Keep An Eye On Norway's Next Oil Production Report

Two from OilPrice. First up, August 20: 

• Norway’s crude output fell nearly 10% year-over-year to 1.776 million bpd in July, while total liquids dropped 9.1%.
• The decline comes at a sensitive time, with 8.3 million bpd of Gulf production shut in and markets increasingly reliant on secure non-Gulf supplies.
• The weakness may be temporary, reflecting summer maintenance and a strong 2025 comparison, making Norway’s next production report particularly important. 

Norway’s crude oil production averaged 1.776 million barrels per day in July, according to preliminary figures from the Norwegian Offshore Directorate.

The country also produced 183,000 barrels per day of natural gas liquids and 17,000 barrels per day of condensate, bringing total liquids production to 1.976 million barrels per day.

The year-over-year comparison is striking. Norway produced 1.971 million barrels per day of crude in July 2025, according to the Directorate’s latest revised figures. Crude output was therefore down by approximately 195,000 barrels per day, or nearly 10%.... 

....MUCH MORE

 

And August 24:

Norway Vows to Keep Drilling for Oil and Gas in the Arctic

Norway plans to continue exploring for oil and gas in its Arctic waters in the Barents Sea regardless of whether the European Union supports or lifts a moratorium on Arctic drilling, Norway’s Energy Minister Terje Aasland told Reuters.

Norway, not an EU member but a close ally and the single biggest gas supplier to Europe, pursues increasing its oil and gas supply to meet demand in Europe, which has had to contend with the bans on Russian oil and gas imports amid two energy crises in four years.

The EU, for its part, currently has a moratorium on drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic.

The EU’s moratorium on Arctic drilling was enacted in 2021 due to the bloc’s climate commitments and environmental concerns. The ban does not allow drilling in Norway’s northern parts of the Barents Sea, which is estimated to contain most of the remaining Norwegian oil and gas resources....

....MUCH MORE 

 Economics is the study of choice.

"Nvidia’s $20 billion bet on Groq’s LPU tech sure looks like it was a good one."

 From The Register, August 24:

What Nvidia's first Groq 3 LPU benchmarks tell us about its $20B gamble
Gemma 4 31B performance tests offer a best-case scenario for next-gen dataflow accelerators 

Nvidia’s $20 billion bet on Groq’s LPU tech sure looks like it was a good one. On Monday, the GPU giant offered the first glimpse of just how big a speedup its Groq 3-based LPX racks will provide.

In an independent benchmark conducted by Artificial Analysis, Nvidia’s LPX rack systems managed to churn out 3,400 tokens a second (tok/s) with a 100,000-token input sequence in Google’s Gemma 4 31B model.

According to Nvidia, this makes it 4x faster than the nearest alternative platform, which going off Artificial Analysis’ leaderboard would be a direct dig at Cerebras, which managed a still impressive 882 tok/s under the same conditions.

Acquihired by Nvidia in late December, Groq has LPUs that feature an SRAM-heavy dataflow architecture designed specifically for high-performance inference serving. Unlike traditional datacenter GPUs, which rely on high-speed DRAM memory tech like GDDR7 and HBM4, Groq’s chips rely entirely on a large pool of on-die SRAM orders of magnitude faster than even the best HBM stacks (around 2.75 TB/s each) available today. And when it comes to inference, memory bandwidth is the bottleneck to beat....

....MUCH MORE  

Previously:

September 17, 2025 - Chips: Nvidia Challenger AI Inference Co., Groq, Raises $750 Million At Post-Money $6.9 Billion Valuation

We don't have much posted on Groq, only a half-dozen mentions in general articles on inference companies including SambaNova and Cerebras. One reason we do have it flagged is that the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel was an early investor. Another investor is Disruptive who seem to have an eye for pre-public companies:

...Palantir, Airbnb, Spotify, Shield AI, Hims, Databricks, Stripe, Slack...

That's from Groq's September 17 press release, "Groq Raises $750 Million as Inference Demand Surges".

We have quite a bit more on the company in the link-vault, including this piece from The Technologist substack, February 13: Deep Dive 4: Groq (Private)

December 26, 2025 - "Nvidia Licenses Groq's AI Chip Tech, Grabs Top Execs In Not-Quite Takeover" (NVDA)

December 27, 2025 - "NVIDIA’s Christmas Eve 'Hackquisition' Miracle" (NVDA; GOOG)

December 28, 2025 - "Nvidia's Groq deal underscores how the AI chip giant uses its massive balance sheet to 'maintain dominance'" (NVDA)  

March 21, 2026 - "Nvidia Finally Admits Why It Shelled Out $20 Billion For Groq" (and Senator Warren swings by) NVDA

"Broadcom Credit Risk Soars on Mega AI Debt Financing Backstops" (AVGO)

From Bloomberg, August 24:

Bond traders have ramped up measures of credit risk associated with Broadcom Inc. as it backstops mega financing packages for the buildout of artificial intelligence.

The yields on Broadcom’s 5.15% bonds that mature in 2031 rose about 14 basis points so far in August. The price of its five-year credit default swaps, meanwhile, climbed 28 basis points over the same period — a larger amount than both Oracle Corp. and SpaceX.

Broadcom is in talks to raise more than $60 billion in debt for an AI chip financing deal that is expected to benefit Anthropic PBC and other companies. While the proposal is still being ironed out, Broadcom could potentially guarantee a portion of a senior-secured tranche.

That’s after it struck an agreement earlier this year to backstop most of a $35 billion debt package while investors including Apollo Global Management Inc. and Blackstone Inc. financed the purchase of custom AI chips to lease to Anthropic.

“The rise in Broadcom’s CDS seems to me is more specific to their balance sheet than overall angst over AI investment,” said Tony Trzcinka, investment grade portfolio manager at Impax Asset Management, adding it was likely related to expectations of additional financial guarantees by Broadcom for chip-financing deals.

 

The use of guarantees and other forms of financial support have gained pace this year as tech companies invest billions to expand cloud-computing capacity. Under these agreements, chipmakers like Broadcom or Nvidia Corp. are effectively lending the strength of their balance sheets to their clients to boost their purchasing ability....

....MORE 

"Hedge Funds’ Cash Treasury Holdings Reach $2 Trillion"

Any forced unwind of those positions could cause some serious ructions.

