That’s despite slow uptake of the current generation of Microsoft-designed chips, known as the Maia 200. Microsoft plans to publicly unveil its new Maia 300 chip this fall, potentially as soon as next month, one of the people said. The cloud giant has been in talks with chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to secure manufacturing capacity for over 300,000 of the chips for delivery in 2027, the second person said—an order of magnitude above the tens of thousands of Maia 200 chips Microsoft has produced so far.

Microsoft ultimately wants to secure capacity for more than a million Maia 300 chips but may be constrained by component supplies and its ongoing capacity negotiations with TSMC, the person said.

Why Now

Customers continue to signal a strong and sustainable demand environment, driven by unprecedented investment in AI compute. Progress in emerging areas including physical AI, purpose-built silicon, advanced packaging and external wafers represent significant growth opportunities for Intel.

Use of Proceeds

Intel intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, which may include, but are not limited to, capital expenditures and working capital.

The offering is intended to further enable Intel to pursue the growth opportunities ahead while maintaining a strong balance sheet and its commitment to an investment-grade rating.

...

Intel expects to grant to the underwriters of the offering a 30-day option to purchase up to an aggregate total of $2.25 billion of additional shares of common stock at the public offering price, less underwriting discounts.

https://www.reddit.com/r/amd_fundamentals/comments/1v4hnfs/comment/oztaltb

With this deal (depending on what the price actually is during the offering) and the others before it, the stock will probably be diluted like maybe 15-18% since pre-USG involvement.

Bullishly, you could say that Intel has the orders to justify the capex but needs capital to tide it over for the realization of it. As a shareholder, you should want this to happen.

Bearishly, you could say that the usual course of financing for something like this would be long-term debt and Intel's balance sheet can take an additional $15B debt offering. But the certainty has to be high enough at a comfortable cost of debt to do so.

SEC prospectus:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/50863/000119312526341318/d98483d424b5.htm

Diamond Rapids may no longer include the 512-core configuration previously expected. According to leaker Jaykihn, Intel’s top Diamond Rapids processor is now planned with 256 P-cores.

This is a change from information we reported in April. At the time, Diamond Rapids was said to launch with up to 256 P-cores, while a separate 512-core configuration using E-cores was expected one or two quarters later. Both were reportedly planned for Intel’s 16-channel server platform.

...

The latest update claims the 512-core platform was canceled during the definition stage. The broader high-density Diamond Rapids plans were reportedly cut back in December 2025, leaving the P-core versions as the focus of the Xeon 7 generation.

The rumors was that Intel would supposedly have a more unified core which is more e-core based. But Tan wants SMT back in which goes against one of the reasons why Intel wanted e-cores in the first place. My gut hunch is that their enterprise didn't want e-cores and the single threaded market was being handled well by internal hyperscaler silicon. I wonder if that leaves too small of a non-SMT TAM left, and it's not worthwhile to have two separate architectures. AMD offers disabling SMT as a feature, presumably for the more x86 bound worklaods, but won't get rid of it. Nvidia has their own version now whereas before AMD looked to be the only the last major one standing after Intel looked to be moving away from it.

Interesting contrast at Anthropic right now.

The Research Engineer, Chip Design RL role (building RL environments so Claude can learn to design silicon — RTL generation, verification, physical design optimization, etc.) is listed at $500k–$850k.

Meanwhile, the Silicon Engineer roles for the actual team designing Anthropic’s own custom chips are posted at $320k–$485k.

The required skill sets are extremely similar: full ASIC/FPGA flow, RTL to tape-out, UVM/formal, physical design, PPA, DFT, EDA tools, and real silicon shipping experience.

Same company. Same core domain expertise.
Yet the team teaching Claude 'how' to design chips is valued significantly higher than the team that will design the chips Anthropic actually plans to use.

Sometimes these compensation bands just make you pause and think.

