The Read

How AI actually works — one short read at a time.

Plain-English explainers on the physical side of AI: what’s running short, why, and who gains. No jargon.

Energy5 min readJul 9, 2026

AI’s next bottleneck is electricity

Chips and memory got the headlines. The quieter constraint now setting the pace for the whole AI build-out is power — how much the grid can deliver, and how fast.

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Infrastructure6 min readJul 9, 2026

AI networking and optics: how thousands of GPUs become one machine

A modern AI cluster is thousands of accelerators forced to behave like a single computer. The wiring that makes that possible — fabrics, switch silicon and above all optics — has become one of the fastest-growing corners of the whole build-out.

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All7 min readJul 9, 2026

How to invest in the AI supply chain

The winners of the AI build-out aren’t only the famous chip names — they’re spread across power, memory, packaging, foundry and networking. The way to find them is to start with the chain, not the ticker.

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Chips5 min readJul 8, 2026

CoWoS: the packaging bottleneck almost nobody talks about

Between the chip and the memory sits a step most people never hear about — advanced packaging. For a while, it was the single tightest link in the entire AI supply chain.

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Chips5 min readJul 7, 2026

The foundry bottleneck: why it all runs through TSMC and ASML

Almost every leading-edge AI chip is made in the same few factories, on machines from a single company. That concentration is the deepest chokepoint in the whole chain.

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All6 min readJun 30, 2026

AI is a physics problem, not a software problem

The market prices AI like software — infinite, frictionless, winner-take-all. But the thing actually limiting AI is physical, finite, and slow. That gap is where the opportunities hide.

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All5 min readJun 29, 2026

Don’t read the headline — read the bottleneck

By the time an AI story is news, the move has usually happened. The signal isn’t in the announcement; it’s in which physical part the announcement just made tighter.

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Chips4 min readJun 22, 2026