From the blog of the U.S. Treasury's Office of Financial Research, August 19: 

Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent official positions or policy of the Office of Financial Research or the U.S. Department of the Treasury.¹

Hedge funds have reemerged as significant participants in the U.S. Treasury market. As of year-end 2025, their cash Treasury holdings reached $2 trillion, nearly three times the level from five years earlier. In comparison, marketable Treasury debt outstanding increased 29% to $28.9 trillion over the same period. As a result, hedge funds’ share of the cash Treasury market reached a record 7% (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Hedge Funds’ Long Cash Treasury Holdings as a Share of Marketable Treasury Debt Outstanding (percent)

Note: Data as of Q4 2025. Numerator is the sum of long Treasury exposures (cash + derivatives) reported on SEC Form PF less the notional value of leveraged funds’ long and spreading positions in Treasury futures and options. Denominator is total marketable Treasury debt outstanding at market value.

Sources: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Office of Financial Research Hedge Fund Monitor, Authors’ estimate

A major driver of this trend may be the cash futures basis trade, or, simply, the basis trade, which is a relative value strategy where hedge funds take offsetting positions in Treasury securities and Treasury futures. Because profits for this trade are small, hedge funds scale positions by relying heavily on leverage through repo financing and futures margining. This leverage allows hedge funds to absorb more Treasury issuance at a time when primary dealers face balance sheet constraints.

Rising Hedge Funds’ Share of the Treasury Market

Primary dealers have traditionally served as a backstop for new Treasury issuance. However, in part resulting from post 2007-09 financial crisis capital regulation, dealers face balance sheet constraints that limit their capacity to hold Treasuries. Hedge funds, by contrast, are not subject to such constraints.

Also, some asset managers, such as mutual funds, separately managed accounts, and insurers have recently preferred Treasury futures rather than cash Treasuries for duration exposure.² In recent years, asset manager demand for futures has grown sharply as the weighting of Treasuries increased in popular U.S. fixed income benchmark indices (Figure 2). Hedge funds are often on the other side, as shown below by the mirror increase in short futures.

Figure 2. Treasury Futures Notional Outstanding ($ billions)

Note: Data as of Q4 2025.

Sources: Office of Financial Research Hedge Fund Monitor, Authors’ analysis.

Measuring Hedge Funds’ Cash Treasury Positions

Hedge funds’ cash Treasury holdings are not specifically reported. However, various methods approximate these holdings using a combination of SEC Form PF, which captures long Treasury exposures (cash plus derivatives), and Traders in Financial Futures data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which report long Treasury futures positions (see OFR Hedge Fund Monitor).

We estimate hedge funds’ long cash Treasury holdings at $2.0 trillion by subtracting long futures and futures‑spread positions from long Treasury exposures in SEC Form PF. In comparison, hedge funds’ short futures positions totaled $1.4 trillion. A significant share of this position is likely the basis trade; hedge funds do not separately report cash Treasury securities and derivatives on SEC Form PF. Research published in recent years by the CFTC, the Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve, and sell-side firms has estimated the size of the trade to be from $350 billion to $1.5 trillion.³

The Basis Trade: A Small Profit, High‑Leverage Strategy....

....MUCH MORE 

"Yields decline on CNBC report Treasury could use General Account to fund buybacks"

From CNBC, August 24: 

Treasury yields were lower on Monday after CNBC reported, citing two Treasury officials, that the department could use its $1 trillion General Account to fund its plans to ramp up government bond purchases.

The 10-year Treasury note yield was last down 4 basis points at 4.7%. The 30-year yield, which last week hit levels not seen since 2007, lost 4 basis points to trade at 5.23%.

One basis point equals 0.01%, or 1/100th of 1%, and yields and prices move inversely to one another.

The officials did not say how much of the the TGA would be used, however....

....MUCH MORE 

"Volkswagen warns Germany's car-making industry is in jeopardy"

Lifted in toto from France24, August 24:

Volkswagen warns Germany's car-making industry is in jeopardy 

The CEO of the German car-making group Volkswagen is warning that the situation at the company is "more than critical". Oliver Blume is saying that ahead of meetings with the car giant's staff. He says  

Volkswagen and the rest of Germany's car industry are facing "the biggest upheaval in their history" due to global headwinds and Chinese competition.

France24 home. 

Capital Markets: "US -Canada Trade War Escalates, while US Seek to Choke the Iranian Economy"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex:

The US dollar is trading higher against nearly all the currencies. Equity markets are mixed and bond yields are lower alongside oil prices. There are two major developments.  First, the US and Canada trade talks broke down, and the risk is further escalation. Last week, President Trump has granted Canada a three-day grace period from the 50% tariffs on $20 bln of Canadian goods, even those that were protected by the USMCA saying a deal was struck. Canadian Prime Minister Carney was less sanguine and acknowledged that while progress was made, there were many unresolved issues. 

The second development is that US economic sanctions on Iran are intensifying.  Treasury Secretary Bessent has an editorial in today’s Financial Times and will hold a press conference later today to explain what the US economic operation will entail. There are not very thinly veiled threats against those who violate the US sanctions.  A key question is China’s response, a month before President Xi is to visit Washington and meet with President Trump....  

....MUCH MORE 

"China sets up shop next to key Spanish naval base"

They are relentless. 
Someone should have spanked Xi and said "no" when he was young, it's probably too late now. 

From Euractiv, 

Fears that state-owned car giant’s hub will be used by China to spy on NATO

MADRID –  Chinese automotive manufacturer SAIC is one step closer to establishing a foothold at the heart of Spain’s defence industry as the state-backed firm prepares to build a major factory next to a naval port.

One of the bases for the future assembly plant is the outer port of Ferrol, a dual military-civil harbour, located in the northwestern region of Galicia, close to a naval shipyard.

In July, SAIC sent a logistics vessel to assess the port’s infrastructure readiness ahead of the company’s arrival amid a growing debate over the site of the Chinese firm’s first European electric vehicle assembly hub.

Ferrol’s natural bay is home to one of the key headquarters of the Spanish Navy and the national shipbuilder Navantia.

Spanish media reported this week that internal defence and intelligence reports warned of potential “threats” arising from the operation.

Still, Digital Minister Óscar López defended the Chinese investment, dismissing claims it could be rejected by the Council of Ministers, whose approval is required for such foreign investments.

“These investments are analysed, and it may be the case that a series of recommendations are made –  from an economic or security perspective – which are taken into account and make the operation viable,” he told the press on Monday, arguing that such security risk analyses “are normal”.

The potential military and intelligence use of commercial infrastructure by Beijing has drawn the attention of EU institutions, as security experts warn of risks spanning from economic reliance, data security vulnerabilities, surveillance of vessel movements, and restricted military mobility.

A military ecosystem

While SAIC prepares its landing in Ferrol – with construction expected to run from 2027 to 2028 – Navantia is preparing its latest-generation corvettes just a few kilometres away in the inner bay.

The new F-110 frigates are set to become one of the most advanced frigates in Europe, with one vessel expected to be delivered yearly to the armed forces until 2032, according to official data.

