Supercomputers are dependent on GPUs and have been for more than a decade. Aurora used Intel GPUs, but Intel has since been undependable with producing state of the art GPUs. Meanwhile, Nvidia has mostly ceded the US government supercomputer market to AMD since 2018 instead focusing on European governments and US corporations. Nvidia used to dominate the US government supercomputer market until the price of GPUs rose too much for the US government's liking. Nvidia balked at lowering their prices and left the market for AMD and Intel, well until Intel not surprisingly was unable to execute on their GPU roadmap.

If you can hire 30k people you didn't need but 3 years later are able to accurately identify who those 30k people are, then you have done the impossible and morphed from being an incompetent manager to being God.

More practically, Amazon and most companies don't need to identify the workers they don't need. They just need to announce to Wall Street that they cut a bunch of workers, all of which were unneeded, leading to a huge increase in their stock price and more importantly executive bonuses.

Most utilities support both residential and industrial customers like data centers. Most utilities give significantly lower rates to industrial customers. For example, in Santa Clara, CA, which has its own city electricity utility, residential customers pay $0.150 to $0.172/kWh while very large industrial customers pay $0.108 to $0.091/kWh. Of course, households pay a higher rate for using more electricity, while data centers pay less when using more. And most of the need for increased power delivery is due to new data centers, but households need to pay to essentially partially subsidize those data centers.

Do you have to pay a monthly fee, either for the service or the cell phone connection? If so, that's not a plus. I've read that GM strongly pushes paying for its OnStar data plan and that although its possible to connect to the phone via a hotspot, it's also not turnkey.

Also, I assume that you have to give the car the credentials for your Google account. That means that you have to trust that GM is going to do the right thing, both in terms of not selling your data and in terms of keeping your data safe from malware. Also, since the car could be driven by a valet, friend, or thief, a PIN or pattern is needed every time the car is turned on, which is slightly less convenient than Android Auto (especially the wireless versions).

Producing a lab chip is closer to showing viability via a simulation than to practical production. One might think that producing the first lab chip should be a harbinger of inevitable practical yields, but Intel has destroyed that idea. We'll see what happens with 18A. Intel is claiming to have beaten TSMC to "high-volume production." We'll see whether that is reality or marketing speak.

This is one-way capitalism. It makes sense from the viewpoint of the owners and stakeholders who want the most productivity for the least cost. From the viewpoint of the workers, they are being asked to work more for the same amount of pay. In essence, the hi-tech "visionaries" are casting their workers as lazy, unambitious, and apathetic because they are unwilling to take a pay cut.

The visionaries are banking on their PR reputations to push through this narrative. Of course, if the visionaries were true visionaries, they would actually incentivize their workers to entice greater buy-in and productivity. I'm not sure if the visionaries are too dumb or too greedy. It's probably more a case of condescension, with the visionaries viewing their workers as work animals. After all, if would be crazy to give incentives to work animals as a means towards increased productivity.

The big concern is that the government can make the company leader "disappear" without any clear public charges, like what happened to Jack Ma, not to mention many others. Maybe the bigger concern is that the Chinese government can mete out these punishments without explicit charges or trials or even acknowledgement of the punishments. Jack Ma's "crime" was criticism of government policy that would be extremely tame by Western standards. Yet he was disappeared for three months, and his company received substantial punishments.

In a full-blown trade war, both sides lose. That's obvious. The importers lose on prices and product availability. The exporters lose on jobs and cash flow. It's not clear whether the G7 or China would suffer more. I'm guessing that China's stability is more tenuous. In the G7, economic problems lead to regime change via elections. In China, economic problems would lead to who knows what.

Seems like the current favorable quarterly results are due to several one-time factors, including massive cash infusions from the US government, Nvidia, and Softbank combined with higher sales due to the Windows 10 sunsetting and the sale of Altera and Mobileye. Take out the money from selling Altera and Mobileye, and the profit decreases by 75%.

The big question is how sustainable Intel's profitability is. Intel has cut a lot of employees, so their operating costs are far lower, maybe around $10 billion less per year. That alone would flip the $1 billion quarterly profit (after subtracting out the Altera and Mobileye sales) to a loss. However, Intel continues to lose market share to AMD across all market segments. Eventually the Windows 10 upgrade cycle will end. Either Intel has to regain market share from AMD or find a way to increase profitability at its foundry. Those are the two big questions for Intel, and even the current quarterly profit doesn't answer those questions.

This has always been the case for a very long time. The main difference now is that the right wing extremists are in power. To the victor goes the spoils, and the greatest spoil of them all is the truth. The right wing extremists also know that whoever yells the loudest gets to define truth to the uneducated masses.

The right wing extremist have done very well in that they realize that the definitions of extremism are necessarily relative. So, yelling louder allows them to shift the perception among the uneducated masses that their extremism is now the "center" and "unbiased." They also realize that their target is solely the uneducated masses, because that will allow them to continue to win elections. Reason and logic not only unnecessary but wholly impotent as tools to fight against their campaign.

China subsidizes its strategic companies with money and favorable regulations along with removing as much domestic and international competition as possible, all in exchange for the CCP's control over the company, including removing/arresting the head at any time. All Trump has done is to require ownership of a company in exchange for the previously free grants of money that previous administrations have given out. There is essentially no advantage to the company aside from the infusion of money. There are no board seats and no legal means to control or even influence the company once the money is handed over. The only difference from the previous grant-based approach is that the government gets money back when they sell the stock. So, this is a good thing for these companies, as the only thing they lose is some stock price dilution due to printing more shares, and that effect hasn't even manifested itself for companies like Intel.

For the quantum companies, we're talking tens of millions of dollars. I'm not sure that's enough to make a difference. The big problem with quantum computing is not money but the lack of technology, and a few tens of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars won't made the difference unless there exists a pathway to technological success, which is currently not clear.

There's not much new in the 5-year plan, which is not unexpected. Manufacturing dominance and technology self-reliance are the key priorities, but they already have been the key priorities in the last few years.

Perhaps the curious thing is that a lesser priority of increasing domestic consumption necessarily means increasing global exports. While a large trade surplus brings many economic advantages, it is itself a roadblock to self-reliance. If a full-blown trade war broke out between China and the G7/friends, China would be forced to overload poorer countries with its exports, which is not sustainable. In a sense, having China hooked on exports should be a greater concern to China than not being able to procure GPUs. The problem for China is that a huge trade surplus is a drug that would bring huge withdrawal symptoms if the drug were not available.

Or maybe AI research is really hard, and Facebook is learning that simply hiring a bunch of people and throwing money at them isn't enough. AI is still in the research stage and not the product stage, so it's hard to have deadlines and product roadmaps. Nonetheless, "visionaries" like Zuckerberg demand progress and excellence by doing what they can, which is to yell a lot and fire the expendable guys in the red shirts.

The motivation for tariffs is winning political elections. For many centuries already, tariffs have proven to be a practical pathway to get elected. Whether they are good for the national economy, consumers, or some notion of national pride is immaterial.

But isn't this the exact same argument used by the plastics industry, that recycling is possible? Theoretical recycling is not the same as practically feasible recycling which is not the same as profitable recycling. Recycling of any material that is profitable doesn't need any type of government incentive or public relations campaign, either of which usually indicates non-profitability and therefore essentially non-existence.