New Ask Claude or ChatGPT about any stock, using Bullpen. Bullpen in Claude or ChatGPT. 7 days free
Bullpen.News From Edwin Dorsey
Get Daily Recap Feedback

Sunday, November 15, 2026

Back to the front page

Intel Custom ASICs?

Intel’s custom ASIC business more than doubled last quarter as it pursues hyperscaler demand, AI accelerators and a stronger Intel Foundry.

INTC $317BQCOM $185B
Chipstrat 3 clicks

From X

@convequity 1 click

Convequity on X

$NVDA, $CBRS, and Huawei's Kirin 9050 Pro are three different bets on the same turning point: what the chip industry does when shrinking transistors stops paying. In AI chips, most energy goes into moving data, not into the calculation itself. In our view, as transistors shrink, calculations get cheaper much faster than the wires around them, so the industry's centre of gravity is shifting from ever-smaller transistors to shorter paths for data. That shift is why Huawei's logic folding — designing a circuit vertically to cut the distance data travels — looks potentially transformative and disruptive for the semiconductor industry to us. Here is the comparison in one line: one 16-bit floating-point calculation is the baseline, 1×, about 0.52 picojoules in NVIDIA's published GH200 energy model. Every figure below is the energy spent moving data, measured against that one calculation. 1. Moving data to local SRAM next to the computing units: Cerebras uses about 2× the baseline. NVIDIA's highly optimized local-memory path uses about 5–15× the baseline. 2. Moving data across the chip: we estimate Cerebras's core-to-core network at about 12–37× the baseline. NVIDIA's optimized path through L2, its shared on-chip cache, is about 60–90× the baseline. 3. Moving data off the chip to external memory: Cerebras's MemoryX path is about 330–800× the baseline. NVIDIA's optimized path to HBM, its external high-bandwidth memory, is about 230–290× the baseline. The energy cost is set by how far the data travels: a short hop costs single-digit multiples of one calculation, a trip across the chip costs tens of times, and a trip to external memory costs hundreds of times. If moving data is the real constraint, then shortening paths, which is what Huawei is doing with logic folding, matters more than another process node — for NVIDIA and Cerebras as much as for Huawei. These are engineering estimates, workload-dependent, not measurements of complete systems. The optimized block transfers behind NVIDIA's figures are already counted above; what remains is the physical cost of the wires and memory themselves. In our view, Cerebras's commercial case depends on whether its compiler can keep data close to computation across enough workloads. NVIDIA's advantage is a broader range of software, not a way around the energy cost of moving data.

Investor Letters

All letters

Q3 Earnings Updates

Q3 updates cover Crocs, Entravision and Fiserv beats, coal and oil weakness, and Xerox’s sharp decline, testing the underlying cases for…

CROX $7.5BEVC $874M
Hidden Rock Capital's Newsletter 3 clicks

The Spy Who Shagged The Market

Nvidia’s leadership scandal puts its AI-market role under scrutiny, with comparisons to AIG’s pre-GFC liquidity influence.

AIG $43B
WHAT ARE WE DOING? “Contrarians At The Gate” 4 clicks
DIDIY · long 2026-08-17

Didi Global INC

Didi Global is China’s Uber, led by co-founder Wei Cheng, who owns $1 billion of Didi stock.

DIDIY $15B
Value Investors Club

Is Nebius Fucked?

Nebius’ Q3 beat relied on $325 million of one-off partnership fees as it raised 2027 CapEx to $40–45 billion and may need $6–11 billion of…

NBIS $32B
Daniel Romero 6 clicks

Qualcomm Custom ASICs?

Qualcomm’s Alphawave SerDes, CPU cores and HBC could support custom AI ASICs as hyperscalers build heterogeneous fleets beyond GPUs.

QCOM $185B
Chipstrat 4 clicks

Publications we follow

Every publication on this site, hand-picked.

130 publications

Newsletters 110

YouTube 4

Blogs 15

Seeking Alpha 89 of 295

Nominate a publication

X accounts we follow

Every account on this site, hand-picked.

91 accounts
Nominate an account

Investor letters we follow

376 firms

Sectors

Ordered by how often our editor reaches for them.