The first F-111 Bonifaz vessel will be ready to sail as soon as 2028.

“This ship will give us a decisive strategic advantage and act as a deterrent…it represents our firm commitment to anticipating the challenges of the future,” said Antonio Piñeiro, chief of the Naval Staff, last year.

The harbour also hosts a Spanish Navy headquarters, home to five F-100 frigates which regularly take part in NATO operations. The SAIC complex in the area is being built right at the entry point of the bay, along the path military vessels take when heading to the Atlantic Ocean....

....MUCH MORE 

If interested we've been tracking China's real estate excursions in Morocco at the approaches to the Strait of Gibralter, at the tip of South America, the approaches to the Bab el-Mandeb/Red Sea, the Panama Canal and some twenty European ports including Hamburg and Rotterdam.

Hot Chips 2026 Has Kicked Off With Micron Warning The Memory Shortage Is Getting Worse (Mandy Rice-Davies moment ahead) MU

Well they would wouldn't they?* 

The big get together at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium always sells out and this year we'll be visiting a few media outlets for their on-the-ground takes on what's being said.

The article below is based on Micron's Sunday tutorial, here's the rest of the schedule of events:

https://hotchips.org/

From WccfTech, August 23:

Micron Says AI’s Memory Wall is Worsening as Compute outruns HBM Bandwidth by 3x every Two Years, Advanced Packaging & Process To Tackle Rising Thermal Constraints

Micron explores what High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is, why it is essential, how it compares to traditional DDR, and the key challenges that demand further innovation to sustain AI’s growing demands.

Micron Reveals HBM Failures Caused 17% of Meta's Llama 3 Training Interruptions as the Memory Wall Deepens

As AI LLMs continue to evolve, the need for advanced memory technologies has become vital for the continuous scaling and improvement of these models. But memory is now becoming a major bottleneck that is limiting the performance of AI systems. 

HBM is currently the leading DRAM type used in leading AI accelerators. To attain maximum operations on a typical AI system, a large portion of the work is bound by memory as compute processors wait for more data to arrive. Once the work is complete, the system enters a compute-bound phase in which data is delivered to it fast enough to keep the processors busy. With HBM, the memory bandwidth ceiling is elevated, allowing memory-intensive AI workloads to achieve higher performance before hitting memory limits.

Micron's HBM Design Architecture Fellow, Raghu Sreeramaneni, shed light on this "Memory Well" during its Hot Chips 2026 presentation. The company states that while compute capabilities are advancing at a rate of 3x every two years, memory is only advancing at <2x every two years. Currently, there are three types of memory architectures: 2.5D attached memory, 2.5D advanced memory, and Processing-in-memory DRAM....

*****

...The key takeaways of the Hot Chips 2026 talk include:

• Memory is central to scaling LLM performance (more compute, larger datasets, more parameters).
• Compute scales ~3× every two years; HBM bandwidth scales only ~2× every two years → the memory wall persists and may be worsening.
• In a typical GPU SIP with four 12-high HBM stacks, memory silicon accounts for ~90% of the total silicon (8× the GPU silicon).
• HBM is the most cross-functionally complex memory solution (packaging + process + design) in a form factor the size of a postage stamp.
• AI workloads are often memory-bound; higher HBM bandwidth shifts the roofline upward and unlocks more of the processor’s peak performance.
• Stack heights have grown from 4-high to 16-high (path to 20-high exists but faces major thermal/mechanical hurdles).
• Meta’s Llama 3 training paper attributed 17% of unintended interruptions to HBM.

.....MUCH MORE 
*Mandy Rice-Davies was a former model and showgirl known for her role in the Profumo affair.

When informed by the prosecuting attorney that Lord Astor disputed her version of events and denied having an affair she responded:

"Well, he would, wouldn't he?"

Although Many died in 2014 we are keepers of her memory

Mandy Rice-Davies Alert: Christina Romer Says Maximum Tax Revenue at 84% Marginal Rate
She would, wouldn't she.*

*For British politicians of a certain age [often referred to as octo or nona-genarians -ed] the scandal surrounding Secretary of State for War John Profumo's affair with the alleged mistress of a Russian spy was highlighted by the testimony of Miss Rice-Davies, a friend of the alleged mistress, Christine Keeler.
From Wikipedia:

While giving evidence at the trial of Stephen Ward, charged with living off the immoral earnings of Keeler and Rice-Davies, the latter made a famous riposte. When the prosecuting counsel pointed out that Lord Astor denied an affair or having even met her, she replied, "Well, he would, wouldn't he?"

We've tried to keep the phrase alive, using it about once per year:

2007
Gore Says Markets are Key in Battle to Combat Climate Change

"Well, he would, wouldn't he?"
Mandy Rice Davies*

2007
ICE, Skating on Thin

TESTIMONY OF JEFFREY C. SPRECHER CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, INTERCONTINENTALEXCHANGE, INC.

Warning: Mandy Rice-Davies moment ahead.

"...we do not believe that a complete overhaul of the current regulatory structure is either warranted or advisable."

2008
UN Can Regulate Emissions Trading Without Conflict of Interest

All together now: A Mandy Rice-Davies Moment!*

2009
Major Problems at California's Public Pension Fund, CalPERS And: A Mandy Rice-Davies Moment!

One of these days I'll have to tell the story of how CalPERS got to this point. It is an ugly tale. For now we'll just post the slow motion train wreck.
On a positive note: Mandy Rice-Davies* moment ahead!  

One of my favorite usages:

Lord McIntosh of Haringey:  My Lords, I am proud of many things that this Government have done. I pause to anticipate the interjection—"He would say that, wouldn't he?"...

Lords Hansard text for 6 Feb 2002

And many more over the years. 

Ag Commodities: "Zelenskyy Says Putin Rejected Black Sea Shipping Truce Offer"

From Bloomberg, August 23:

Ukraine offered Russia a truce on attacks against ships carrying agricultural commodities through the Black Sea, but Moscow rejected the deal because it wanted guarantees against strikes on its energy infrastructure, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

“It looks like their position is that they will not attack our grain corridor only if we stop attacking their energy sector,” Zelenskyy said Saturday at his office in Kyiv.

Zelenskyy also ruled out holding wartime elections, an idea advocated last week by the popular former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. “If we want to tear the country apart, then we can move toward elections in the middle of a war like this,” the president said, describing it as a “tsunami” for Ukraine.

Ukraine’s constitution doesn’t permit elections under martial law, which was introduced in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. It last held presidential and parliamentary elections in 2019.

Fedorov’s ouster as defense minister last month triggered protests in Kyiv and other major cities, which have since subsided. His call for elections met a mostly negative public response in Ukraine, where critics highlighted the threat from Russian attacks and the difficulties of ensuring participation in the vote for millions of people displaced by the war.

