China’s Surveillance State
For most of the past two decades the Chinese government has been building the largest video surveillance network in the history of computing. The…
29 min read
Tag
AI
Optical Interconnects Break the AI Power Wall
The question of whether optical interconnects can break the AI power wall by 2028 became, in the AI Infra Summit 2026 panel discussions, the…
16 min read
The Chip to Grid Data Center
The phrase “chip-to-grid” emerged from the Open Compute Project 2026 summit as the organizing principle for the next generation of AI data-centre design. The…
16 min read
The 7.6 Trillion Dollar AI Infrastructure Buildout
In September 2026, the Goldman Sachs Global Institute and Global Investment Research teams published a research note that put forward a forecast whose sheer…
16 min read
The HBM4 Era and the Memory Wall
The phrase “memory wall” has, by late 2026, become one of the most-cited pieces of jargon in the AI infrastructure industry, just as the…
17 min read
The Power Wall in the AI Buildout
The phrase “power wall” has, by late 2026, become one of the most-used terms in the AI infrastructure industry. The phrase was originally a…
19 min read
The Inference First Architecture Shift
The most consequential single architectural insight of the late-2020s AI industry is one that is now obvious in retrospect but that took several years…
18 min read
OpenAI Jalapeno and the Vertical Integration Move
In June 2026, OpenAI confirmed that it had taped out its first custom AI processor, a Broadcom-co-designed inference chip the company had given the…
17 min read
The Hyperscaler Custom Silicon Wave
In October 2026, a short, sharply argued piece on Axios carried the headline that summarized a strategic shift the AI infrastructure industry had been…
19 min read
Microsoft Maia 300 and the Azure Inference Bet
On Monday, October 12, 2026, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President for Cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie, posted a blog on the Microsoft corporate site that…
18 min read
How the M Plan Has Powered My Three Journals
I run three WordPress journals — one on Chinese history, one on Jewish textual scholarship, one on science and technology — and I have…
15 min read
Why the MiniMax M Plan Is the Best Value in AI
MiniMax launched M Plan on 30 September 2026, replacing the older Token Plan with three tiers — Go at $22, Explore at $55, Build…
19 min read
The Terafab Project
On the afternoon of 21 March 2026, in a press release issued from the Giga Texas site north of Austin, Elon Musk formally announced…
19 min read
The GPU Computing Story
A modern GPU contains more than a hundred billion transistors, performs more than a hundred trillion floating-point operations per second, and is now the…
15 min read
Small Reactors, Big Promises
In October 2024, the four largest cloud providers — Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta — began signing the largest wave of nuclear power contracts…
15 min read