Semiconductors

Semiconductors are rarely a topic in their own right on ToTheMoon; they surface whenever the hosts explain why one company or country can build a model and another cannot. Chips stand for access to compute, the price of a single token, and a lever of policy: whoever owns inference sets the cost, the limits and the dependency (episodes 127 and 136).

In 2024 the subject began with observations. NVIDIA had the best chips, but Apple had its own processors and devices, which gave it a real chance in AI (episode 007); chips specialized for transformers were raising money but had no wide use yet (episode 013). In 2025 chips became an instrument of geopolitics. Episode 040 argued that export controls turn compute into politics, and episode 058 examined the American strategy of selling chips more widely while squeezing Huawei so that the world would not learn to live without NVIDIA. Episode 054 added that the winner is whoever holds the infrastructure of chips, computers and electricity.

By 2026 the focus had moved to in-house silicon. In episode 103 the hosts tied the shutdown of Sora to a chip shortage and described the fight for capacity as a fight for the whole stack: chips, energy and the ability to serve tokens cheaply. In episode 127 the OpenAI chip built with Broadcom was judged through the economics of inference: a custom chip matters if it lowers the cost of tokens and the dependence on a supplier. Episode 136 added reports of a Meta chip and Apple's search for acquisitions, and the conclusion became general: control over chips is turning into control over the product.