Russia and Ukraine have stepped up attacks on each other’s commercial ships and ports in the Black Sea area, raising fears about the impact on grain supplies to world markets. The two countries account for more than a quarter of global wheat exports, and the attacks come in the middle of this year’s harvest.

Ports in Ukraine’s Greater Odesa region handle about 90% of its grain shipments. The country has exported only about 500,000 tons of grain since the start of August, or about a fifth of its potential shipments, Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said on Thursday....

 

....MUCH MORE 

"EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton 'Planning' Husband Bill's Funeral Amid Health Concerns — As Ex-Prez Made Changes to $120 Million Will, Sources Claim"

 

From Radar Online, August 19:

Hillary Clinton has reportedly been planning her husband Bill Clinton's future funeral, RadarOnline.com has learned.

According to insiders, the former POTUS, who turned 80 on August 19, could also be making reasonable preparations of his own, including changes to his $120million will.

Hillary, 78, has reportedly begun plans for an elaborate memorial service for her husband. Insiders claimed the service will take place at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and will have a traditional funeral mass.

"All current living presidents have plans in the works for a state funeral," Elizabeth Hargrove, a spokesperson for the church, said earlier this year.

Later, he may be buried at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas, according to Leon Wagener, a presidential historian.

Bill Clinton's Rooftop Garden at His Library Is His 'Happy Place'....

....MUCH MORE

 

Happy (belated) birthday Mr. President. 

"Nvidia Bets on the Classical Side of Quantum Computing" (NVDA)

From EE|Times, August 17:

On the ground floor of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), MareNostrum 5 sits alongside three new quantum computers housed in an adjoining deconsecrated chapel. The supercomputer, equipped with thousands of Nvidia GPUs, is now connected to the quantum systems. The arrangement puts Nvidia’s role in the emerging hybrid-computing architecture into view.

MareNostrum Ona, the quantum computing partition of MareNostrum 5, is housed in the 
Torre Girona chapel at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The red and blue systems 

are the digital quantum computers; the green system in the center is the newly 

inaugurated analog quantum computer. (Source: BSC)

“We don’t build a quantum computer,” said Sam Stanwyck, director of quantum products at Nvidia, in an interview with EE Times. “But Nvidia is fundamentally an accelerated computing platform company, and quantum computing is a part of the future of accelerated computing that we are extremely excited about.”

Nvidia is not developing its own quantum processing units (QPUs). Instead, it is focusing on the classical computing infrastructure around quantum hardware, including software, libraries, interconnects, and control systems that enable hybrid quantum-classical computing. 

Stanwyck compared the company’s hands-off hardware approach to its strategies in other capital-intensive markets. “We don’t build our own robot, but we work with every company that does; we don’t build our own self-driving car, but we work with every company that does; we don’t build our own quantum computer, but we’re working with every company that does to make them successful.”

Integration imperative 
Nvidia’s approach reflects a practical limitation of quantum computing: Quantum processors cannot operate independently. Qubits, the basic units of quantum information, are highly sensitive to noise and errors, requiring classical computing systems to control the hardware, process measurement data, perform error correction, and coordinate workloads....

....MUCH MORE 

Covid Fun Fact: Early Report Of A Connection Between The Coronavirus And The Wuhan Institute Of Virology

Long-time readers know that we keep tabs on early reports of covid, not searching them out but dropping them into the link-vault as they appear. Here's one from Radio Free Asia, January 9, 2020: 

Experts Cast Doubts on Chinese Official Claims Around 'New' Wuhan Coronavirus 

....Ren Ruihong, former head of the medical assistance department at the Chinese Red Cross, said she too has her doubts about the reported "absence" of human-to-human transmission in Wuhan.

"It's a new type of mutant coronavirus," Ren said. "They haven't made public the genetic sequence, because it is highly contagious. From what I can tell, the patients caught it from other people. I have thought that all along."

She said the lack of fatalities didn't indicate that the virus was less deadly than SARS, just that antiviral medications have improved in the past 10 years or so.

Ren said she also regarded the relatively high number of infections in Hong Kong with suspicion, given that there had been no reports of cases anywhere in between the two cities, in the southern province of Guangdong, for example.

"Genetic engineering technology has gotten to such a point now, and Wuhan is home to a viral research center that is under the aegis of the China Academy of Sciences, which is the highest level of research facility in China," she said.

Repeated calls to various numbers listed for the Wuhan Institute of Virology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences rang unanswered.

However, an employee who identified herself as a senior engineer said she knew nothing about the virus.

"Sorry, I ... I don't know about this," the employee said....

....MUCH MORE  

Not only is that an early story on Covid but it is one of the earliest to mention the WIV publicly. 

And speaking of early, How's this for prescient. Originally published at The American Interest September 20, 2016: 

Bioengineering The Age of Designer Plagues 

....Those that do keep working, medics and police in particular, are likely to catch the virus. We should expect that most economic activity, public services, production of essential goods, and transportation may cease. To minimize inventory costs, businesses, even hospitals, now have “just-in-time” delivery of supplies, sourced from lowest-cost providers on the other side of the world. Even if your local trucker decides to continue working, with multiple long-distance suppliers and shippers involved in moving foodstuffs, a contagious pandemic would certainly disrupt the flow of essential goods. Panic-buying and hoarding will add to the problem of getting food to the population. How long will our public water supplies continue functioning when maintenance personnel fail to report for work? Our highly interdependent, just-in-time delivery economy is very vulnerable to disruptions. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an expert in risk and thinking about rare events, points this out: “Our connected world appears to be more efficient. But when there is a disturbance, the setback is much harder to handle. Not only are we building riskier systems, but also the risks involved in failure are a lot larger.”⁶....

We didn't catch up with it until October 2021:

https://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/2021/10/bioengineering-age-of-designer-plagues.html    

"Alphabet’s Waymo Has Built a Custom Chip for Its Robotaxis" (GOOG; NVDA; TSLA)

From Bloomberg, August 23:

Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo has built a custom chip that the company said will improve the performance of its robotaxis, while also diversifying its chip supply beyond third-party companies such as Nvidia Corp.

The ASIC chip — short for application-specific integrated circuit — is in production in Waymo’s latest robotaxi generation, the company said Thursday. Waymo said using its own chip, alongside others and with sensors the company designed itself, will improve its robotaxis’ reflexes and navigational skills in complex urban environments.

Waymo has historically relied on products from companies including Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., integrating them into computers of its own design. With a specialized chip, Waymo said it can now more quickly process sensor data and run AI models that help robotaxis understand and respond to surroundings.

