NVIDIA Archives | Small Island Research Notes

The Linear Narrative Around AI Memory Demand May Be Starting to Show Small Cracks

Jane2026-03-26T16:18:11+08:00March 26th, 2026|Categories: Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Google, Market Sentiment and Reflexivity, Narrative and Trust, NVIDIA, Supply Chain and Manufacturing|

Executive Summary In current discussions around AI infrastructure, the market broadly assumes that memory demand will continue rising steadily as models scale, inference workloads expand, and HBM and DRAM remain under supply pressure. This narrative is grounded in real conditions, which is also why it appears especially durable. But once the focus shifts from demand itself to system design, the picture becomes less straightforward. As memory supply, cost, and capacity allocation increasingly become real constraints,

After the Groq Move, NVIDIA’s Moat May Be Deeper Than It Appears

Jane2026-03-20T13:38:28+08:00March 20th, 2026|Categories: Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Groq, Market Sentiment and Reflexivity, Narrative and Trust, NVIDIA, Research and Methodology, Supply Chain and Manufacturing|

Executive Summary At first glance, NVIDIA’s move to incorporate the Groq-based NVIDIA Groq 3 LPX into the Vera Rubin platform may look like a new approach to inference workload allocation. But the real focus of this article is not the technical detail itself. It is whether this move suggests that NVIDIA’s moat may be deeper than it previously appeared. The argument here is that NVIDIA’s competitive strength may not rest only on chip performance, the

The Expansion Logic of AI Infrastructure Is Changing

Jane2026-03-19T20:49:50+08:00March 19th, 2026|Categories: Featured Notes, Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Oracle, Platform and Business Model, Supply Chain and Manufacturing|

Executive Summary Several recent signals that appear unrelated at first glance may in fact point to a shift in how decisions around AI infrastructure are being made. Adjustments to the expansion pace of the Abilene data center by OpenAI and Oracle, together with Meta’s description of its in-house AI chip roadmap for MTIA, suggest that companies are facing the same underlying question. As model development, chip generations, and infrastructure construction cycles become increasingly out of

A Second Path Beyond the GPU? Architectural Thinking Behind NVIDIA’s Licensing Agreement with Groq

Jane2026-03-05T13:01:28+08:00March 5th, 2026|Categories: Featured Notes, Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Groq, NVIDIA, Supply Chain and Manufacturing|

Executive Summary NVIDIA’s licensing agreement with Groq is worth watching not only because the technology itself is extreme, but because it may signal that AI compute architecture is being reconsidered. Even after GPUs have become the dominant platform for AI training and inference, NVIDIA is still willing to engage seriously with an execution model that runs almost counter to the mainstream path. That suggests the demands of the inference era may be making determinism important

CPU as an AI Pillar, Is Arm Approaching a Structural Inflection?

Jane2026-03-28T20:28:34+08:00February 27th, 2026|Categories: Featured Notes, Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Amazon and AWS, Ampere, Arm, Meta, NVIDIA, Platform and Business Model, Supply Chain and Manufacturing|

Note (March 2026): I wrote this piece before Arm officially unveiled its own data center CPU. That does not make the original argument irrelevant, but it does change the context in an important way. I am keeping the article largely as it is because the framework still helps explain what to watch. What has changed is that some of the questions discussed here are no longer purely hypothetical. They can now be read

When Grace CPU Reaches Its First Large-Scale Deployment: This Is Not Just a CPU Story but Also a Shift in Data Center Structure

Jane2026-02-27T12:25:01+08:00February 24th, 2026|Categories: Featured Notes, Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Meta, NVIDIA, Platform and Business Model, Supply Chain and Manufacturing|

Executive Summary The first large-scale deployment of the Grace CPU may appear, at the surface level, to be a routine update on product and partnership progress. Within a broader industry context, however, this development may carry structural implications that extend beyond a single product milestone. This article examines the signals embedded in Grace CPU’s large-scale deployment from the perspectives of market positioning, data center architectural evolution, and hyperscaler strategy. These signals include NVIDIA’s changing role

In the Age of AI Inference, a Narrative Shift Is Taking Shape

Jane2026-02-02T12:20:29+08:00January 29th, 2026|Categories: Featured Notes, Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, AMD, Market Sentiment and Reflexivity, Narrative and Trust, NVIDIA, Platform and Business Model|

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

Following CES: What Vera Rubin Confirmed and What It Changed

Jane2026-01-08T16:37:10+08:00January 8th, 2026|Categories: Featured Notes, Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Amazon and AWS, Google, Micron, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Platform and Business Model, Samsung, SK hynix, Supply Chain and Manufacturing|

Executive Summary Following CES, NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform did not introduce a dramatic shift in specifications. Instead, it clarified a broader direction. In the era of AI inference, the core challenge is shifting away from pure compute performance toward how context is managed. What the Vera Rubin platform reveals is not merely a next generation GPU, but a moment in which the platform itself begins to assume responsibility for memory. As long context and multi

Tech Narrative Weekly #5 (Dec 2025, Week 4): When AI Is Placed Within Real World Structures

Jane2026-02-24T17:05:00+08:00December 29th, 2025|Categories: Tech Narrative Weekly|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Google, Market Sentiment and Reflexivity, Narrative and Trust, NVIDIA, Platform and Business Model, Policy and Tariffs, Supply Chain and Manufacturing|

Key Events of the Week: What Happened Last week, during the fourth week of December, the U.S. technology sector did not produce a single explosive event that dominated market sentiment. Instead, several seemingly disconnected developments gradually came together at the narrative level to form a coherent picture. Notably, the observation signals in the fourth week showed little substantive difference from those of the third week. First, the relationship between AI and infrastructure became more concrete.

From TPU Sales to Governance Redistribution: Broadcom’s Role in AI Is Quietly Changing

Jane2025-12-04T12:21:03+08:00December 4th, 2025|Categories: Global Business Dynamics, Strategic Tech and Market Signals|Tags: AI Hardware and Chips, AI Strategy and Ecosystem, Amazon and AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Google, Market Sentiment and Reflexivity, MediaTek, Meta, Microsoft, Narrative and Trust, NVIDIA, Platform and Business Model, TSMC|

Executive Summary Broadcom has long been one of Google’s key partners in building the TPU architecture. As Google plans to make its TPU technology available to external customers, this partnership is entering a new phase. Broadcom’s role is shifting from that of a co-designer to that of a modular integrator, serving as a stable and indispensable technical pillar within Google’s institutional framework. This position provides stability, but it also limits Broadcom’s ability to influence the