Observing from the edges, where small signals in technology, business, and culture point to the futures taking shape.
Featured Research Notes
January 29, 2026
Executive Summary The rapid growth of generative AI has led the market, over the past two years, to focus on memory supply and storage capacity. As AI systems move decisively into an inference-driven phase, however, the fundamental bottlenecks facing infrastructure are beginning to shift. In inference environments, system costs are no longer determined primarily by model size or total data volume. Instead, they are shaped by how contextual states persist during computation. When large volumes
October 16, 2025
Executive Summary NVIDIA’s Rubin platform may look like a routine GPU upgrade, but its impact extends far beyond chip performance. By redesigning the internal architecture of AI servers, with a larger motherboard, liquid cooling as a core feature, and a modular dual-layer PCBA, Rubin fundamentally reshapes the value distribution within the supply chain. PCB and materials suppliers gain new momentum from increased complexity and higher technical requirements. Liquid cooling vendors and metal processing partners become
June 2, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 24 to May 30, 2026, the AI narrative in the U.S. technology industry continued the direction of the previous week, but the focus became more pronounced. The first important set of developments centered on Anthropic’s financing and compute arrangements. Anthropic completed a large financing round, with its valuation approaching $1 trillion. This showed that frontier model companies can still attract significant capital. In the same week,
May 25, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 17 to May 23, 2026, the most visible shift in the U.S. technology sector was that AI competition moved more clearly from model capability and infrastructure expansion toward platform entry points, agent workflows, compute architecture, and geopolitical boundaries. Google I/O stood out as the most important technology event of the week. Google introduced a broad set of updates across Gemini, AI Search, developer tools, agent-related features,
Observing from the edges, where small signals in technology, business, and culture point to the futures taking shape.
Featured Research Notes
January 29, 2026
Executive Summary The rapid growth of generative AI has led the market, over the past two years, to focus on memory supply and storage capacity. As AI systems move decisively into an inference-driven phase, however, the fundamental bottlenecks facing infrastructure are beginning to shift. In inference environments, system costs are no longer determined primarily by model size or total data volume. Instead, they are shaped by how contextual states persist during computation. When large volumes
October 16, 2025
Executive Summary NVIDIA’s Rubin platform may look like a routine GPU upgrade, but its impact extends far beyond chip performance. By redesigning the internal architecture of AI servers, with a larger motherboard, liquid cooling as a core feature, and a modular dual-layer PCBA, Rubin fundamentally reshapes the value distribution within the supply chain. PCB and materials suppliers gain new momentum from increased complexity and higher technical requirements. Liquid cooling vendors and metal processing partners become
June 2, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 24 to May 30, 2026, the AI narrative in the U.S. technology industry continued the direction of the previous week, but the focus became more pronounced. The first important set of developments centered on Anthropic’s financing and compute arrangements. Anthropic completed a large financing round, with its valuation approaching $1 trillion. This showed that frontier model companies can still attract significant capital. In the same week,
May 25, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 17 to May 23, 2026, the most visible shift in the U.S. technology sector was that AI competition moved more clearly from model capability and infrastructure expansion toward platform entry points, agent workflows, compute architecture, and geopolitical boundaries. Google I/O stood out as the most important technology event of the week. Google introduced a broad set of updates across Gemini, AI Search, developer tools, agent-related features,
Latest Research Notes
June 2, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 24 to May 30, 2026, the AI narrative in the U.S. technology industry continued the direction of the previous week, but the focus became more pronounced. The first important set of developments centered on Anthropic’s financing and compute arrangements. Anthropic completed a large financing round, with its valuation approaching $1 trillion. This showed that frontier model companies can still attract significant capital. In the same week,
May 25, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 17 to May 23, 2026, the most visible shift in the U.S. technology sector was that AI competition moved more clearly from model capability and infrastructure expansion toward platform entry points, agent workflows, compute architecture, and geopolitical boundaries. Google I/O stood out as the most important technology event of the week. Google introduced a broad set of updates across Gemini, AI Search, developer tools, agent-related features,