The move marks a shift toward more purpose-built robotaxis that Waymo said may reduce costs while offering roomier, more accessible spaces for riders. It also coincides with Alphabet’s Google orchestrating a broader effort to develop custom chips and control the soaring costs of AI computing infrastructure.

Waymo is the clear US robotaxi leader, offering more rides in cities including San Francisco, Phoenix and Atlanta than rivals like Tesla Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.’s Zoox. Its fleet has largely relied on Jaguar vehicles retrofitted with autonomous-driving technology and chips from others. But it recently launched a robotaxi with Zeekr, an arm of China-based automaker Geely Automobile Holdings, that is now being equipped with the new custom chip....

....MORE 

Related:

May 17, 2015
Nvidia Wants to Be the Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVDA) 

April 12, 2017

Watch Out NVIDIA: "Google Details Tensor Chip Powers" (GOOG; NVDA)

We've said NVIDIA probably has a couple year head start but this bears watching, so to speak....

 

September 20, 2017
NVIDIA Partner Tesla Reportedly Developing Chip With AMD (TSLA; NVDA; AMD)
Today in leveraged WTFs.... 

 

August 5, 2018 

"Tesla says it’s dumping Nvidia chips for a homebrew alternative" (TSLA)
The only reason for Tesla to do this is that NVIDIA's chips are general purpose whereas specialized chips are making inroads in stuff like crypto mining (ASICs), Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for machine learning and Facebook's hardware efforts.

August 17, 2018 
"Nvidia CEO is 'more than happy to help' if Tesla's A.I. chip doesn't pan out" (NVDA; TSLA) 

Aug 18, 2018
Ahead of NVIDIA Earnings: The Last of the "Easy" Comparisons (NVDA)

Beating that Q3 2017 EPS, 90 cents, by double i.e. $1.80 or more, is doable but AI and data centers will have to pick up the slack from the Q1 and Q2 cryptocurrency bump that started declining with Bitmain and other miners use of ASICs rather than GPU's.

Going forward the trend toward specialist proprietary chips, see Tesla's development of their own chips etc, etc will leave NVIDIA with a couple holes in the potential addressable markets they will want to fill.

Additionally, the smaller pups, some still in stealth, are nipping at the big dog's heels, making it more expensive for NVIDIA to maintain their edge in architecture....

December 12, 2018
A Dip Into Chips: "AI Chip Architectures Race To The Edge"
We'll be referring back to this piece, it's the next big thing.

Jan. 24, 2019
Watch Out Nvidia, Xilinx Is Performing (reports, beats, pops) XLNX; NVDA

Xilinx with their field-programmable gate array approach versus Nvidia's more generalist chips is an example of the type of competition experts were predicting NVDA would be facing, some over two years ago, links after the jump... 

June 5, 2019
Chips: NVIDIA Begins To Embrace the Move Toward More Specialized Chips (NVDA; INTC; AMD; GOOG; XLNX)
See I told you I wasn't crazy. Something we've been babbling about for a couple years.

July 1, 2022
Crypto Mining Market Pullback Hits Nvidia, Others (NVDA)
Just to pound the message home, the high-end miners switched to ASICS years ago.
That said, this is a nice overview of what's been going on with GPU's.

February 9, 2024
Nvidia Is Developing A Custom Chip Design Unit To Address $30 Billion Niche (NVDA)
Yes, a big niche but still a niche. Nvidia really, really wanted to own ARM's design capability but when the regulators said 'ummm no', Mr. Huang didn't stop trying to address the fact that Google, Microsoft, Amazon Tesla and Facebook are all producing their own data center chips....

January 16, 2025 
Chips: "How Big A Threat Are Custom AI Chips To Nvidia Stock?" (NVDA; AVGO)

November 17, 2025
"Tesla teases new AI5 chip that will revolutionize self-driving" (TSLA)

August 16, 2026
"Terafab could become the largest factory on the planet—or Elon Musk’s biggest failure" (SPCX; TSLA)

And many more. 2015 to last week. What a long strange trip. 

"Belgian car salesman becomes prince after DNA test proves royal parentage"

 Wasn't this a movie?

From CNN, August 22:

A Belgian car salesman has become a prince at the age of 26 after being acknowledged as the son of the king’s brother, Prince Laurent.

Clément Vandenkerckhove’s mother, a Belgian singer who had a relationship with Prince Laurent in the 1990s, only told him who his father was when he turned 16 a decade ago.

It emerged this week that he was legally recognized as the son and heir of the 63-year-old younger brother of King Philippe, at a low-key town hall ceremony about six months ago after a DNA test proved his link to the royal family.

Prince Laurent has registered his paternity of Vandenkerckhove with Belgium’s civil registry, The Telegraph reported on Wednesday.

The formality affords the new prince equal inheritance rights to Laurent’s private estate with his half-sister Princess Louise, 20, and half-brothers Prince Nicolas, 20, and Prince Aymeric, 19, children Laurent shares with Princess Claire whom he married in 2003.

But he will not receive a royal allowance, nor will he be expected to take on official duties, and he has no rights to the Belgian throne....

....MUCH MORE 

News You Can Use: "How to Kill a Robot Dog"

From Field Ethos:

We live in the most amazing times. Someday soon when we are all living in caves wearing animal skins picking parasites off of each other, our children will ask why we no longer have cool stuff like the internet, running water, electricity, and food. When that time inevitably comes, you can at least tell your kids that you saw it coming.

The Terminator was Actually a Documentary 
The people who work on artificial intelligence cannot cogently articulate exactly how AI works. The days of some computer geek settling in behind a keyboard to bang out code are gone never to return. Nowadays, computer programmers get their computers to write their computer code. It seems inevitable that those computers will eventually wise up and decide to cut out the middle man.

Unless you want to end up paying taxes to your microwave, it behooves us all to do a little sensible preparation. Chief among those post-apocalyptic chores is figuring out how to kill a robot dog. It’s not intuitive.

Know Your Enemy 
Just in case you’ve been living underneath a bridge someplace, Google “scary robot dog” and get ready to have your world rocked. If you have an operational credit card, $9,420 will get you a flame-throwing robot dog over the Internet from ThrowFlame.com. The Unitree Go2 robot dog is only two grand. Uncle Sam has militarized versions sporting advanced sensors, thermal imagers, and machine guns. It just seems inevitable that we will someday go to war with these things.

For starters, the militarized versions are quite often armored. However, like tanks, extra armor means extra weight which means decreased agility. Such stuff is the perennial tactical tradeoff. With the right ammo, your typical defensive rifle should be up to the task, presuming you know where to shoot.

Feeding the Beast 
GI green-tip M855 5.56mm ammunition incorporates a small tungsten penetrator into the bullet to offer better performance through light cover. It’s not armor-piercing per se, but it will still penetrate 3mm of mild steel at 600 meters. It’s even better up close. Think car doors and the like. That is likely adequate to deal with your typical robot dog.

