← Today's edition 47 in AI & Compute
News Aug 4 PLATFORM

SpaceX Doubles Revenue. Markets Price Orbital AI.

SpaceX's first post-IPO quarter delivered $7.8 billion in revenue, up 92%, powered by Starlink and wholesale AI compute leases. The stock still sank on AI capex that outran the rent. Markets are no longer pricing rockets; they are pricing whether Nvidia-backed orbital satellites can convert today's power bottleneck into SpaceX-owned inventory.

paceX's first public print arrived almost exactly as the IPO choreography promised — and almost exactly as investors now refuse to celebrate. Revenue climbed to $7.8 billion in the second quarter, up 92% from a year earlier. Connectivity, still mostly Starlink, contributed $4.29 billion. The AI segment nearly tripled year over year to $2.56 billion after Anthropic and Google locked wholesale capacity at the Memphis-area Colossus campuses. The net loss narrowed to $541 million. After hours, the stock still slid as much as 8%. The market is not scoring this print as aerospace. It is scoring it as an infrastructure claim. Ground Rent Is Real. Capex Is the Argument.

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01

SpaceX Is the Data-Center Bottleneck Markets Miss
02

Cloud Race Hits CoWoS Packaging Ceiling
03

AI Capex Hits ASML — and the CBDC Blind Spot
04

AI's Cash Burn Is a Packaging Problem, Not a Spending One
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Jul 24 PLATFORM

The Token Ledger: Metering Work Like Electricity

For two centuries enterprise cost rested on the labor hour — a measure of presence, not output. Generative AI introduces the token: metered at the point of consumption, auditable per task. Finance can finally see marginal cost of cognitive work the way utilities meter electricity, not headcount.
Jul 20 CAPITAL

We Are All Korean Investors Now

South Korea's AI-heavy equity market now prices overnight risk for Wall Street's chip complex. Single-stock leverage on Samsung and SK hynix made the KOSPI a global barometer just as regulators slam the brakes, Moonshot prepares open weights for Kimi K3, and SoftBank's OpenAI exposure gets marked to market.
Jul 5 PLATFORM

The SaaS Recoil

Viral coding agents have turned software delivery from months into weeks and weeks into days. Major firms now sell AI solutions teams that help every other company board the same express — and the logical endpoint is software that no longer arrives as SaaS, but as an in-house capability that no longer needs the SaaS industry's engineers.
News Jul 1 STATE

The GB300 Diversion

Keelung prosecutors detained three executives and raided twelve sites in Taiwan's first criminal AI chip-smuggling case — fifty GB300 servers routed through Japan toward China. The probe widens as U.S. charges against Super Micro co-founder Wally Liaw over $2.5 billion in diverted hardware move toward trial.
News Jul 1 PLATFORM

The Honam Gamble

On June 30 in Gwangju, Samsung and SK Hynix pledged 800 trillion won to build four memory fabs in South Korea's Honam region — the country's first southwest chip hub — as President Lee Jae Myung's government targets doubling national DRAM capacity within five years. The bet tests whether AI-driven HBM demand overrides memory's brutal boom-bust cycle.
Jun 30 PLATFORM

Jalapeño and the Fight for Inference Sovereignty

Nvidia built its moat on training; the margin war has moved to inference. OpenAI's Jalapeño processor — co-architected with Broadcom and taped out in nine months — is a vertical-integration play with geopolitical teeth. If the schedule slips, latency economics break. If the IP exports, sovereignty fractures. And the BIS warning on circular AI finance collides with physical silicon nobody has yet powered.

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12 additional stories

  • Dec 31 PLATFORM

    NVIDIA’s Groq Licensing: The Acqui-Hire That Rewires Enterprise AI Budgets

    NVIDIA’s licensing agreement with Groq recasts a personnel‑heavy acquisition as a capacity and roadmap play: it buys immediate inference scale, embeds talent and code paths, and forces enterprises and chip cycles to reprice AI‑inference as a delivered service rather than a raw component.

