To me this is going to be one of the bigger Chicken Little moments in the history of semiconductors. Mostly because we are now a click driven society and the media is plagued by so called influencers that live and die by clicks. In my 40+ years as a semiconductor professional I have witnessed many of these Chicken Little moments with … Read More
The Pan Am–Boeing playbook and what Musk’s Terafab order could mean for Intel Foundry
“We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips.” That’s Elon Musk, speaking to Reuters, stating a supply constraint as plainly as anyone has stated one. TSMC is sold out. Samsung is committed. The existing supply chain can’t expand fast… Read More
Everyone has been treating Intel as a turnaround story. What if it’s not a scheduled airline — but a charter, and Musk is the one filing the flight plan? Not just Tesla. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Oracle are all designing their own silicon now, and their AI infrastructure depends on it. And yet they remain dependent… Read More
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 spent his career yelling “real men have fabs!” Now Intel has fabs–and apparently tweets about … 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
