SemiAnalysis Weekly

Jordan Nanos, Doug O'Laughlin

Everything semiconductors and AI Covering the spectrum

  1. 2d ago

    Ep. 037 - Who's Funding the $11 Trillion AI Buildout? (Capital Markets) | Dan Nishball, Jordan Nanos

    H100 rental prices went up, on a GPU that should be sliding down its depreciation curve. That curve is what lenders underwrite. Daniel Nishball (@dnishball) kicks off our new Compute Capital Markets group by following the money through Nvidia's $497B backstops, ClusterMAX as a credit signal, and whether each token is profitable. Jordan Nanos (@JordanNanos) brings the rental data. AI debt is about to pass auto loans. 0:00 Opening 1:48 Nvidia's Backstop Universe 6:22 The $11T Funding Wall 17:25 Balance Sheet as a Service 26:27 ClusterMAX as Credit Risk 31:51 Why H100 Prices Rose 43:09 Token Profitability 58:05 You Can't Go Back 1:07:25 AI Debt vs Auto Loans 1:11:14 Inside Nvidia's Backstops

  2. 4d ago

    Ep. 036 - $200 Buys $12,000 of Opus Tokens, We Bought Every Plan (AI Cloud TCO) | Max Kan, Jordan Nanos, Andrew Megalaa

    Pay Anthropic $200 a month and you can pull $12,000 of Opus 5.5 tokens at API pricing. Max Kan (@maxkan) and Andrew Megalaa bought every plan, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, MiniMax, Moonshot, Z.ai, Cursor, and measured every token type to find the ceiling. The catch isn't subsidy. Anthropic still books 50 to 60% gross margins on these plans, which means the API itself is the price gouge. 0:00 Cold Open 1:03 Subsidies and Credits 5:23 Token Types and Cache 14:08 Model Value Charts 20:51 Test Methodology 26:54 Other Plans 31:26 Utilization and Limits 36:24 Token Efficiency 41:24 Open Models 44:22 Cyber and Capture Read More: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-subscriptions-offer-5x

  3. 6d ago

    Ep. 035 - Tech DD’s, Performance Projections, Benchmarks, Supply Chain, Investment Thesis (Consulting)| Abhilash Jain, Jordan Nanos

    Jordan (@JordanNanos) and Abhilash (@AbhilashJain17) discuss the clients SemiAnalysis consulting serves, custom projects like the inference simulator, how client work turns into research products, neocloud due diligence, and why SLAs decide who gets funded. They also discuss Feynman specs, de-specced memory, and a 20-trillion-parameter OpenAI model. 0:00 Intro and Overview 2:27 Client Types 5:24 Custom Projects 9:47 Strategy Work 12:27 Consulting to Products 14:33 Neocloud Due Diligence 18:40 SLAs and Insurance 22:32 Risk Assessments 26:45 Build vs Buy 29:19 Favorites and Outlook

  4. Oct 2

    Ep. 034 - Engrams: How DeepSeek Offloads KV Cache to DRAM and SSD (Core Research) | Jordan Nanos, Cam Quilici, Alec Ibarra, Bryan Shan

    The InferenceX team is back after two months. Jordan Nanos (@JordanNanos) is joined by Cam Quilici (@noslawextratost), Bryan Shan, and Alec Ibarra to discuss Engram and DRAM offloading, the AgentX benchmark and its profit calculator, TPU v7 on InferenceX, Vera Rubin vs Blackwell, fast tokens, and TileRT on NVIDIA GPUs. 0:00 Intro 0:31 Engrams 12:27 AgentX Benchmark 16:36 Profit Calculator 23:40 TPU v7 32:03 Vera Rubin 40:49 Fast Tokens 49:33 TileRT 54:00 Chip Startups 1:01:31 Wrap Up

  5. Sep 23

    Ep. 033 - ClusterMAX 3.0 Is Here! Neoclouds Ranked (Neoclouds, GPUs) | Sam Harshe, Pratt Bhatt, Jordan Nanos

