The Kansas City Chiefs were the Super Bowl favorites at this time last year (May 2025), holding consensus odds of roughly \(+550\) to \(+600\) to win the championship. The Rams look amazing, but a lot can happen. The people who say that the #49ers’ SB chances are completely dead simply because of today’s move, may be being slightly melodramatic.
This account is run by Benjamin Wood, editor of Salt Lake City Weekly
If you ever wondered why everything in that blog has this same low-t, getting revenge-on-my-dad-for-making-me-eat-my vegetables energy, now you know
Holy crap. This interview. Too much logic and common sense. Jeff Bezos talking too much sense about housing supply/demand policy to fix high rents, zero taxes for poor. Bezos for President! Competence Party!
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan sat down with CNBC’s Jim Cramer to talk about Apple; Intel 14A rivaling TSMC's top chip production technology; Shortages of CPUs and substrates; and the state of Intel's turnaround.
How to know when Intel signs Apple or other foundry customers:
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan: “Over time, the IP will be ready so we can serve some of these customers. I think the best indication, when you see I increase my capex, I’m putting money to buy equipment, that means I have real customers. That’s the discipline I have.”
Intel 14A manufacturing process and EMIB-T advanced packaging:
Intel CEO: “(A14) is 1.4nm, this is the most advanced. To be candid with you, in 2028 we will have risk production. 2029 will be volume production. It will be the same time as TSMC. So that is a major, major breakthrough, and I’m so excited.
And we already have multiple customers engaged with us, and we have 0.5 PDK available.”
Taking advantage of TSMC’s CoWoS shortage
Intel CEO: “Our technology is called EMIB-T, this is the next generation of advanced packaging. We really have the best technology and now we are making sure we can bring it into volume production with reliable yield so the customer can count on us.”
CEO: “You know, CoWoS…(TSMC) ran out of capacity, so in a way we’ve become in the unique position to support that and that’s something we are very excited (about).”
Shortages of CPUs and Substrates
CEO on the CPU shortage: “I’ll give you one example. I had one customer say Lip Bu, we gave you the forecast for this year, but we want to increase 3x, and I say I cannot do it overnight but give me a few quarters and I will catch up. So, I think this demand is not short term, it’s the next couple of years. It’s a great opportunity.”
CEO: “Right now, as I mentioned, CPU is in high demand. And that’s good for me. I cannot even ship enough to the customer. It used to be the CPU to GPU ratio for training was 1-to-8. And now, because of inference and agentic AI, and more agents you have to manage, and orchestration, and reinforced learning, CPU is actually better, so that becomes 1-to-4 and 1-to-1 and some people even talk about 4-to1, and so that’s a huge opportunity to me to drive the CPU....”
CEO on Substrates: “A couple of customers have prepaid for substrates, because the substrate supply chain is very tight – so I need to put up the money to secure this material…(and it shows) the commitment to me – so that’s very exciting.”
Intel’s Turnaround
CEO: “We used to have leadership in data center, and over the years we lost it…We made some big mistakes,” he said, adding he’s brought back some talent to refocus the product lines and that “Coral Rapids will have multi-threading, and will come out very strong.”
CEO: “When I took over, the 18A yield was not good, so I had to ask some of the ecosystem partners to help me look at the data, see how to improve. The best practice is to see 7% or 8% yield improvement per month, and now I’m seeing it.”
CEO: “The other part is supposed to be the yield performance, defect density, you know at the end of the year to see the target. Now I see that even before the end of the year – so that is very big encouragement for me and also that’s why Panther Lake can be shipped in volume now.
And now some customers knock on my door and say Lip Bu, now we hear you are making great progress, can you now open up to outside customers? So that is very exciting. It’s a lot of hard work, it’s a lot of teamwork, it’s a lot of talent I’ve brought on board.”
CEO: “In the past we made a lot of mistakes and now we correct the mistake and we’ve simplified the roadmap. By the way, from Day 1 I came on board as the CEO, I have all the engineers report to me so I have an understanding, hear from the customer, and know where are the mistakes.”
Cramer: “They didn’t report to the previous CEO?”
CEO: “No. And in a way, they had too many silos, too many people reporting…So I decided, the best thing is to really understand where the problem is, so I can focus on the engineering, how to redesign, simplify the product and then get the real killer products out.”
Cramer asks about China, Taiwan and the importance of US manufacturing:
CEO: “I was very glad for President Trump understanding the strategic importance for the United States to have (chip manufacturing supply chain) and their support is so valuable to me – it’s so critical for the country to have the technology, R&D development, manufacturing in the United States. That’s why I came back in, as a U.S. citizen – as a calling – to do that.”
CEO: “From time to time I update President Trump and also (Sec.) Howard Lutnick and they are big supporters of me and we are delighted to have their support.”
Going forward:
CEO: “I recruited some key talent…and now, by the end of June, I will have my team, what I consider my team, so that we can work on the next 5-years, 10-years, how to become a different company. I call it the New Intel, work at the speed of light, work as a team to progress forward.”
$INTC $TSM #Samsung $UMC $GFS #semiconductors
https://t.co/ljZJaUmxJS
SpaceX has officially scheduled Starship's first V3 test flight for May 19th! The launch window will open at 6:30 PM ET.
