the past month or so has been busy for ASICs across the board here's the month in order... aug 6: amd agrees to buy @taalas_inc outright aug 18: @Etched raises $700m at $21bn, led by Jane Street, one of the top quantitative prop traders in the world aug 19: @Cerebras launches cs-4 with 10x throughput of cs-3 aug 20: @fractile_Ai is supplying Anthropic, reported to be in talks for ~$600m months after its last round aug 21: reports NVIDIA is in early talks with rebellions and NVIDIA already paid ~$20bn for groq's people and ip before any of this aug 24: at hot chips, intel shows crescent island. 350W, air cooled, up to 480GB of LPDDR5X, no HBM. aug 25: openai publishes first measured results for jalapeño, its first custom inference chip, co-developed with broadcom. the most interesting part of this is that this news is driven by strategic moves from incumbents across frontier labs, hardware and even financial services Jane Street, Anthropic, openAI, AMD and NVIDIA, all different parts of the ecosystem all trying to take a piece of alternative silicon why? next-gen chip access is getting decided through ownership. a frontier lab can buy (or build) its way onto the delivery schedule but everyone else is left queuing behind the guys who funded the fab run. if you want capacity in 2027, the relationship you need with the chip supplier probably started a year ago congrats again to the Etched, Cerebras and @fractile_Ai teams