There is no memory cycle.
An AI deployment plan is also a memory deployment plan. Follow the connection from learned weights and persistent agents to the rack, the factory and the customer contract.
Independent research · John Collins
Technical
change.
Economic
consequence.
AI changes what can be built, what is worth doing and who gets paid. I follow those changes through the systems, the businesses and the accounts.
Explore the writingAI. Infrastructure. Capital. Markets.Singapore / Published worldwide
Latest dispatch
The compute bill can come back quickly.
SpaceX's call put payback, contract duration and the ability to reprice compute beside the capex headline. The question is how quickly deployed capacity can help finance what comes next.
Three places to begin
Follow the consequences.
The architecture, the business model and the price. Each tells a different part of the story.
AI is rewriting the software bill.
Jane Street and the emerging agent stack show how customers can buy less packaged software while becoming much larger infrastructure users. The application may survive; its old economics do not get the same guarantee.
The bull market had a bear inside it.
The broad index hid a severe semiconductor drawdown. Looking beneath it changes the sustainability question: what kept earning, what improved, and what did the share price already require?
The question underneath the headline
What happens between
a working model
and a working business?
Read the engineering. Check the contracts and accounts. Follow the money far enough to see who actually earns it.
How I approach the workMore from the notebook
Evidence before analogy.
The bill gets our attention. What it buys takes longer.
Meta and Anthropic expose two sides of the same investment question: spending can create new capability, while constrained capacity can limit the revenue used to judge that spending.
Micron: below past cycle-low valuations.
A comparison with documented memory-cycle lows asks what investors are paying for expected earnings—and what has changed in the contracts supporting their duration. Late 2018 is an explicit exception, not a detail to hide.
AI is also becoming a source of funds.
Semtech connects lower-power optical engineering with higher supplier value and operating cash. Its turnaround shows why the funding discussion also needs to examine businesses already generating money from the build-out.
AI doesn’t need everyone to get it.
Disclosures from five banks show how a small group can build systems that benefit far more people than ever touch a frontier model. Some productivity gains improve the systems needed for the next round of adoption.
John Collins / Singapore
Close to the engineering.
Attentive to the economics.
I write about AI, the systems it depends on and the economic consequences that are easy to miss.
About the work