Doug O'Laughlin
Semiconductor analyst; writes Fabricated Knowledge on the chip industry and the companies in it.
Doug O'Laughlin did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
Latest Newsletter
What they believe
-
Cheaper AI will be used more in the long run and still strand the hardware built for it in the short run, exactly as unlit fibre did after 2001.
And so, while the Jevons paradox case was 100% correct in the long run, 97% of the fiber laid in 2001 was unlit.
fabricatedknowledge.comSaid 29 Jan 2025This on korrents
-
Changed their mind Chips made on older process nodes have to get more expensive, because a new fab cannot make money selling at prices a fully depreciated fab set.
Before There are obvious pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can’t turn a profit selling a lagging-edge chip at the price that was previously dictated by a fully depreciated fab. Prices have to go up.
Now The COVID super-cycle, plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics, points to a forever glut.
Said 4 Sept 2025This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These one: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
13 August
27 July
19 May
15 April
16 February
16 September 2025
15 September 2025
10 September 2025
8 September 2025
4 September 2025
-
Their words, before
There are obvious pricing problems in this scenario. With a new fab, a company can’t turn a profit selling a lagging-edge chip at the price that was previously dictated by a fully depreciated fab. Prices have to go up.
Their words now
The COVID super-cycle, plus a new China supply line that does not care about capacity economics, points to a forever glut.
3 September 2025
25 August 2025
20 August 2025
15 August 2025
13 August 2025
12 August 2025
11 August 2025
30 July 2025
25 July 2025
21 July 2025
15 July 2025
11 July 2025
Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 12 beliefs, 1 changed mind — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Cheaper AI will be used more in the long run and still strand the hardware built for it in the short run, exactly as unlit fibre did after 2001.
And so, while the Jevons paradox case was 100% correct in the long run, 97% of the fiber laid in 2001 was unlit.
DeepSeek: Is this Jevon's Cope? Said 29 Jan 2025
Every semiconductor shortage is followed by a glut, because capacity arrives in lumps long after the price signal that ordered it.
A glut follows every semiconductor shortage.
Capital Cycles and AI Said 13 Jan 2025
The AI build-out is not yet a bubble, because it lacks the self-reinforcing feedback loop that drove the railway and telecom manias.
What prevents this from being a broad-based bubble is that we are missing a critical feedback loop from the announcement's impact, like network growth or land value.
Capital Cycles and AI Said 13 Jan 2025
Show 9 more
If the AI build-out does become a bubble, power and data centres are the assets that will carry it.
In today’s world, I think the increase in self-fulfilling asset prices will be due to power and data centers.
Capital Cycles and AI Said 13 Jan 2025
Air cooling has run out of headroom for AI racks, so liquid cooling is now a requirement rather than an upgrade.
The critical change that makes this all possible is liquid cooling.
The Data Center is the New Compute Unit: Nvidia's Vision for System-Level Scaling Said 4 Apr 2024
Moore's Law is a fractal: the same squeeze that shrank the transistor is now being applied to the rack.
Moore’s Law is a fractal, and the principles that apply to nanometers apply to racks.
The Data Center is the New Compute Unit: Nvidia's Vision for System-Level Scaling Said 4 Apr 2024
The copper backplane inside a rack is the new advanced packaging, and scaling it is where the next generation of performance comes from.
The copper backplane in the data center rack is effectively the new advanced packaging in the system-level Moore’s Law race.
The Data Center is the New Compute Unit: Nvidia's Vision for System-Level Scaling Said 4 Apr 2024
High-bandwidth memory costs roughly twice the capital per bit that ordinary DRAM does, because its dies are twice the size.
HBM has the unique dynamic of costing a lot more than traditional DRAM, and the dynamic 2x higher capex is driven by the twice as large die size for HBM.
Why HBM is the Hottest Thing in Memory Said 3 Mar 2024
The rush to build high-bandwidth memory starves ordinary DRAM and NAND of capacity, so AI demand tightens the memory markets it never touches.
They will shift what cash they generate to HBM capacity, which will keep supply growth in DRAM and NAND low.
Why HBM is the Hottest Thing in Memory Said 3 Mar 2024
Chips are getting more expensive mainly because they take more process steps, not because the tools got dearer.
The primary driver is not only the rising costs of tools such as EUV, but the rising number of steps to make a chip.
The Rising Tide of Semiconductor Cost Said 22 Nov 2021
TSMC can pass its rising costs on because at the leading edge its customers have nowhere else to go.
Given the concentration of fabrication power at TSMC, customers really don’t have another option.
The Rising Tide of Semiconductor Cost Said 22 Nov 2021
Chipmakers are consolidating into a few strategically important firms, so a fab is now a geopolitical asset rather than an industrial one.
Finally, not just old chips and new chips, but the companies that make the chips (semiconductor fabs) are becoming more consolidated and more strategic.
The Rising Tide of Semiconductor Cost Said 22 Nov 2021
Beliefs others hold too
Air cooling has run out of headroom for AI racks, so liquid cooling is now a requirement rather than an upgrade. 3 hold this
The critical change that makes this all possible is liquid cooling.
The Data Center is the New Compute Unit: Nvidia's Vision for System-Level Scaling Said 4 Apr 2024
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 11 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Loved The Asianometry Newsletter
Well written and interesting explainers about a variety of topics, from Asia, to semiconductors, and my favorite youtube channel!
Loved Apricitas Economics
One of the best macroeconomic newsletters I follow. Seriously just knows how to lay the logic out in charts and graphs.
Loved The Chip Letter
History is where I start almost always in the semiconductor industry, and no one does it quite like the Chip Letter!