May 20, 2026
Executive Summary This AI infrastructure cycle may not be fully understood through the traditional framework of technology hardware cycles. First, although the market keeps discussing an AI bubble, these early bubble warnings may actually make suppliers more disciplined about capital spending and delay the point at which supply becomes excessive. Second, KV cache is changing the architecture of AI infrastructure. AI infrastructure is no longer only a question of supply and demand for individual hardware
May 18, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 10 to May 16, 2026, the most visible signal in the U.S. technology sector was that AI competition was increasingly becoming a system-level integration game, moving beyond model capability and infrastructure expansion into enterprise deployment, platform gateways, capital structures, and geopolitical boundaries. The policy backdrop of the week was the meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. From a technology industry perspective, this was not only
May 14, 2026
Executive Summary Investment markets are applying two different standards of evidence to AI. The market has been willing to believe in AI infrastructure because GPUs, data centers, AI servers, optical communications, liquid cooling, power equipment, and supply chain orders can be built, measured, and reflected in financial results. But when the discussion shifts to SaaS and AI applications, the market asks for clearer proof of commercialization, including enterprise willingness to pay, user habits, workflow change,
May 11, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 3 to May 9, 2026, the most visible change was that model companies continued to need more compute, while their sources of compute became more diversified. The long-term cloud and chip partnership between Anthropic and Google Cloud did not simply reflect the expansion of one company. It showed that model competition is entering a stage that requires more long-term infrastructure support. If model companies want to
Latest Research Notes
June 2, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 24 to May 30, 2026, the AI narrative in the U.S. technology industry continued the direction of the previous week, but the focus became more pronounced. The first important set of developments centered on Anthropic’s financing and compute arrangements. Anthropic completed a large financing round, with its valuation approaching $1 trillion. This showed that frontier model companies can still attract significant capital. In the same week,
May 25, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 17 to May 23, 2026, the most visible shift in the U.S. technology sector was that AI competition moved more clearly from model capability and infrastructure expansion toward platform entry points, agent workflows, compute architecture, and geopolitical boundaries. Google I/O stood out as the most important technology event of the week. Google introduced a broad set of updates across Gemini, AI Search, developer tools, agent-related features,
May 20, 2026
Executive Summary This AI infrastructure cycle may not be fully understood through the traditional framework of technology hardware cycles. First, although the market keeps discussing an AI bubble, these early bubble warnings may actually make suppliers more disciplined about capital spending and delay the point at which supply becomes excessive. Second, KV cache is changing the architecture of AI infrastructure. AI infrastructure is no longer only a question of supply and demand for individual hardware
May 18, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 10 to May 16, 2026, the most visible signal in the U.S. technology sector was that AI competition was increasingly becoming a system-level integration game, moving beyond model capability and infrastructure expansion into enterprise deployment, platform gateways, capital structures, and geopolitical boundaries. The policy backdrop of the week was the meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. From a technology industry perspective, this was not only
May 14, 2026
Executive Summary Investment markets are applying two different standards of evidence to AI. The market has been willing to believe in AI infrastructure because GPUs, data centers, AI servers, optical communications, liquid cooling, power equipment, and supply chain orders can be built, measured, and reflected in financial results. But when the discussion shifts to SaaS and AI applications, the market asks for clearer proof of commercialization, including enterprise willingness to pay, user habits, workflow change,
May 11, 2026
Key Events of the Week: What Happened From May 3 to May 9, 2026, the most visible change was that model companies continued to need more compute, while their sources of compute became more diversified. The long-term cloud and chip partnership between Anthropic and Google Cloud did not simply reflect the expansion of one company. It showed that model competition is entering a stage that requires more long-term infrastructure support. If model companies want to
RESEARCH COLLECTION
From a small island vantage point, we explore signals in technology, business, and culture that are shaping the global future.
