Scott Bessent says the AI industry has done a horrendous job explaining data centers to the American people. He's right. But the failure is bigger than bad PR. There is something inherently funny about organizing a protest against data centers from an iPhone. You pull out the phone, connect to the internet, start the WhatsApp group, build the Facebook page, design the signs in Canva, ask ChatGPT to make the slogans better, schedule the meeting in Google Calendar, start a GoFu

I saw a post about Etched today and my first reaction was basically: finally. I've been waiting two years for this chip. And yes, I know how that sounds. But here's the thing. Back in June 2024, Etched came out of stealth, and the whole thing sounded kind of insane. Their pitch was basically: GPUs are great, but if AI inference is really going to become what we think it is, why are we still using a general-purpose architecture for it? Why not build the damn chip specifically

There's a growing class of AI commentary that sounds very sophisticated. The hyperscalers are overspending. The financing is getting circular. OpenAI sits in the middle of a giant web of capital commitments. Data centers are expensive. Power is constrained. Valuations are stretched. Therefore: AI bubble. I think that conclusion is increasingly coming from people who understand pieces of the technology extremely well while still not understanding what the technology is actuall

An 8-gigawatt OpenAI compute deployment in Ohio looks like a data-center story. It's actually a story about how AI infrastructure is becoming bankable — and what happens when credit, not capital, becomes the bottleneck.

We spent decades asking how much smaller a transistor could get. IBM just changed the question: how high can we build? IBM's NanoStack technology goes vertical, and the semiconductor story becomes one story.

Traders on Polymarket are pricing a path to a $1.75 trillion Anthropic valuation. Maybe the real question isn't how an AI company gets there — it's that we've just discovered what a mind costs to manufacture.

The breakthrough may not be a better reactor. It may be discovering that reactors can be treated like products. Valar's Ward 250 went critical in Utah. Now the question is whether nuclear is entering its SpaceX moment.

The grid became the constraint. Wall Street built the teams. NVIDIA started financing the mine. Now the world's largest capital providers are building the rails. A receipt check on the AI infrastructure stack.

Berkshire Hathaway's first Alphabet position caught my attention for a reason that had very little to do with Google stock. The second move made the original argument considerably harder to ignore. Berkshire Hathaway just did something it hadn't done in a while. After 14 consecutive quarters as a net seller of equities, Berkshire went back into the market in size. It bought roughly $20 billion more stock than it sold during the second quarter. And sitting right in the middle

Nvidia is starting to finance the AI economy that buys Nvidia. That doesn't mean the boom is fake. It does mean somebody outside the circle eventually has to pay. There's an old song called "Sixteen Tons" about coal miners trapped in the economics of the company town. You load sixteen tons. You get another day older. You get deeper in debt. And, famously: you owe your soul to the company store. Well, welcome to AI Economics 101. Except now you owe your GPUs to the company sto

This is getting ridiculous. Yesterday I wrote about what happens when AI makes the search space of physical reality economically explorable. The basic argument: almost every major engineering bottleneck eventually becomes a materials-science problem, and AI combined with simulation and automated laboratories is starting to let us search for new materials instead of waiting decades for someone to stumble across them. Today I watched a video about the Salton Sea. There may be a

There's a toxic lake in the California desert that smells like rotten eggs, kills fish by the million, and gives children asthma at triple the national average. For decades, it was the kind of place you'd write off as an environmental catastrophe and move on. Now it might be the most valuable piece of land in America. The Salton Sea sits on top of one of the largest lithium deposits ever found in North America — enough for 375 million EV batteries, worth over half a trillion

The U.S. Air Force just bought a nuclear reactor. That sentence probably needs some context. The Air Force didn't buy a nuclear reactor the way you buy a refrigerator. They awarded a contract — an SBIR Phase I through AFWERX, their innovation arm — to a company called NANO Nuclear Energy (NASDAQ: NNE) to advance a microreactor called KRONOS MMR for base power applications. If you don't follow defense procurement or advanced nuclear, that probably sounds like a routine governm

Something Happened This Week. I'm Not Sure What to Call It. I have been in and around security and technology long enough to be suspicious of hype. The word "singularity" gets thrown around like a party favor by people who want to feel like they are living inside a historic moment. Most of the time, the moment is smaller than they think. This week is different. I am not going to tell you the singularity has arrived in the Kurzweil sense. That is a specific technical claim abo

I'm writing this by talking... Hands crossed. Sitting back. Just saying words out loud into a console that's going to turn them into an article, generate a cover image, produce audio, post it to my site, push it to LinkedIn. The whole thing. I'm not touching a keyboard. Last week I wrote a Mac app in twenty minutes. It connects over Bluetooth to my Ember mug and shows me the temperature in my menu bar. Not my mug. I didn't build the mug. Didn't invent the Bluetooth stack. I j

Everyone has been staring at the benchmark leaderboards. Meanwhile, the real fight moved somewhere else entirely. Apple just filed a 41-page lawsuit against OpenAI. Not over AI. Over manufacturing. The specific targets are Tang Tan — OpenAI's hardware chief, formerly Apple's VP of product design — and a former Apple engineer named Chang Lu. Apple's allegation is a coordinated extraction campaign: employees being actively pushed to download confidential files on their way out

In March, Anthropic quietly shipped tracking code inside Claude Code that checked whether a user's machine was set to a Chinese time zone and whether it was talking to domains linked to certain Chinese AI companies. It sat there undisclosed until a developer found it, Alibaba banned Claude Code over it, and Anthropic pulled the code last week, calling it an "experiment" it would replace with "better defenses." Set aside for a second whether the tracking itself was the right c

A video's been making the rounds this week breaking down a trio of new SpaceX-adjacent trademarks — Starmind, Stargaze, Starfall — and connecting them to a real FCC filing: SpaceX asking permission to launch up to one million satellites as an orbital data center constellation. The video's framing is clean and mostly right: Starlink becomes the communications layer, the new constellation becomes the compute layer, laser links between satellites become the internal data fabric.

There was no press release. No X post. No earnings call mention. No product launch event with dramatic lighting and a carefully rehearsed keynote. An FTC early termination notice — the kind of bureaucratic filing that almost nobody reads — quietly confirmed that Elon Musk purchased the assets of Jacksonville-based APR Energy sometime before May 14, 2026. The only reason we know at all is because Duos Technologies, which held a 5% stake, was required to disclose it in an SEC f

The market will naturally treat the White House's latest quantum initiative as a technology story. That's understandable. Quantum computing, post-quantum cryptography, quantum sensing, and secure quantum networks sound like they belong in the world of software, semiconductors, cybersecurity firms, national laboratories, and defense contractors. And they do. But that's only the visible layer. The more important question for investors is this: What sits underneath it? Every maj