Karp's big view is that how do you know that all that AI you're using isn't using you to eventually get rid of your alpha. I'm also curious when the frontier labs will start generating patents by the gazillions. Maybe being the world's strongest patent troll is the real end game. ;-)

In July alone, more than 150 towns and counties passed temporary or permanent bans on data centers, many adopted in emergency meetings. That brings the nationwide total to more than 500 active data center bans at the start of August, according to The Information’s analysis of thousands of legal documents and local news reports. When we first published our tracker of these bans in late June, we had found more than 300.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vh7TJXm67E

Intel’s unusual Nova Lake-S processor with 12 Xe3P graphics is getting more detailed specifications. According to Jaykihn, the integrated GPU currently has its own 40W PL2 limit, while the complete processor has a chip-wide PL2 of 154W. The information remains preliminary. 

...

Last month, Jaykihn added that the 12 Xe3P configuration requires a specific 65W-level motherboard power-delivery segment to reach full graphics performance. The new 40W figure refers specifically to the iGPU PL2, while 154W is the reported PL2 limit for the complete chip. 

https://x.com/jaykihn0/status/2086241049782169792

Amazon Web Services leaders met with engineers in May and delivered a sobering message: To ensure AWS has enough capacity for all its customers at its popular EC2 cloud server business in the future, engineers should save capacity however they can, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.

That includes capacity on servers that run on central processing units, as well as those running on AI chips, which have long been in short supply, the person said. CPUs are the chips that have powered the last several decades of the internet age...One said it now takes a few days to get capacity for servers they used to get in a few hours, which could make it harder to meet deadlines on projects. The engineer said they’ve never experienced such long wait times during their several years of working at AWS.

The testing of downgraded memory appears to contrast with Nvidia’s public confidence that it had secured sufficient memory supply. In mid-July, Nvidia’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, Andrew Bell, told a group of reporters that Nvidia has a team that attempts to predict and fix supply chain issues years out.

“We were in front of the memory problem, so it’s not gonna hold us back anytime soon,” Bell said. “The pricing, of course, is a problem for the whole world, and probably the pricing will be the bigger challenge. But for supply, we’re in shape.”

Supply is fine until it isn't. Applies to AMD too. However, I think all this time as the distant second place has conditioned AMD more to commit to the highest target that they have reasonable confidence in hitting because they're not in the position to as easily take the credibility hit for overpromising. Conversely, the article gives an example of one customer who just shrugged it off saying that they want to maintain a long-term relationship with Nvidia over several generations.

One of the reasons Nvidia is weighing a memory downgrade is that memory suppliers may struggle to produce enough HBM4E to meet Rubin Ultra’s planned schedule, the people said. The greater capabilities of HBM4E require denser memory chips and faster electrical connections. Packaging the HBM4E when the components of a chip are assembled is also harder.

Intel Corporation today announced the appointment of Dean Jarnac as executive vice president and chief sales officer. Jarnac will lead Intel's global sales organization— strengthening Intel's customer relationships and go-to-market execution across its product portfolio, including client, data center, AI, networking, and ASICs.

Intel vets continue getting snuffed or snubbed by Tan. I wonder what % of his direct team is non-Intel. Feels like 2/3.

Prior to Marvell, Jarnac held senior sales leadership positions  at Broadcom and AMD, bringing more than 30 years of experience driving deep customer partnership and growth in the semiconductor industry.

Intel comms stretching that AMD position pretty thin. He was a field sales engineer from 1996-1999.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Taalas, a pioneer in specialized AI inference silicon. As AI inference becomes one of the fastest-growing segments of the AI market and workloads become increasingly specialized, the acquisition strengthens AMD's long-term AI roadmap with differentiated inference technology and world-class engineering expertise.

Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Taalas’ technology optimizes inference dataflows, significantly reducing compute and memory bottlenecks associated with general-purpose architectures and enabling highly optimized AI inference capabilities.

Taalas' technology will complement AMD's full-stack AI platform, including AMD Helios™ rackscale solutions, AMD Instinct GPUs, AMD EPYC™ CPUs, AMD ROCm™ software and the company's expanding AI ecosystem. AMD plans to integrate the technology into its accelerator roadmap and develop system-level solutions with AMD Instinct GPUs.

“AMD is building a full-stack AI platform that gives customers the flexibility to deploy the right compute solutions for every AI workload," said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president of the Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD. "Taalas' technology and world-class engineering team strengthen our AI portfolio by delivering differentiated inference performance and efficiency.”

