Al Yuen, CEO of PicoJool, talks with Austin about using VCSELs for scale-up optical interconnects in AI data centers. Al explains why gallium arsenide (GaAs) supply is unconstrained while indium phosphide (InP) is limite…
Vik welcomes Val Bercovici from Weka to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of AI memory and storage. Val explains how Weka's architecture leverages high-bandwidth networks to make storage faster than motherboard DRAM…
Austin and Vik break down the current memory crisis, where AI demand is driving unprecedented profits for memory makers like Micron, while simultaneously causing inflation and price hikes for consumer electronics. They d…
Qualcomm flew Austin to New York for its investor day, where the communications company laid out a plan to make data center, automotive, and IoT two-thirds of its business by FY29. Austin was in the room and asked Cristi…
New episode: Advanced packaging for AI chips, from wire bonds to TSMC CoWOS and Intel EMIB. Packaging is no longer an afterthought. It is the chip, and Intel's EMIB challenges TSMC's CoWOS. Three CoWOS flavors: silicon,…
Austin and Vik discuss their recent experience at Computex, where they met for the first time in person after six months of podcasting together. They share insights about the massive show, the people they connected wit…
Huawei dropped a paper claiming 1.4nm-class performance without EUV, and the internet immediately declared ASML dead and US export controls useless. Austin and Vik recorded one day after Memorial Day to unpack what Huawe…
Spend one hour here and you've caught up on the entire arc of semiconductor lithography. Austin and Vik run a masterclass on the technology that decides who gets to make leading-edge chips, and why so few companies can a…
Cerebras IPO is the only thing to talk about this week. 🔥 IPO prices at $185/share. Pops nearly 70% right after. The first wafer-scale chip company to make it public — after a 40-year curse killed every prior attempt. A…
Gimlet Labs runs an inference cloud built on heterogeneous silicon. Their software traces a PyTorch workload, segments it into its component parts, and schedules each piece onto the best-suited hardware — connecting chip…
What's common to optics and power that ruins everything in the era of AI? Resistance. The same physics that drove interconnects to optics is now driving low-voltage power delivery up to 800V. Austin Lyons (Chipstrat) and…
The hyperscaler memory tax quarter. More CapEx? Pssh. We knew flops needed scaling. But $25B at Microsoft alone just to pay higher component prices? A memory tax. That's the news. NAND? Sold out. HBM? Sold out. What we…
Google's Cloud Next 2026 keynote? Fire. 🔥 The TPU is now two chips instead of one — 8t for training, 8i for inference — but more interestingly, it's two scale-up networking topologies too. Austin Lyons (Chipstrat) and V…
Matt Steiner, VP of Monetization Infrastructure, Ranking & AI Foundations at Meta, walks through how Meta's ad system actually works, and why the infrastructure behind it differs from what you'd build for LLMs. We c…
Austin and Vik discuss Credo's acquisition of Dust Photonics, XPO as the new standard for scale-out (maybe instead of CPO?) and some thoughts about Nuvacore entering the CPU scene for agentic AI. Gavin Baker's tweet: ht…
In this episode, Austin and Vik discuss if Intel is finally back with CPU partnerships with Google, and heterogeneous inference with SambaNova, while market cap soars above $300B. Vik tries to get his OpenClaw instance t…
Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, the startup building chips designed from first principles for LLMs. Before MatX, Reiner was on the Google Brain team training LLMs, and his co-founder Mike Gunter was on the…
Intel Foundry just partnered with Elon Musk’s Terafab. What is Terafab anyway, why vertically integrated fabs make sense but the economics don’t (yet!), and what Intel is doing here (hint: no idea). Then: OpenAI acquires…
In this episode, Austin and Vik analyze NVIDIA's $2 billion investment in Marvell NVLink Fusion, exploring its implications for AI infrastructure, interconnect protocols, and the broader chip ecosystem. They also discuss…
In this episode, Austin and Vik analyze recent developments in GloFo patent lawsuits, the impact of TurboQuant on AI inference, and ARM's strategic move into silicon for agentic AI workloads. Read Vik's substack: https…
Austin and Vik break down a packed week in semiconductors, covering GTC, OFC, and Micron earnings. The conversation kicks off with Jensen Huang's bold claim that engineers should spend $250K/year on AI tokens, and whethe…
Vik and Austin unpack the Nvidia GTC keynote with fresh, top-of-mind takes while trying to breakdown key announcements, what matters and what doesn't. They discuss Groq's LPX, optics+copper for scale up, new CPU requirem…
Austin recaps moderating an agentic AI panel at Synopsys Converge, then gives an in-depth technical breakdown of Meta's MTIA custom silicon. Why they're building it, how chiplets let them ship a new chip every 6 months,…
This week, Austin and Vik break down the optics vs. copper debate that rocked semis this week. Nvidia dropped $4 billion on Lumentum and Coherent, Credo posted a blowout quarter betting on copper, and then Hock Tan shock…
This week, we move from optics technology to optics companies. We walk the AI optical supply chain from bottom to top. Main debate: Who has a moat? Who is already priced for perfection? *Not investment advice, do your o…
Austin and Vik delve into the evolving landscape of optics and networking, particularly in relation to AI and data centers. The conversation covers various scales of networking, including scale across, scale out, and s…
In this episode of the Semi Doped podcast, Austin and Vik delve into the current state of the semiconductor industry, focusing on the memory crisis driven by increasing demand from AI applications. They discuss the impli…
In this episode, Vik and Wayne Nelms discuss the emerging financial exchange for GPU compute, exploring its implications for the AI infrastructure market. They discuss the value of compute, pricing dynamics, hedging stra…
Vik and Val Bercovici discuss the evolution of storage solutions in the context of AI, focusing on Weka's innovative approaches to context memory, high bandwidth flash, and the importance of optimizing GPU usage. Val s…
Austin and Vik discuss the emerging trend of AI agents, particularly focusing on Claude Code and OpenClaw, and the resulting hardware implications. Key Takeaways: 2026 is expected to be a pivotal year for AI agents.The…
Maia 100 was a pre-GPT accelerator. Maia 200 is explicitly post-GPT for large multimodal inference. Saurabh Dighe says if Microsoft were chasing peak performance or trying to span training and inference, Maia would look…
OpenAI's partnership with Cerebras and Nvidia's announcement of context memory storage raises a fundamental question: as agentic AI demands long sessions with massive context windows, can SRAM-based accelerators designed…
Innoviz CEO Omer Keilaf believes the LIDAR market is down to its final players—and that Innoviz has already won its seat. In this conversation, we cover the Level 4 gold rush sparked by Waymo, why stalled Level 3 progra…
Austin and Vik discuss why LiDAR is important for autonomy, how modern systems work, and how the technology has evolved. They compare Time of Flight and FMCW architectures, explain why wavelength choice matters, and walk…
Episode Summary Austin and Vik break down NVIDIA’s CES 2026 keynote, focusing on Vera Rubin, DGX Spark and DGX Station, uneducated investor panic, and physical AI. Key Takeaways DGX Spark brings server-class NVIDIA archi…
Austin and Vik discuss key insights from the IEDM conference. They explore the significance of IEDM for engineers and investors, the networking opportunities it offers, and the latest innovations in silicon photonics, c…
Key Topics What Nvidia actually bought from Groq and why it is not a traditional acquisitionWhy the deal triggered claims that GPUs and HBM are obsoleteArchitectural trade-offs between GPUs, TPUs, XPUs, and LPUsSRAM vs H…