The Insider Brief

The AI chip industry in five minutes a week. Free, written by an engineer, no hype.

What you get each week

The documentaryThe week's new video, with links to the filings and papers behind it.

Three storiesThe three chip industry developments that mattered, and what they mean in plain English.

One chartA single chart that explains a market, a supply chain or a technology shift.

Signal to watchOne thing coming up that's likely to move the industry.

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THE INSIDER BRIEF · SAMPLE ISSUE5 MIN READ

This week's documentary

A German lab built a chip that computes with light. What an all-optical processor is, why it's claimed to be far more efficient than a GPU, and the manufacturing problems standing between it and a data center.

Story 1 · Memory

High Bandwidth Flash moves from slides to samples. Why capacity, not speed, is the next memory bottleneck for AI inference.

Story 2 · China

Another domestic lithography milestone. What it does and doesn't change about China's access to leading-edge nodes.

Story 3 · Packaging

Advanced packaging capacity is still the quiet limit on how many AI accelerators ship this year.

Chart of the week

Where an AI accelerator's cost goes: compute die, HBM, packaging and test.

Sample shown for illustration. Actual issues follow the week's news.