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Silicon & Chips

The manufacturing chokepoints behind AI compute — advanced packaging, high-bandwidth memory, and the export controls that decide who can buy which part.

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Silicon & Chips2026-09-09

Apple's A20 Pro Is the First 2nm Phone Chip. Its On-Device AI Claim Is Missing the Only Number That Settles It.

Apple shipped the first high-volume 2nm smartphone SoC on September 9, with a Dual 16-core Neural Engine, 50% more memory bandwidth, and packaging that moves memory out of the chip's thermal path. Here is how the silicon, the flash-resident AFM 3 models, the developer frameworks, and Private Cloud Compute fit together — and why none of Apple's figures describes energy per token, the number that decides whether on-device inference is actually cheaper than a data center round trip.

Analysis Brief →
Silicon & Chips2026-08-16

TSMC's Earnings Call Reveals the Real AI Chip Bottleneck: Not the Fab, the Packaging

A primary-source read of TSMC's Q2 2026 earnings call: the CEO's own words say packaging capacity, not wafer fabrication, is now the constraint on AI chip supply — with a $60-64B capex raise to prove it.

Analysis Brief →
Silicon & Chips2026-07-30

The Memory Supercycle: How HBM Ate the DRAM Market and Made Your Laptop More Expensive

Samsung and SK Hynix both warned in their 2026 earnings that memory shortages will likely persist through at least 2027. Goldman Sachs calls it the worst DRAM supply-demand gap in 15 years — and the same shortage is why Nvidia is cutting RTX 50-series production by up to 40%.

Analysis Brief →
Silicon & Chips2026-07-30

China's Open-Weight AI Labs Are Winning the Model Race. Memory Is Still Winning the War.

DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Qwen, and MiniMax now fill eight of OpenRouter's top 10 slots. But Huawei's own chip supply tells a different story: its TSMC die stockpile is exhausted, and domestic HBM production caps Ascend output at roughly 250,000-300,000 accelerators a year.

Analysis Brief →
Silicon & Chips2026-07-24

India's $13 Billion Chip Bet: Inside the Semicon 2.0 Package

India's Cabinet approved a ₹1.27 lakh crore chip package on July 15, 2026, extending its semiconductor mission to twelve years — with Micron's Sanand plant already running and the Tata-PSMC Dholera fab targeting first silicon by late 2026.

Analysis Brief →
Silicon & Chips2026-07-20

Sovereign Compute, Splintered Silicon: How the Global AI Hardware Stack Fractured in 2026

The Biden AI Diffusion Rule was rescinded in two days. TSMC's foundry share rose anyway, to ~70%. A sourced look at how AI chip policy actually moved in 2025-2026.

Analysis Brief →
Silicon & Chips2026-07-20

The Inference Reckoning: Custom Silicon, Sovereign Compute, and the End of Public-Cloud AI Economics

Google's Ironwood, AWS's Trainium3, and up to 1M TPUs for Anthropic — custom AI silicon is real and shipping. Nvidia still owns the merchant layer, sourced and ranged.

Analysis Brief →