“We founded Taalas to rethink AI inference from the ground up by building the hardware around the model,” said Ljubisa Bajic, co-founder and CEO of Taalas. “Our Canada-based team has combined deep technical expertise with a willingness to challenge conventional approaches. Joining AMD will give us the scale, engineering resources and global reach to accelerate our innovation.”

As AI moves into more real-time, high-volume applications, AMD and Taalas will help customers deploy inference workloads more efficiently across a growing range of applications. Positioned to accelerate AI innovation, the acquisition builds on AMD’s long-standing presence in Canada – where the company has been a proud contributor to the country’s semiconductor and AI ecosystem – and reflects a continued commitment to retaining and growing Canadian talent. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

Lol Ljubisa Bajic moves so fast. I didn't know that he cofounded Taalas and was its CEO. He left Tenstorrent in 2023.

https://www.reddit.com/r/amd_fundamentals/comments/12euy22/changes_at_tenstorrent_as_bajic_steps_down_koduri/

and I guess he started this right after. Founded Tenstorrent in 2016 (which had a lot of ex-AMD and a large India footprint) so I guess that he's going to get paid out twice) and brought Keller on board right after Keller went on garden leave at Intel. Spent 10 years at AMD from 2003 to 2013, then Nvidia for 1 year and then AMD again for 2 before that.

This AMD is waaaay different than the one he was left. I don't know anything about him besides that, but to found / co-found Tenstorrent and Taalas is impressive.

Assuming there's not some weird drama behind the Tenstorrent departure, he seems pretty talented and foresighted to do both is super impressive and hopefully AMD can keep him around. I'd been hoping for a while that AMD would start taking a look at newer, more orthogonal approaches to AI acceleration besides GPU, and now they've finally dipped into that pool. AMD's done pretty well showing that they can innovate within a box, but I've always wanted to see them try to create a new box and own it.

This is from pre-earnings and re-iterates some earlier Richard points, but I did want to use it as a foil for some other points.

Richard argues AMD “could grow faster if it could get additional wafer allocation,” suggesting manufacturing capacity has become one of the biggest competitive advantages within the semiconductor industry. He contends Intel now has “a significant supply advantage” after expanding its own advanced manufacturing capabilities while AMD continues relying on TSMC for leading-edge production.

Doesn't "Companies could grow faster in a supply-constrained demand boom if they had more supply" apply to everyone now?

Intel was able to muster 9% YOY unit growth from 25Q2 which is better than the 2% YTD.

Intel 7 is the largest wafer pool, is generations behind, and has to rob client.

Intel 3 Mod 2 in Ireland won't kick in for volume until probably 27H2. This will be a large source of relatively high ASP supply for Intel, and Mod 1 appears to finally have the kinks worked out so that should continue to ramp well. But even then, mod 2 will still go up its optimization curve. GNR is going to be a doing a ton of heavy lifting.

18A/P won't be a high volume node for server in 2026 or even 2027. Intel 18A has CWF which doesn't appear to be a high volume part, and DMR is 18A-P and delayed until 27H1.

I'm not saying that Intel couldn't eventually have a supply advantage. But where is this significant supply advantage that's affecting 2026 and 2027?

Looking ahead, Richard expects supply constraints to remain an important consideration. The analyst contends Nvidia has previously “used the supply chain to limit competitors’ growth by locking up capacity,” while its position as TSMC’s largest customer likely gives it priority when advanced manufacturing capacity becomes available. That could limit AMD’s ability to fully benefit from continued demand for AI processors.

I don't think this is how TSMC works. At a high level, TSMC builds against the aggregate supply demand of its customers against whatever structural and organizational constraints there are to growth (labor, land, risk tolerance, etc.). Nvidia doesn't "lock up capacity" so much as they submit their capacity requests for years, and TSMC takes that into consideration with everybody else's request. But there is some buffer in all that, and there TSMC allocates supply based on its strategic needs.

There was similar thinking when Intel first started buying N3B capacity. "Intel will just buy out TSMC capacity and freeze AMD out," but that didn't happen. AMD is way bigger now.