    ClusterMAX 3.0 is here. Sam Harshe (@sharshe02) and Pratt Bhatt (@PrathmeshBhat19) join Jordan Nanos (@jordannanos) after months of testing 77 GPU clouds. Some moved up, some moved down. Health checks, cache hit rates, NCCL recipes, agentic coding on clusters, a Linux kernel bug, neocloud security, SLAs and financing, NVIDIA's backstops, five-year-old H100s, and hosted RL training. Read the full ClusterMAX 3.0 report: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/clustermax-30-the-industry-standardClusterMAX inquiries: clustermax@semianalysis.com 0:00 Cold Open 1:32 The Rankings 6:58 Health Checks 13:26 Endpoint Cache Misses 16:40 Networking and NCCL 22:52 Vibe-Coded Infra 31:27 Bug Hunting 38:36 Security 45:43 Financing Neoclouds 56:33 Hosted Training and RL

  6. Sep 18

    Ep. 032 - 300 Datacenter Bans, 3 Projects Delayed: Moratoriums Explained (Datacenter, Energy) | Maya Barkin, Reyk Knühtsen, Jordan Nanos

    More than 300 towns, cities, and counties have voted to pause data centers in the past 18 months. Maya Barkin (@mayabarkin) and Reyk Knühtsen (@robotknower) from the SemiAnalysis Data Center, Energy, and Industrials team join Jordan Nanos (@jordannanos) to explain what a moratorium actually is, how they mapped every one of them against the US project pipeline, and why only three projects are being delayed. Plus: the SpaceX de-annexation in Brownsville, New York vs Texas, why politicians love a moratorium, and the surprising amount of alpha in anti-data center Facebook groups. Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros (@JeremieEO) drops in from Bangkok. Read More: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/everyone-says-datacenter-moratoriums 0:00 Intro 0:36 What Is a Moratorium 4:34 300 Moratoriums, 3 Projects 10:18 Behind the Meter Wins 14:04 Eight Conditions to Delay 17:06 The SpaceX De-Annexation 20:03 Cheap Political Signaling 32:03 New York vs Texas 41:14 City Council Alpha 46:32 Advice for Developers

  7. Sep 16

    Ep. 031 - EMERGENCY EPISODE: Are We Doomed? | Jordan Nanos, Doug O'Laughlin, Max Kan, Joey Brookhart

    Emergency episode. Doug O'Laughlin (@Fabknowledge) , Joey Brookhart (@SaasquatchC), and Max Kan (@maxkan) join Jordan (@JordanNanos) to talk through Dario's "We Must Pace the Frontier" blog and the responses from Sam Altman and David Sacks. Does pacing actually mean less compute, or a lot more? Plus the Hugging Face incident, Moonshot serving Claude, and the security behaviour that keeps them up at night. 0:00 Cold Open 2:50 Glorified Neoclouds 8:21 Pacing the Frontier 12:53 Safety Eats Compute 20:38 Hugging Face Lessons 30:52 Moonshot Serving Claude 36:37 The Coxson Resignation 38:27 Two-Year Predictions 49:19 Regulation Under Trump 57:21 Hotter or Cooler

  8. Sep 14

    Ep. 030 - Long Live the Short King: Why 4-HI HBM Wins (Memory) | Myron Xie, Jordan Nanos

    NVIDIA previewed Rubin Ultra at 1TB of HBM per package. The part that ships will carry 192GB. Myron Xie and Jordan Nanos get into how the design fell that far, why the reason is supply and not performance, and why shipping less memory per chip might be the right call anyway. For the first time in recent memory, NVIDIA's next flagship will have less capacity than the one it replaces. Read More: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi

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About

Everything semiconductors and AI Covering the spectrum

Information

  • Creator
    Jordan Nanos, Doug O'Laughlin
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    38
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Jordan Nanos, Doug O'Laughlin
  • Show Website
    SemiAnalysis Weekly

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