  • Dec 31 CAPITAL

    CME Raises Margins on Silver and Gold — Dealers Reprice Risk, Traders Shrink Leverage

    The CME’s second successive margin increase on silver and gold futures this month has shrunk permitted leverage, lowered speculative volume and pushed dealer desks to reprice risk. Traders are stripping back positions; liquidity is fragmenting across venues; and hedging costs are rising for miners and jewelers.

  • Dec 30 PLATFORM

    Intuitive Machines-Lanteris Deal Accelerates Path to Prime Space Contracts

    Intuitive Machines' strategic purchase of Lanteris' propulsion and avionics business sharpens its offer for NASA and commercial lunar work: faster integration, cleaner margins and a clearer path to prime contractor status that could re-price future mission bids.

  • Dec 30 PLATFORM

    Meta’s Manus Deal Locks In Agent Tech—and a Talent Arms Race

    Meta's purchase of Manus—an AI agent studio—bundles code, workflows, and people into a package that accelerates agent capabilities across social products. The deal shifts the binding constraint from model scale to platform integration and talent, creating both a moat and a flashpoint for rivals and regulators.

  • Dec 30 CAPITAL

    SoftBank’s $3B Bet on Data Centers: Tilting the World Toward AI Infrastructure

    SoftBank's $3 billion cash acquisition of DigitalBridge reframes the firm's AI wager: not on models or chips alone, but on the physical racks, power plants and real‑estate contracts that will carry exabyte‑scale workloads. The deal crystallizes a capital-first strategy to privatize the backbone of generative AI.

  • Dec 30 CAPITAL

    States Pivot to Nuclear: SMRs Move from Hype to Funded Baseload

    Across the United States, state governments are treating nuclear — and especially small modular reactors (SMRs) — as the few dispatchable, carbon-free resources that can anchor 24/7 decarbonization. Policy incentives, regulated utility planning, and nascent project finance are nudging SMRs from rhetorical promise into funded pipeline, reshaping capital allocation and grid planning.

  • Dec 30 PLATFORM

    Datadog’s Post‑Peak Optimism Reinforces the AI‑Native Workload Thesis

    Datadog reported results that suggest peak-growth worries are overblown: revenue momentum slowed, but management’s confidence about AI‑native workloads and higher‑margin observability services points to a reallocation of enterprise spend rather than a demand collapse.

  • News Dec 30 STATE

    Velo3D lifts price targets on reshoring tailwinds and defense demand

    Velo3D has raised its price target on the back of reshoring incentives and accelerating defense programs, suggesting a longer runway for the company as aerospace and space end markets glow. The upgrade reframes Velo3D not merely as a supplier of hardware, but as a strategic enabler of national resilience, domestic supply chains, and high-precision production for mission-critical programs.

  • News Dec 29 CAPITAL

    The AI Subsidy Hidden in Your Electric Bill

    A stark economics problem is emerging in consumer AI: 1.8 billion people use these tools, but only 3% pay for them. Meanwhile, the data centers powering this experiment are driving residential electricity bills up by double digits in states hosting AI infrastructure. The gap between usage and monetization suggests consumers may be subsidizing Big Tech's most speculative bet yet.

  • News Dec 16 PLATFORM

    AI in Space? The Satellite That Ran an H100 Is Just the Beginning

    A commercial satellite just demonstrated GPU-accelerated AI in orbit. The implications extend far beyond space exploration—they redefine where intelligence processing happens.

  • Dec 9 PLATFORM

    The Automated Mathematician: FunSearch and Beyond

    Large language models have broken through the barrier between computation and creativity, discovering new theorems and algorithms that expand human mathematical knowledge. From FunSearch to AlphaEvolve, AI systems are now partners in mathematical exploration.

  • Dec 8 CAPITAL

    The Most Expensive Mistake in Human History

    The tech industry's AGI obsession represents a catastrophic misallocation of resources, chasing artificial minds while wasting billions of real ones. An examination of why the most advanced intelligence we know isn't coming from data centers—it's already here.

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