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SemiAnalysis
Everything semiconductors and AI, covering the spectrum.
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Ep. 038 - Is GLM 5.3 a Mythos-Class Cyber Model From China? (InferenceX)
Kimbo ChenWenyao GaoJordan Nanos
GLM-5.3’s sparse attention eases bandwidth pressure, not KV-cache capacity needs, while cheaper serving could lift HBM and bandwidth demand.AMD’s MI355 reportedly matched B200 cost at 150 tokens per second per user within weeks, underscoring software-driven cost volatility.Post-training reportedly lifted agentic benchmarks by more than 10%, though GLM-5.3 is not Mythos-class and technical disclosure remains limited.
Ep. 037 - Who's Funding the $11 Trillion AI Buildout? (Capital Markets)
SemiAnalysis estimates $11.3 trillion in cumulative AI IT and data-center CapEx for 2024-29, implying roughly $7 trillion of debt by 2029 and $1 trillion of net funding this year.Hyperscaler and NVIDIA backstops, five-year offtakes, and frontier API gross margins near 90% could support financing, but lenders still face residual-value, churn, and execution risks.
Ep. 036 - $200 Buys $12,000 of Opus Tokens, We Bought Every Plan (Tokenomics)
Max KanJordan NanosAndrew Megalaa
Anthropic’s $200 subscription delivered roughly $12,000 of API-equivalent usage in testing, but workload mix—not headline token counts—determines its economics.At roughly 96% cached reads priced at 0.1x or less of fresh input, model ownership may support 40–70% subscription gross margins, while OpenAI’s 50% limit cut and migration to open models remain risks.
Ep. 035 - Tech DD’s, Performance Projections, Supply Chain, Investment Thesis (Consulting)
SemiAnalysis Consulting is turning bespoke AI-infrastructure diligence into scalable products, including a token-supply simulator linking chip deployment, workload allocation, throughput, and token pricing.NeoCloud underwriting centers on contractual survivability: 99.9% availability expectations, sub-90% performance, and mismatched 15–20-year leases versus five-year GPU contracts can threaten financing and trigger remedies, while capacity timelines determine whether clients build or lease.
Ep. 034 - The Fight for Fast Tokens, TPU v7, Vera Rubin, and Engrams (AI Supply Chain, InferenceX)
Jordan NanosCam QuiliciBryan ShanAlec Ibarra
Engrams co-design model architecture and memory hierarchy, retrieving 2-gram and 3-gram embeddings from DRAM or SSD.Hybrid Engram-MoE layers outperform either endpoint, while AgentX traces show 100,000 input tokens at P50 and cache-hit rates above 98%.DRAM offload matters for hundreds of agents at 40–60 tokens/s; TPU V7's early Pareto position still leaves software, utilization, pricing, and demand unresolved.
Ep. 033 - ClusterMAX 3.0 Is Here! Neoclouds Ranked (Neoclouds, GPUs)
Sam HarshePratt BhattJordan Nanos
ClusterMAX 3.0 reshuffles 77 providers: Nebius joins CoreWeave in Platinum, Google Cloud joins Oracle in Gold, while Azure, AWS, Crusoe, and Together fall.Endpoint X finds 75% versus 99% cache hit rates can double an identical bill, while NVIDIA’s backstop universe forecast above $2T by end-2031 leaves SLA discipline, security, and hosted RL’s unproven market as risks.
Ep. 033 - 300 Data Center Bans, 3 Projects Delayed: Moratoriums Explained (Datacenter, Energy)
Maya BarkinReyk KnühtsenJordan NanosJeremie Eliahou Ontiveros
Mapping 400+ local instruments against 3,500 projects finds 300+ moratoriums but only three projects actively affected: AWS, NorthPoint, and CoreSite.Roughly 80% of live restrictions have no capacity behind them, leaving the forecast unchanged and making behind-the-meter power more attractive; New York delays roughly 800MW by 6–10 months, while an off-grid-blocking Texas-scale ban is key risk.
Ep. 031 - EMERGENCY EPISODE: Are We Doomed? | Jordan Nanos, Doug O'Laughlin, Max Kan, Joey Brookhart
Jordan NanosDoug O'LaughlinMax KanJoey Brookhart
“Pacing” would slow Anthropic’s capability progress without halting training or compute purchases, potentially weakening its strongest internal model.Near-term scarcity and safety workloads keep compute demand elevated, while semiconductor signals increasingly depend on frontier-lab ARR and capacity premiums.Bank hacks, data leaks, or AI-assisted biological attacks could accelerate regulation.
Ep. 030 - Long Live the Short King: Why 4-hi HBM Wins (Memory)
Rubin Ultra shifted from the GTC-previewed 1TB of HBM4E to 192GB of 8-high HBM4, below Blackwell Ultra’s and vanilla Rubin’s 288GB, as HBM supply rations TSMC-secured logic.Four-high saturates the interface at far lower cost per bandwidth and can yield roughly twice as many cubes as eight-high, but model-size growth is the key risk while memory tightness is not expected to ease within this decade.
Ep. 029 - Modular Data Centers Cut Build Time to 12 Months (Datacenter)
Jordan NanosEric WenNigel ChiangNico Bontigui
Time to power, rather than cost, is driving modular adoption as compute deals reach $40M/MW and some Anthropic configurations exceed $100 million per megawatt.Factory parallelization cuts fit-out from up to nine months to three, shortening builds from 18–24 months to as little as 12; Level 5 commissioning can take 3–8 months, while module lead times reach 18 months.