I keep two PMags loaded with M855 next to my primary defensive rifle at the house. It doesn’t sport a label that says, “For use against armored robot dogs” or anything. However, yeah, it’s for use against armored robot dogs.

Mechanical Anatomy 
It is tempting to concentrate on the head of the robot dog. However, robot dogs are anthropomorphically different from real dogs or carbon-based animals of any sort, for that matter. The head is just sensors. That’s not where the beast thinks....

....MUCH MORE

I do not want to find myself anywhere near a situation where I am trying to escape some flame-throwing robot mutt.

I. Do. Not. 

"Russia runs out of petrol at seven in 10 stations as fuel crisis worsens"

From EuroNews, August 20:

Ukrainian drone campaign on Russia's energy infrastructure has caused fuel shortages so severe that the Kremlin has admitted it. Queues in Moscow are forming for the first time, and Russia has brought back banned low-grade fuel to plug the gap, while detaining residents who complained publicly.

Petrol was available at fewer than three in 10 petrol stations across Russia on Wednesday, the latest sign that a second wave of fuel shortages is hitting harder than the first, with queues forming at pumps in Moscow for the first time.

The monitoring app Gdebenz put nationwide petrol availability at 28% of filling stations on Wednesday, down from 41% a week earlier.

Fuel restrictions — including limits on the volume sold per customer, QR-based rationing and odd-even number plate schemes — were in place in nearly all regions as of last Saturday, according to Benzinmap, which tracks restrictions and prices nationwide.

Gazprom Neft filling stations in Moscow set a temporary cap of 40 litres per fill-up. Tatneft capped petrol at 50 litres and diesel at 60. By Wednesday, the Yandex Fuel service showed AI-92 petrol available at just one in 10 stations in the capital.

The crisis is the direct result of Kyiv's sustained drone campaign against Russian oil infrastructure in a bid to weaken its war machine amid Moscow's ongoing all-out invasion of Ukraine. By early July every major refinery in Russia had been struck at least once.

In the first two weeks of August alone, nearly a dozen more facilities were hit, including Yaroslavnefteorgsintez in Yaroslavl, two refineries in Bashkortostan and export infrastructure at the port of Ust-Luga.

Russian Forbes calculated that damaged refineries now account for 54% of total national refining capacity. Daily petrol output fell to between 75,000 and 80,000 tonnes in July, against summer demand of 115,000 to 120,000 tonnes — a daily deficit of roughly 35%....

....MUCH MORE 

"An Abecedary Of Scientific Serendipity"

The author of this excursion, Sheldon Lee Glashow, is old 
(emeritus professor at both Harvard and Boston University)
He also has one of those Nobel thingies. (physics, 1979)

From the (possibly) resurrected Inference Review:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but: ‘That’s funny...’

—Isaac Asimov

Horace Walpole coined the word serendipity in a letter to Horace Mann. The two men had become friends during Walpole’s Grand Tour of Europe in 1739. Walpole returned to England a year later while Mann remained in Florence as Britain’s permanent envoy, a position he secured with assistance from Walpole’s father. The two men never met again but corresponded for forty-six years.

In one of his letters, Walpole wrote:

I once read a silly fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. As their highnesses traveled they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest for: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side where it was worse than on the right — now do you understand serendipity?

The Travels and Adventures of the Three Princes of Serendip first appeared in a fourteenth century Persian poem by Amir Khusrau. The mule that Walpole recalled from childhood had actually been a one-eyed lame camel, driven by a woman and laden with bags of butter and honey. Given these clues, the prince deduced the path the lost camel had taken. The camel was found, the princes richly rewarded. The tale was translated from Persian to Italian in 1557, from Italian to French in 1619, and then to English in 1721. The story of the wayward one-eyed camel may be traced back to the sixth century Talmud, the princes replaced by Jewish slaves, the butter and honey, by wine and oil.

The Abecedary

A is for the first aniline dye, stumbled upon in 1856 by the 18-year-old English chemist Henry Perkin whose German tutor asked him to synthesize quinine from coal tar. Perkin ended up with a dirty brown sludge. After cleaning his beaker with alcohol, he noticed that the sludge had turned purple. Patented and marketed as Perkin’s Mauve, it was exhibited publicly by Empress Eugénie thereby becoming highly fashionable and making Perkin rich. His tutor synthesized another aniline dye, magenta, and helped to create the huge German dye industry. Sir William Henry Perkin was knighted in 1906 and quinine itself was first synthesized in 1944, just in time for its use in World War II. Mauve was not alone among serendipitous synthetic dyes: Prussian blue was accidentally hit upon in 1706, Scheele’s Green in 1775, Monastral blue in 1927, Pyrrole red in 1974, and Yin Mn blue in 2009. Serendipity comes in many colors.

B is for Botox. The powerful toxin produced by botulism bacteria was introduced to medicine by Alan B. Scott. His experimental drug, a form of the toxin later called Botox, was approved in 1989 for treating eye muscle problems, but often found off-label targets such as migraine headache or urinary incontinence. Its bonanza application arose by chance when Jean Carruthers saw her patient’s facial wrinkles vanish after treating her with Botox. For years she and her husband explored the many cosmetic applications of Botox. Once approved for such purposes, Botox became a multi-billion dollar drug, but the Carrothers had neglected to patent its cosmetic use.

C is for Cisplatin, the trade name for a chemical first synthesized in 1844 and called Peyrone’s salt. A century later, the American chemist Barnett Rosenberg set out to explore the effect of electricity on bacterial growth by sending electric currents through media containing live bacteria. Noticing that the cells stopped dividing, Rosenberg hoped that electricity might be used to treat cancer, but the suppression of cell division had resulted from a compound produced at their platinum electrodes. Rosenberg identified Peyrone’s salt as the most effective such platinum compound. Cisplatin arrived at clinics in 1978 to treat testicular and ovarian cancers. It is often used off label for other cancers. Cisplatin, along with several other platinum-based drugs, account for about forty percent of all effective chemotherapeutic agents.

D is for Dynamite, devised by Alfred Nobel in 1867. Two decades earlier, Ascanio Sobrero had created the liquid explosive nitroglycerine. Due to its instability, he could find no practical use for it. Nobel sought a material that could absorb nitroglycerine thereby yielding a stable solid that could safely be shaped, transported and triggered. He tried many materials – sawdust, cement, charcoal – but with no success. The serendipity of Nobel’s discovery lay in his fortuitous use of sand from dunes near his lab as his absorbent material – not the sand of ocean beaches nor that used to make concrete or fill children’s sandboxes, but kieselguhr, a diatomaceous earth made of ancient fossilized organisms. You can buy it as a health food or an insecticide and it gave rise to Nobel’s prize-creating discovery. Incidentally, symptoms often reported by nitroglycerine workers led to its serendipitous use to treat angina. Late in life Nobel was prescribed nitroglycerine pills for heart disease.

