Topic
Export Controls
Google's AI Brain Drain, SpaceX's Huge Quarter, Airtable's 90% Collapse, US Data Fuels China AI
The episode centers on three big AI/infrastructure stories: Google’s AI leadership shakeup, SpaceX’s blockbuster quarter, and what Airtable’s sale says about SaaS under AI pressure. The panel also debates whether U.S. data-labeling firms are accelerating China’s AI catch-up.
Did China just beat Intel?
SemiAnalysis argues SMIC’s N+3 chip for Huawei is a real technical achievement: it reaches near-EUV-like density using DUV, but with much worse cost, complexity, yield, and efficiency. The episode’s bottom line is that China is not catching TSMC or Intel at the leading edge, but domestic chips may still be “good enough” for strategic workloads like phones, inference, and networking.
Ep. 019 - Inside the STEEL Lab: From Package to Transistor (Teardown Lab) | Afzal Ahmad, Andrew Wagner, Jordan Nanos
SemiAnalysis’s STEEL team explains how it tears down chips from package to transistor to infer process, architecture, and packaging details. The episode centers on SMIC’s N3 node and Huawei’s Kirin 9030, highlighting aggressive DUV scaling, SRAM shrink, NPU changes, and the growing challenge of analyzing backside power, gate-all-around, and advanced packaging.
(Preview) The Anthropic Saga Continues, Fox and the Future of Streaming, Q&A on ChatGPT, Agentic Shopping, Autonomous Driving
Ben Thompson and Andrew Sharp open with a World Cup hydration-break riff before diving into Anthropic’s export-control fight and what it says about AI security, trust, and government oversight. The rest of the preview ranges from Fox’s Roku deal and ChatGPT competition to agentic shopping, AI-generated vulnerability discovery, and whether autonomous driving can scale beyond today’s constraints.