Summary
Asianometry reports back from a trip to San Francisco, where the host gave a keynote on the history of automated test equipment at the Test Vision Symposium at Semicon West, then walked the show floor. The impression: Semicon West feels like the quiet sunset of an older era, with the 2026 OCP Global Summit drawing more energy around inference hardware, cooling, and networking.
The video then turns to the mood of the AI industry. It notes market jitters after the Financial Times reported Anthropic’s figures of about $16 billion in revenue with strong gross margins, which investors judged insufficient. The host discusses the plan for roughly 50 gigawatts of compute by the end of 2027 and early talk of another 40 to 50 gigawatts in 2028. Lam Research expects wafer fabrication equipment spending of about $150 billion in 2026 and over $200 billion in 2027, while Goldman Sachs estimates $218 billion in 2027 and $281 billion in 2028.
The host also covers startups betting heavily on compute, the argument that raising equity beats taking on debt, and the risk of being “structurally short” on chips. A closing section looks at how many small companies building on frontier labs depend on subscription plans that offer far more value than API pricing, and compares that to the ride-share subsidies of the 2010s.
📺 Source: Asianometry · Published October 30, 2026
🏷️ Format: Opinion Editorial