Show 8 more
Loved Kyla's Newsletter
Kyla writes some of the best pieces that are easy to understand and digestible. Macroeconomics for everyone
Loved China Talk
Straightforward coverage of all things China. Jordan's one of best, and I've been a long time fan and supporter!
Loved Nongaap Investing
The GOAT. This sub has first lien over my rent in my budget.
Loved Liberty's Highlights
My favorite aggregator of financial and scientific information!
Liked Exponential View
Recommends TMT Breakout
Literally helps me, a guy who covers semis, keep up with Semis. Keep it up.
Recommends Citrini Research
Citrini has a good pulse on all things in markets. Worth reading!
Loved Yet Another Value Blog
The best single stock newsletter in the game.
Where they publish
Site SemiAnalysis The chip research firm he writes for. Has a feed; the card shows only his own pieces.
Recent
- xAI’s Colossus 2 – First Gigawatt Datacenter In The World, Unique RL Methodology, Capital Raise 16 Sept 2025 Much has been written about xAI’s Colossus 1. The Memphis build belongs in the history books: the largest AI training cluster, erected from scratch in 122 days. With roughly 200,000 H100/H200s and ~30,000 GB200 NVL72, i…
- Another Giant Leap: The Rubin CPX Specialized Accelerator & Rack 10 Sept 2025 Nvidia announced the Rubin CPX, a solution that is specifically designed to be optimized for the prefill phase, with the single-die Rubin CPX heavily emphasizing compute FLOPS over memory bandwidth. This is a game chang…
- Huawei Ascend Production Ramp: Die Banks, TSMC Continued Production, HBM is The Bottleneck 8 Sept 2025 Compute is the lifeblood of AI. He who controls the spice controls the universe the compute will control the production of tokens and reap the benefits of AI. Without compute you do not have a seat at the table. The Uni…
Show 7 more
- Amazon’s AI Resurgence: AWS & Anthropic’s Multi-Gigawatt Trainium Expansion 3 Sept 2025 Two-and-a-half years ago, we flagged a looming “cloud crisis” at AWS. Today, the evidence has mounted. AWS is the crown jewel of the Amazon empire, generating ~60% of group profits, and dominating the lucrative Cloud Co…
- H100 vs GB200 NVL72 Training Benchmarks – Power, TCO, and Reliability Analysis, Software Improvement Over Time 20 Aug 2025 Frontier model training has pushed GPUs and AI systems to their absolute limits, making cost, efficiency, power, performance per TCO, and reliability central to the discussion on effective training. The Hopper vs Blackw…
- GPT-5 Set the Stage for Ad Monetization and the SuperApp 13 Aug 2025 To many power users (Pro and Plus), GPT5 was a disappointing release. But with closer inspection, the real release is focused on the vast majority of ChatGPT’s users, which is the 700m+ free userbase that is growing rap…
- Scaling the Memory Wall: The Rise and Roadmap of HBM 12 Aug 2025 The first portion of this report will explain HBM, the manufacturing process, dynamics between vendors, KVCache offload, disaggregated prefill decode, and wide / high-rank EP. The rest of the report will dive deeply int…
- Robotics Levels of Autonomy 30 Jul 2025 Robots have powered manufacturing for decades, yet they stayed single-purpose and thrived only in perfect settings. Previous attempts at intelligent machines overpromised and underdelivered. But they were too early. Tod…
- Intel 18A Details & Cost, Future of DRAM 4F2 vs 3D, Backside Power Adoption (or Not), China’s FlipFET, Digital Twins from Atoms to Fabs, and More 21 Jul 2025 Long time readers will recall that SemiAnalysis covers more than just datacenters and AMD. Today we’re back to semiconductors with a tech-focused roundup of the best from this year’s VLSI conference, the premiere design…
- Meta Superintelligence – Leadership Compute, Talent, and Data 11 Jul 2025 Meta’s shocking purchase of 49% of Scale AI at a ~$30B valuation shows that money is of no concern for the $100B annual cashflow ad machine. Despite seemingly unlimited resources, Meta has been falling behind foundation…
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Newsletter Fabricated Knowledge His newsletter on semiconductors and the companies that make them. Has a feed.
Recent
- The Cost of Time and AI Timelines 13 Aug 2026 Financing anything is just pulling forward the future.
- Close but Not Quite 27 Jul 2026 It's not the end of this washout.
- Nvidia should buyback stock 19 May 2026 A quick take into earnings
Show 9 more
- Engels' Pause and the Permanent Underclass 15 Apr 2026 The first permanent underclass, and what that would look like today.
- Another Conversation with Val Bercovici Memory Markets 16 Feb 2026 General chatter about memory, agents, and more!
- Oracle and Animal Spirits 15 Sept 2025 Oracle's result is the second most impactful earnings result this cycle. And I think it's a critical turning point.
- Lagging Edge will have a Permanent Glut 4 Sept 2025 The direction is clear, the lagging edge with exposure to Chinese markets will have a glut.
- Foundry Idea(s) 25 Aug 2025 Not one but two foundry ideas today.
- Intel's One True Stakeholder is Here 15 Aug 2025 What an Intel with Government help would look like.
- Earnings: Hyperscalers, AMD, ALAB, ANET 11 Aug 2025
- Earnings: TSMC, NXPI, AEHR, GOOG, TXN, VAT, VICR 25 Jul 2025 Was way too late on AEHR
- Software Follow Up 15 Jul 2025 Let's refine the thesis. Sorry guys, the net cope means I'm probably going to be right.
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.