E is for chemical elements discovered more or less by chance. Nine of the prenuclear ninety-two elements qualify: Helium, Phosphorus, Oxygen, Argon, Iodine, Yttrium, Lanthanum, Praseodymium and Neodymium. Three more are found among the twenty-six transuranic elements: Neptunium, Einsteinium and Fermium. Phosphorus was discovered by alchemist Hennig Brand in 1669. He found it by distilling urine in quest of the Philosopher’s Stone. Three centuries later phosphorus bombs helped destroy his hometown of Hamburg. Lanthanum and didymium were chanced upon in 1840 when Carl Mosander tried to purify cerium. Both were regarded as elements and included in Mendeleev’s Table, but forty-five years later Carl von Weisbach was amazed to find didymium to be an alloy of two new elements, which he named Praseodymium and Neodymium....

....MUCH MORE 

Previously from Inference Review:

Disease, Famine, Drudgery, Bondage: A Lively Look at the Birth of the Modern 
Not that kind of bondage. Not that lively a look, sorry.
Refunds available at the entrance.

"Reviewing Mervyn King's The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy"

"The Euro Is Doomed"

Lo and Behold: Andrew Lo's Adaptive Markets

"The Subjective Statistician"

Review: "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century"

One Euro, One Europe (One Love)

When France Invented The Internet

Tribes and States: Human Self-Organization

Emanuel Derman: "Trading Volatility"

The BIS and the Rise of Secular Stagnation 

The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World 

Economics: "The Miracle of General Equilibrium"

In response to 'At Lunch with Freeman Dyson': "Escape from the Prisoner’s Dilemma"

Vaclav Smil Is A Party Pooper: "History and Risk" 

And many more. Use the 'search blog' box upper left, if interested. 

"Who Really Runs Canada? Inside Mark Carney’s Influence Network"

It used to be Desmarais and Power Corporation of Canada and Maurice Strong and that whole crowd. 

Now I think it's Brookfield that's in charge.

From Canada's The Walrus, August 21:

Government priorities increasingly reflect the interests of a small, well-connected elite 

Rockcliffe Park is as lovely a neighbourhood as you can find in this country. It has large, secluded yards and calm, shady streets. Its residents’ stately manors and homes are nestled between the river, forests, and a semi-private lake, which the plebes are only welcome to swim in upon invitation from owners of private docks along its shore. Some of Ottawa’s best private schools claim the neighbourhood as their home, and the residents’ association is certainly one of the city’s best resourced. 

Rockcliffe Park also houses a significant portion of the capital’s decision makers and gross domestic product.

The prime minister and governor general live there. The leader of the opposition shares a backyard fence with the high commissioner of India. There are so many diplomats hanging around, their neighbourhood block parties may now have to register on the foreign interference registry. Venerable public servants, a handful of journalists, business leaders, and, of course, lobbyists rub shoulders on the hiking trails or at the sailing club.

In 2024, Mark Carney—then just one of the illustrious members of the Rockcliffe community—was the headliner for the association’s speaker series. He was described by the association president as “our Mark,” before he spoke to a packed fieldhouse crowd, which included Joe Clark as well as probably more members of the Order of Canada than any other room in the nation.

Rockcliffe isn’t the star of this story. I don’t mean to bother the good people who live there. But I happen to be fascinated with the connections between this country’s handful of policy influencers, business people, politicians, media pundits, and moguls who run much of Canada. There are neighbourhoods quite similar to Rockcliffe across the country. Not all of them hold the same level of power, but all share common characteristics: safe and quiet streets, good or excellent infrastructure, access to nature or, at a minimum, ample green space, and a great chance of residents being put in touch with the right people.

I don’t believe any of this is a conspiracy. Rich and influential people have wanted to live among one another since tribes started to settle down in the earliest days of Mesopotamia. But as we experience a widening chasm between what Canadians want and the policies they are being given, I believe there is value in examining where the government is getting their ideas from. And part of the answer, I believe, resides in the circles in which our decision makers exist....

....MUCH MORE 

If interested see also:

July 2021 - "Mark Carney Was the World’s Rock-Star Banker. Now He’s Ready for His Encore" 

October 2021 - Climate/Energy: "Mark Carney, man of destiny, arises to revolutionize society. It won't be pleasant"

March 2025 - "Mark Carney, crisis-fighting central banker, hopes to lead Canada through trade war"
Man, he gets all the best titles....

Followup II: "Interrogation Tapes Reveal Journalist Murder Suspect Pointing to Highest Levels of Maltese Power"

From the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, August 19:

Police interviews played for a Maltese jury show Yorgen Fenech accusing the prime minister’s chief of staff of ordering the 2017 car bombing of Daphne Caruana Galizia, while insisting his payments to the plot's middleman were extortion.  

Audio recordings of police interrogations played to a Maltese jury this week revealed that Yorgen Fenech, the businessman on trial for the 2017 car bomb assassination of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, pointed the finger at the highest levels of government at the time, claiming the murder was commissioned by the former prime minister’s chief of staff....

....MUCH MORE 

August 15's Followup: "Tapes Hidden in an Ice Cream Box Lay Bare a Maltese Journalist’s Assassination"  has most of our backlinks to the murder story,

Mansfield Energy: Petroleum Markets At A Glance

From Mansfield, one of the largest, if not the largest, independent distributors of diesel fuel in the U.S. August 21:

Oil Prices Head for Second Weekly Gain as U.S. Pressure on Iran Intensifies

Oil prices are heading for a second consecutive weekly gain as renewed U.S. pressure on Iran and continued disruptions to Middle East crude flows keep supply concerns at the center of the market. WTI was trading near $86.90/bbl Friday morning and is up roughly 5.3% for the week. Brent was trading near $93.98/bbl, up more than 6% week over week. Prices pulled back from earlier gains Friday after Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said it would be better to end the war now, introducing the possibility of de-escalation after a week dominated by tighter supply concerns.... 

 

....MUCH MORE, narrative, charts. 

Also at Mansfield:

Natural Gas News – August 21, 2026 

"Artificial intelligence boosts automated biolabs"

This is the stuff that Nvidia's Jensen Huang has been pitching* for the last half-decade or so. 

It's also why we saw this in October 2024:

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024

From Knowable Magazine, August 18:

AI and machine learning are kicking synthetic biology up to new levels of innovation. Researchers see huge potential for novel drugs and other chemicals; some also see risks.  