"The upcoming flight will debut the next generation Starship and Super Heavy vehicles, powered by the next evolution of the Raptor engine and launching from a newly designed pad at Starbase. The flight test’s primary goal will be to demonstrate each of these new pieces in the flight environment for the first time, with each element of the Starship architecture featuring significant redesigns to enable full and rapid reuse that incorporate learnings from years of development and test."
There are 100,000 births per year in Taiwan and TSM needs to hire 10,000 people per year in Taiwan, a number which will only grow.
Continued expansion in the United States is likely inevitable. Especially given immense willingness to pay a premium for American wafers.
People are misreading the SpaceX/Cursor deal as an M&A story. It’s actually a bet on what the real bottleneck in frontier coding models is.
xAI has struggled to close the gap with Claude Code and Codex. Cursor sits on the best corpus of developer traces in the world. The deal lets Cursor train Composer on Colossus while xAI runs the same recipe on Grok. Both sides find out, at the same time, whether Cursor's data is actually the difference.
The option structure reflects that uncertainty. If the training work ports over, SpaceX buys Cursor and owns the pipeline. If it doesn’t, they pay $10B for the experiment and walk. Either outcome, Grok ends up stronger than it would have been, and xAI gets an answer to a question it couldn’t answer internally.
The part worth holding onto: a pre-IPO company just priced a live experiment to figure out whether real developer traces are the scarce input in coding agents. $10B is what they’re paying to run it. $60B is what the answer is worth if it comes back yes.
Intel has made great strides. I was one of the only analysts that gave them a shot when the company had been written off for dead by most.
They’re definitively getting advanced packaging from big XPU players. I called this a long time ago. Lower risk, less time, very high need, easy to explain to TSMC and can tell USG they’re supporting Intel.
Next stop? Wafer agreements. This would definitively be a game changer for the company. And I do think it will happen unless the Intel process execution improvement train comes off the tracks. I’m guessing execution-based LOIs are already in place and customers are spending real dollars. If I had to guess, it would be Apple and NVIDIA. They both have the most resources and the highest need. Don’t assume it’s their leading edge products, either, that’s too risky to them. There’s a sharp learning curve using other wafer foundries and it’s steep.
$INTC $AAPL $NVDA
Almost everything you think you know about the history of technology and capitalism was warped by communist/luddite propaganda of the era. That's happening this time too.
🚨 Wedush's Dan Ives has written a new note on TERAFAB:
"Elon Musk announced that SpaceX and Tesla will build two advanced chip factories in Austin, Texas with the company focused on building a Terafab facility to keep up with necessary demand for chip technology powering TSLA’s AI strategy. One factory will be focused on powering Tesla’s cars and Optimus humanoid robots with the other being designed for AI data centers in space with Musk focused on generating 1 terrawatt of capacity annually (~2x current US production) as current suppliers, including Micron, TSMC, and Samsung, are unable to meet future demand for TSLA’s AI strategy. The Terafab project will focus on two chips, inference chips for Tesla vehicles and Optimus robots and D3 chips designed for orbital AI satellites with this project pursuing a 2-nanometer process technology, which has only seen the start of development by TSMC, with 80% of the Terafab’s output expected to be on computer output for space-based orbital AI satellites and the other 20% focused on ground-based applications. Musk also noted that SpaceX’s AI chips will have differentiating characteristics as those chips would need to withstand harsher operating environments with the ability to operate at higher temperatures to “minimize radiator mass” which represents a major constraint to chip functionality on Earth.
This Terafab project with both SpaceX and Tesla is expected to cost up to $25 billion to produce at TSLA’s Giga Texas, making it the largest semiconductor fab in human history, which focuses on chip design, lithography, fabrication, memory production, advanced packaging, and testing. The initial production target is expected to reach 100k wafer starts per month which would then scale to 1 million wafer starts per month, which would represent ~70% of TSMC’s global output, with the goal of producing 100 billion – 200 billion custom AI and memory chips per year to power TSLA FSD, Cybercab and Optimus manufacturing lines. While this expected increase in spend is not incorporated into TSLA's $20 billion capex guidance, Musk noted on the most recent earnings call that TSLA would have to build its own in-house Terafab including logic, memory and packaging domestically to protect against any geopolitical risks that may take place. With TSMC and Samsung not scaling its chip production enough to meet Musk’s goals, this facility will ramp over time to meet his companies’ demand for computing power that is actively outweighing current supply with current AI compute output at ~20 gigawatts per year with this representing ~2% of the companies' needs.
While the timeline for this project is uncertain, this will accelerate the company’s ambitious AI path which we believe will set the foundation for TSLA to become an AI powerhouse over the coming years with chip and memory supply expected to be the greatest constraint. We also believe this is the first step to ultimately what will be Tesla and SpaceX combining forces in a merger likely in 2027.
We maintain our OUTPERFORM rating and our $600 price target."
@pbeisel I am a huge admirer of Nvidia and Jensen btw. That market cap is well-deserved.
SpaceX AI and Tesla expect to continue ordering Nvidia chips at scale.
huge shoutout to @nvidia for lending engineers to help triage our security advisories 🛡️🦞
open source security hits different when GPU companies show up to help