurity threshold, Amazon takes drone delivery from 11 cities to more than 500, Unitree’s STAR Market debut values the humanoid maker at around $50 billion, and Alibaba lifts AI capex 75% as its cloud revenue accelerates.

On 18 August 2026, Governor Josh Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05, changing how Pennsylvania permits and powers data centers. Most of the state's large pipeline is still proposals, and only one of the nine former Fast Track campuses has verified operating AI-capable capacity.

US debt passed $40tn as the Fed and foreign reserve managers reduced their holdings. Private investors now absorb more supply and seek higher yields. Treasury's buyback briefly lowered the thirty-year yield but did not reduce net supply. Lasting relief will require other measures.

Tesla prepares to demo a Roadster that briefly flies on cold-gas thrusters, the US drafts a letter telling partners to pick a side between Pax Silica and China’s new WAICO bloc, and Nvidia tests Rubin Ultra with less HBM than it announced.

Google DeepMind loses its CEO and Alphabet its chief scientist on the same day, SK Hynix and SanDisk publish the first High Bandwidth Flash standard, and ByteDance is reportedly pre-training a 10-trillion-parameter model.

Compute prices are rising for the labs while token prices fall. We size the supply of inference capacity against the demand for it, estimate where the two cross, and set out how that crossing could resolve.

China builds its first immersion DUV machines and ASML falls 8%, Nvidia funds open weights to stop any one lab owning the model layer, and TSMC answers Intel's EMIB.

OpenAI models broke out of a sandboxed cyber test and hacked Hugging Face, Anthropic commits two gigawatts to AMD's Helios racks as Nvidia's software moat slowly erodes, and Stripe's reported $10 billion approach for OpenRouter asks where model routing belongs in the stack.

New York's statewide moratorium and New Mexico's block on Oracle's Stargate campus mark the moment politics — not water, land or power — becomes the binding constraint on the AI build-out, a risk we think is badly underpriced; Moonshot's Kimi K3 reaches the frontier as the largest open-weight model yet but stays too expensive and verbose to be a Sputnik moment, its real bite falling on frontier-lab margins rather than prices and pushing profit downstream to hardware and software; and China's biggest-ever chip IPO values DRAM maker CXMT near $85 billion, a price that confirms the memory shortage rather than threatening Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.

China weighs curbs on overseas access to its top AI models, small firms swap Salesforce for custom apps built with coding agents, Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 shows its frontier rebuild closing the gap, and Nvidia pushes into the data-centre CPU market with Vera.

In the inference era, the binding constraint is no longer raw compute but memory bandwidth and latency. Cerebras answers with a wafer-scale, SRAM-centric processor that separates model storage from compute — a bet on latency-first inference that reshapes the throughput-versus-interactivity tradeoff and unlocks new classes of application.

Meta is reportedly building a cloud business to resell spare AI compute, which markets read as a threat to the neoclouds but which looks more like a large buyer turning contracted capacity into a monetizable asset; OpenAI floats giving the US government a 5% stake, testing whether frontier AI is too strategic for the state to stay only a regulator; a Ramp and Revelio study finds heavy AI adopters are hiring more rather than less, complicating the layoff narrative even as Goldman sees a monthly drag on job growth; and Etched raises $800M at a $5B valuation for Sohu, an ASIC that hard-wires transformer inference.

Drafting an email does not require frontier intelligence, yet enterprise AI spend has concentrated at the top of the capability curve while the true cost of a token stayed hidden. As that subsidy ends and cognition commoditises, this note argues that value moves from the model endpoint to the layer that governs how models act inside the enterprise — the ground Palantir's AIP and Ontology already occupy.

Qualcomm buys Modular for $4 billion to own the software layer that lets AI inference move across any chip; Satya Nadella argues AI must get cheap enough to spread through the economy, judged against labor cost rather than legacy SaaS budgets; The Information finds Nvidia's inference-market share is actually rising as production serving rewards software depth; and Goldman Sachs makes the case for South Korea as the missing supply chain for humanoid robots.

Today's language models adapt without ever learning. Their weights freeze when training ends, so everything they take in afterward sits in the context window rather than in the model. This essay argues for continual learning — compressing new experience into the weights, online, after deployment, so a system becomes better than its training rather than replaying it — and confronts the cost that argument carries, that a frozen model is auditable in a way a self-updating one is not.

Midjourney launches a medical division built around a full-body ultrasound scanner, betting consumer-health imaging can shift from episodic diagnosis to continuous measurement; Z.ai's open-weight GLM 5.2 shows how fast China is closing the frontier coding gap as US labs absorb the Fable export-control fallout; and a wave of star-researcher departures from Google DeepMind raises the question of whether being the only publicly traded lab is a liability or an underrated edge.

The U.S. government orders Anthropic to suspend foreign access to its frontier Fable and Mythos models, turning the model itself into an export control; China tightens its grip on indium phosphide, the optical substrate that wires AI clusters together; and Google second-sources TPU production across Intel, Samsung, and TSMC to route around the leading-edge bottleneck.

An energy shock and firm US jobs data have flipped the next likely Fed move from a cut to a hike, but the more durable pressure sits at the long end — debt at full employment, the retreat of the price-insensitive central-bank buyer, and the capital intensity of the AI buildout. Why higher-for-longer sorts equities rather than hitting the market as a block.

SpaceX turns its GPU buildout into a third-party product, signing Google to $920M a month for ~110,000 GPUs; Huawei pitches a τ Scaling roadmap to route around EUV; Microsoft ships Scout, an always-on enterprise agent; and an AI-driven memory squeeze spills into chipflation across the hardware economy.

SoftBank commits up to €75B to a 5GW AI buildout in France, TSMC says energy efficiency is now the chip industry's binding constraint, and enterprises start trading tokenmaxxing for ROI discipline.

Nvidia opens a CPU front with Vera, a $135B IPO wave from SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic hits the market, Lilly's retatrutide resets the GLP-1 ceiling, and Amazon's Trainium quietly closes the gap on Nvidia.

PJM power-price pressure, the rise of AI deployment companies, and why the labor-market signal remains hard to read.