James Field believes his automated laboratory is closing in on a powerful new drug to kill cancer cells with unprecedented precision. Yet the drug wasn’t created by any of the biologists working in his lab — it was generated by artificial intelligence.

Field is a protein engineer working in synthetic biology, a discipline that uses the latest technology to engineer novel cells or biological components. In his world, researchers often talk about a cycle known as DBTL — design, build, test, learn — an iterative process where the end product, whether it is a molecule or a new strain of bacteria, is repeatedly optimized until it has the traits scientists seek. Field’s company, LabGenius, is one of a group of startups that is at the forefront of a revolution in which AI increasingly runs the DBTL cycle from beginning to end.

The work takes place at the company’s sophisticated automated laboratory in a former biscuit factory in south London. Such laboratories, known as biofoundries, first emerged in the 2010s as gene editing technology, combined with “high-throughput” machines — which can conduct hundreds of experiments at once — accelerated the DBTL cycle by many orders of magnitude.

Experiments using biofoundries often involve adapting a piece of DNA that is then added to a host organism — frequently the bacterium Escherichia coli or yeast — to get it to produce a desired molecule, which can be anything from an antibody to an ingredient for sustainable plastic.

Algorithms have been integral to biofoundries from the start in managing the operation of high-throughput machines. But the industry is now approaching a point where AI models are becoming sophisticated enough to program DNA to produce new medicines and industrial chemicals, an emerging field known as SynBioxAI.

Rather than helping only to run the machinery, AI can now work iteratively, learning from results and suggesting new avenues of experimentation, reducing the development time for new drugs or industrial chemicals from years to months.

According to Paul Freemont, who heads synthetic biology at Imperial College London, we are approaching a powerful point of “convergence of automation, data and machine learning and AI.” He was the founding chair of the Global Biofoundries Alliance, an international group of publicly funded biofoundries that launched in 2019 in Kobe, Japan, with 16 members. The group has now grown to over 40 members across the world, spread from China to Mexico.

Since that launch, countries have been rapidly investing in biofoundry capacity. The United States, for example, is spending $75 million on the development of five new biofoundries, while China has named biomanufacturing and synthetic biology as core strategic priorities for its 2026-2030 five-year plan.

The objective is to engineer biology, programming cells to produce new drugs and industrial products, a technology that Freemont says is going to “become essential for mankind.”

However, he believes the field hasn’t fully reached this point of convergence. “I think there’s a massive amount of technical work that needs to be done to achieve the vision of what people are trying to do,” he says....

....MUCH MORE
*Some previous posts:

July 2021 - NVIDIA Opens UK's Fastest Supercomputer To Outside Researchers, Academic and Commercial

NVIDIA Claims Install of UK’s Top Supercomputer, for Research in AI and Healthcare

Announced last October, NVIDIA today launched Cambridge-1, calling it the United Kingdom’s most powerful supercomputer. Enabling scientists and healthcare experts to use the combination of AI and simulation to accelerate the digital biology revolution, Cambridge-1 represents a $100 million investment by NVIDIA.....

March 2023 - "The Biorevolution: Its Implications for U.S. National Security, Economic Competitiveness, and National Power"
The author of this piece, Dr. Tara O'Toole is Senior Vice-President of the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.

January 2024 - Boston Consulting Group: "Synthetic Biology Is Getting Closer to Industrial Scale" 

January 2024 - We Are Going To Hear More And More About Digital Biology (NVDA)

February 2024 - Taking Nvidia's Jensen Huang Seriously: Paris-Based "Bioptimus primed with $35m to unravel disease biology using AI"

Two pitches that Nvidia's CEO will be making at next month's NVDA lovefest (Nvidia GTC Conference, March 17 - 21, 300,000 attendees in-person and online) are 1) sovereign AI, every country, even every city needs its own supercomputer powered by Nvidia chips and its own Large Language Model trained on those supercomputers and 2) digital biology - everything from rapid drug discovery to individually tailored gene therapy.*

February 2024 - "17 key takeaways from the 2024 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"

April 2024 - "RAND: 'Artificial Intelligence and Biotechnology: Risks and Opportunities"

October 2024 - Paris-based baCta Is Using Engineered Bacteria to Grow Natural Rubber and Slash CO2 Emissions
AI-powered synthetic biology is so hot right now.

April 2026 - "Genomics Has Revealed An Age Undreamed Of"

This piece was published at Palladium magazine in 2023, so a few years after Nvidia's Jensen Huang started talking about AI and medicine and artificial biology*, but before the possibilities really started to become apparent. Now genomics looks to be very investable.**

In many ways the vibe feels similar to the zeitgeist around chips and training AI a dozen years ago.

I don't know if it is going to work out as well as 2013's "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford?"—which was followed by 2014's Deep Learning is VC Worthy—which was followed by 2015-to-date: "Saaaay, this Nvidia may be on to something."

But we shall see.

"US says hackers are targeting vulnerable water systems with the help of AI"

From TechCrunch, August 20: 

Amidst a spate of ongoing cyberattacks targeting water systems across the country, the U.S. government’s security agencies are warning that hackers are actively breaking into Siemens devices used in critical infrastructure.

U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency, among others, said on Wednesday that hackers are targeting “all” Siemens S7 programmable logic controllers, which are devices used for controlling automated physical processes in energy, water systems, manufacturing, and agriculture.

CISA said the attacks are part of broader activity targeting water supply and wastewater systems around the United States. The agency said that the disruption could result in downtime, safety incidents, or equipment damage to critical infrastructure that relies on these devices.

The agencies said the hackers are using AI to generate exploit scripts that rely on publicly available information to find and exploit vulnerable programmable logic controllers that are running out-of-date software or are otherwise poorly secured.

CISA has long warned owners of critical infrastructure to keep these devices disconnected from the internet, and officials have acknowledged that rural communities are often the most affected because these systems service large geographic areas.

An incident response professional who works with critical infrastructure told TechCrunch that it was noteworthy that the hackers are using AI to identify and target vulnerable programmable logic controllers, as well as to understand how these devices work. But he cautioned that these devices are already highly vulnerable to begin with....

....MORE 

Vaguely reminiscent of Stuxnet vs. the Iranian nuclear program:

"When Stuxnet infects a computer, it checks to see if that computer is connected to specific models of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Siemens. PLCs are how computers interact with and control industrial machinery like uranium centrifuges. If no PLCs are detected, the worm does nothing; if they are, Stuxnet then alters the PLCs’ programming, resulting in the centrifuges being spun irregularly, damaging or destroying them in the process. While this is happening, the PLCs tell the controller computer (incorrectly) that everything is working fine, making it difficult to detect or diagnose what’s going wrong until it’s too late." 

—Stuxnet explained: The first known cyberweapon