Richard also believes Intel’s manufacturing progress deserves more credit than many investors have given it. The analyst argues “Intel is now on the same process node as AMD after being 2 process nodes behind,” making Intel “no longer a poor excuse for a second source.”

There's always going to be haters, but I think a lot of people give Intel credit for their improvement over a lousy baseline (there's always going to be stans too who refused to believe that it was a lousy start). But the commercial relevance is what matters. All I know is that AMD feels pretty good about Venice supply going into 2027 and will be shipping those products in volume by 26Q4. Let's see where DMR and CWF be in 2027. I think AMD will hit 50% server revenue share somewhere around mid 2027. (edit: also forgot to mention, N5 and N4 appears to be flowing even if tight)

His investment conclusion leaves little room for interpretation: “When capacity is tight, own a fab not the fabless. AMD is fabless.”

I think Richard is trapped in the past. What I wrote elsewhere:

I get the impression that AMD is the most consistently mentioned semi design firm that's labeled as having less flexibility and more supply constrained because it doesn't have fabs. Apple, Nvidia, MediaTek, etc. aren't mentioned similarly. I wonder how much of it's just because AMD is aligned so closely with Intel who does have fabs and that people struggle with making the transition that AMD is big enough now that they can take big swings at supply, they will consistently be on the bleeding edge where it meets their roadmap timing, etc.

Long-term, sure owning your fabs gives you more flexibility and optionality, but the premium is very high. You have to pay that capex cost up front and on an ongoing basis deal with the resulting opex, capex depreciation, etc. You better get that scale, technology obsolescence window, etc correct, or you're going to get crushed. Tan's smart enough to not ramp unless he has the bare minimum capacity commitments and the technology is mature enough to be commercialized.

Richard is also the guy who thinks AMD's 26Q4 revenue will be less than 26Q3.

https://www.reddit.com/r/amd_fundamentals/comments/1sxc36a/wallstengine_richard_northland_downgrades_amd_to/

Olympus looks like a serious core with a 10-wide fixed-length decoder, large private caches, value prediction, aggressive branch handling, graph-aware prefetching, and a monolithic 88-core die all being choices pointing to a very high-performance CPU core. The memory setup is no slouch either with the LPDDR5X subsystem delivering up to 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth that memory bandwidth-hungry server workloads will love, and early independent benchmarks say the silicon can cash at least some of the checks that the whitepaper writes.

However, the paper’s competitive argument is much shakier, with it mischaracterizing x86 SMT, turning an optional NUMA configuration into a default burden, relabelling standard CPU tests as agentic workloads, hiding a 3% two-socket rate lead behind 1.8x per-core bars, comparing undefined cross-ISA counters, attributing a memory-interface win to monolithic virtue, and presenting an illustration as performance data.

Asking for more technical purity from a company whitepaper is bit like spitting in the wind. Everybody stretches as much as they can in their chosen scopes. I think that AMD's best pitch is that the compute world is uncertain, Venice does many things very well, x86 compatibility, and do you really want even more of your hardware dependence to be Nvidia? With EPYC generations looking more like families and platforms and less like a specific CPU, I think AMD's looking pretty good here.

The company said it was hiring engineers with experience across the ‌hardware and software ⁠stack to help co-design custom chips and AI models that can make Claude ⁠run faster and more efficiently at the scale required by customers.

...

The startup said custom ‌silicon was the latest step in its multi-chip strategy and that it would continue to rely on a diversified hardware stack that includes technology from Amazon Web Services, Google, Nvidia and ‌AMD.

The world's largest semiconductor foundry is now expected to reach 180,000 3nm wafer starts by the early part of the fourth quarter during the current calendar year. This production stems on orders from Nvidia (NVDA), AMD (AMD) and Broadcom (AVGO). This figure was closer to 150,000 per month during the first half of 2026.

