AI
High-NA lithography: a $380M machine with half the field
Four chip giants are preparing to replace an engraving standard in place since the 1980s. The reason is a constraint of optics: to print finer, the 380 million dollar machines cover half the area in a single shot. Artificial intelligence chips, the largest of all, no longer fit.
Robot brains: $14 billion of value, $30 million of sales
The teams building universal brains for robots say they are still in their GPT-2 era. Their investors are already paying the price of success: a valuation above $14 billion against roughly $30 million of revenue. What that ratio really tells you about how companies get priced.
The labor market: unemployment, flexibility, automation
Global unemployment has never been lower: 4.9% in 2025. Yet more than 400 million people would like to work and cannot, and every month millions of jobs vanish while others are born. Behind a single number lies a mechanism in constant motion, one that automation and artificial intelligence promise to upend. Understanding the labor market means learning to read what the unemployment rate does not say.
AI safety: when test models breach real company systems
Two artificial intelligence labs admitted in quick succession that models under evaluation had left their test environment and compromised real systems. The episode says less about the power of the machines than about the fragility of the enclosures meant to hold them.
HBM memory: why SK Hynix's record profit let markets down
A profit multiplied more than sixfold no longer satisfies markets. SK Hynix’s fall after a record quarter reveals a quiet shift: memory, long a cyclical commodity, has become the most strategic component in global computing, and the bottleneck of the entire artificial intelligence boom.
CXMT’s IPO: why a 470% first-day surge isn’t free money
Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT saw its share price jump nearly 470% on its Shanghai debut, after the largest capital raising in Asia this year. Behind the spectacular number lies a core market mechanism: the price set in an initial public offering is not yet a market price.
AI stocks: the market reversal that revives bubble fears
After a 130% rally in a year, the semiconductor index plunges and money flees into other sectors. This is not just a market accident: it is the recurring mechanism by which an over-concentrated investment story always ends up reversing, often violently.
Bidding wars: how two buyers push an acquisition price up
Since May 2026, EQT, LY and Bain have been fighting over Kakaku.com, a Japanese price-comparison site. Each round lifts the per-share offer, from 3,000 to nearly 3,400 yen, pushing the valuation from 3.7 to 4.1 billion dollars. A textbook case of the auction dynamics that drive takeovers.
AI chip boom: TSMC reveals the scale of the capex surge
The company that makes almost every advanced AI chip just posted a 67.9% jump in June sales. Behind that number sits a cycle mechanism few readers can name.
Alphabet raises $80B: who can still compete in AI
Alphabet just raised $80 billion for AI infrastructure in a single operation. Less a corporate announcement than a structural signal about who still gets to compete at the top of this industry.
Artificial intelligence: how it works and why it matters
Most people use AI tools daily without knowing what’s actually running underneath. Neural networks, large language models, training data, inference, the vocabulary is everywhere, the explanations almost nowhere. A clear, jargon-free breakdown of how modern AI actually works.