Silicon & Hardware · Week of November 10, 2026
AI's $800B capex meets political backlash and a paralysed memory supply chain
- Midterm Backlash Meets the $800B Capex BillThursday's session erased roughly $2.3 trillion in market value — the worst single day on record — and not one data-center permit had yet been denied.
- HBM's Expansion Starves DDR5 and GDDR6 as Memory Capacity Locks UpThe solder balls on a used LPDDR4X module are melted until the chip lifts free of a discarded phone. Then the same chip is re-soldered onto the board of a new budget handset. That is not a repair-shop curiosity anymore. …
- Four-Way Sell-Out Across GPU, HBM, SSD and MLCC UpstreamThe most common mistake right now is to treat the AI buildout as a GPU story with some memory attached. The second most common is to treat memory as the bottleneck. Both framings are now wrong in the same way: they assum…
- Power Projects Race the Grid and the PermitsOn December 9, the City of Starbase will hold a public hearing on tax abatements for a project SpaceX has described to local officials as a gas-fired power plant and super-compute facility on roughly 444 acres east of Br…
- Nvidia's NVHBM Base Die Mandate Reshapes Korean Memory Supplier Power"Nvidia's Two-Track Memory Strategy Tests Korean Suppliers":
Threads we are following
- Whether newly elected Texas and Ohio governors sign construction requirements that push more 2028 projects into 2029, and whether lenders keep tightening terms for neoclouds.
- Whether HBM yields stabilize enough in 2027 to return wafer capacity to commodity DRAM lines
- Whether Samsung's reported NVHBM base-die routing to TSMC's 3nm process becomes a formal multi-vendor standard, and how memory vendors renegotiate leverage once logic yield is set by a foundry rival.
- The December 9 Starbase hearing and the pending air and water permits for SpaceX's 35 turbines
- Whether TSMC's 5-micrometer microbump packaging reaches sufficient performance to make hybrid bonding unnecessary for HBM integration.
One issue a week. Free.
sift. reads hundreds of sources so you don't have to, and sends one issue you can actually finish. No daily noise. Unsubscribe anytime.