Intel, Musk, and the Tweet That Launched a 1000 Ships on a Becalmed Sea
Why do professional executives running major corporations frame a major moment in their company’s history with a tweet? Jerry Sanders, who passed away just last December, spent his career yelling “real men have fabs!” Now Intel has fabs–and… Read More
Semiconductor Intelligence estimates total semiconductor industry capital spending (CapEx) was $166 billion in 2025, up 7% from 2024. We estimate 2026 CapEx will be $200 billion, up 20% from 2025. TSMC was the largest spender in 2024 with $40.9 billion in CapEx, 25% of the total. TSMC projects 2026 CapEx will be between $52 billion… Read More
At the TERAFAB launch event in Austin on March 21, Elon Musk made a prediction that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago—and may still: roughly 80 percent of AI compute will eventually move off-planet.
The argument is straightforward once you accept his premises. Earth-based data centers face three hard constraints—land,… Read More
Intel has posted three consecutive years of falling revenue and an $18.76 billion loss in 2024 alone—and the U.S. government has handed it tens of billions of dollars to fix the problem. The government money isn’t fixing the real issue, which isn’t technical. It’s cultural. Intel got slow, political, and risk-averse—the… Read More
Lip-Bu Tan made it very clear on his most recent call that Intel will not continue to invest in leading edge semiconductor manufacturing solo. Lip-Bu is intimately familiar with TSMC and that is the collaborative business model he envisions for Intel Foundry. I support this 100%. Intel and Samsung have tried to compete head-to-head… Read More
– Musk chip lifeline to Samsung comes with interesting strings attached
– Musk chose Samsung over Intel-What does that say about Intel?
– Musk will hold sway over Samsung much as Apple/NVDA over TSMC
– Will Musk do a “DOGE” on chip tool makers? How much influence?
We are in the semiconductor market phase where everybody disagrees on what is going on. The market is up; the market is down. Mobile phones are up…. oh no, now they are down. The PC market is up—oh no, we need to wait until we can get an AI PC. The inflation is high—the consumer is not buying.
For us in the industry, the 13-week financial … Read More
“I think we’ll be better than human by the end of the year.” – Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla
Parsing the impact of the latest Tesla earnings call featuring CEO Elon Musk has become an eerie out-of-body experience. The comments of the CEO are simultaneously assessed in real time and in retrospect as they are being spoken. It is automotive… Read More
When it comes to competing with Elon Musk’s Tesla the automotive industry is, in many ways, its own worst enemy. For more than two decades the auto industry – in the U.S. and E.U. – has struggled to bring vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology to market – first as dedicated short range communications… Read More
Some things just really rile me up. Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress. Bernie Madoff explaining his investment strategy. Elon Musk inveighing against restrictions on free speech. But there is a new candidate for boiling my blood – word of a potential merger of vehicle data aggregators Wejo and Otonomo.
These two… Read More