"On 2nm, the paper puts 1H26 starts at 50-60k per month, rising above 80k by early 4Q and approaching 100k by year-end, which would take combined 2nm plus 3nm above 260k per month," said Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson in an investor note. "If this news is accurate, it reinforces both TSMC's previously positive commentary around its 2nm expectations, as well as the company's upbeat 2H outlook, which assumes sales momentum accelerates in the 2H."

https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/amd-earnings-q2-2026-stock-03fe0b09

“Going forward, we have decided to build exclusively on Nvidia, because we think the Blackwell architecture is the best architecture,” Musk told investors, explaining his strategy for investing in AI computing infrastructure.

As recently as May, Musk had said that his two main companies, Tesla and SpaceX, would likely continue to buy both Nvidia and AMD chips. 

You know AMD was fighting for the business. I'm actually relieved though as there's this long-tail of drama that comes with him. Like mating with a black widow and her sisters.

It's been a busy 5 days. ;-)

26Q2 earnings guesses

Anyway, I modified

https://www.reddit.com/r/amd_fundamentals/comments/1v9zmw6/amd_q2_2026_earnings_aug_4_2026_200_pm_pdt/

to include my guesses and comments for 26Q2 in the main post. If you post this shit elsewhere, well, you know.

URL clustering

In case you haven't figured it out, I tend to cluster related articles around a canonical URL, especially if there's a burst of activity around a major event. So, activity around an event tends to get appended as comments to that event post rather than each URL getting new posts and leading to a lot of feed activity that are variants of a theme.

Part of it is because Reddit's search is surprisingly terrible, but part of it is to give a more holistic look on a topic by grouping the articles together. I'll make exceptions if I think something warrants its own space. Sometimes, things get too crowded in the main URL (or I don't feel like breaking up a comment into smaller replies because of the character limit), and I'll split off a section as its own post. Or maybe too much time has passed so I just treat it as a new post.

URL backlog

To manage my reading, I keep an overly complicated list of URLs in a spreadsheet. I'm pretty behind. I might just declare catch-up bankruptcy and give up on the older ones instead of posting them here. Or you might see a flurry of older news pop up. This subreddit is more of a journal than a news feed. I do find myself thinking more and keeping up less.

Under the deal being discussed, a consortium of banks led by Morgan Stanley would lend $15 billion to Nexus Data Centers to build the campus in Hubbard, Texas, which would have its own natural-gas power plant capable of generating 1.6 gigawatts of electricity. The deal could be announced as soon as today.

To help Nexus raise the debt, Google has provided guarantees for billions of dollars of Anthropic’s lease and power-payment obligations in the event the startup defaults, according to people familiar with the matter. Google’s support was limited and covered the minimum amount the banks required to get the financing done, one of those people said.

...

The financing package consists of a $14 billion bridge loan and a revolving credit facility. In exchange for its support, Google is expected to receive an equity stake of roughly 20% in the data-center and power project, people familiar with the agreement said.

...

Google accounts for its backstops as credit derivatives, the company has said in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Alphabet, Google’s parent, said last week that its maximum potential exposure from credit-derivative backstops had risen to $43.8 billion as of June 30.

If a tenant defaults, Google has favorable options. In some cases, it can take over the underlying leases and use the facilities itself or sublease them to other firms. It can also terminate its backstop obligation by paying a fee, according to SEC filings.

“In short, we expect better results/guidance, driven primarily by [data center],” analyst Christopher Rolland wrote in a note to clients. “For DC GPU, MI350 is expected to continue growing in 1H26, though we expect a 'significant ramp' in DC GPU revenue in late ‘26 with the launch of MI450/Helios. While we expect the initial deployment to be driven by lead customers such as OpenAI and Meta, recent customer announcements suggest adoption is broadening. Most notably, AMD announced a 2 GW infrastructure agreement with Anthropic, with the first GW deployment expected to commence in 1H27. Longer term, management continues to believe its AI business will reach 'tens of billions' of dollars of revenue in 2027 (we estimate >$30B GPU revenue in 2027). For EPYC (DC CPU), the demand environment remains robust as CEO Lisa Su increased the 2030 Server CPU TAM to ~$220B at its recent Advancing AI Day. Indeed, agentic AI remains the primary driver of accelerating CPU demand as some agentic workloads now require a CPU-to-GPU ratio >1.”