ICYMI: "Bank of England must plan for financial crisis sparked by aliens"

From the Times (o'London Town), January 16: 

A former analyst at the central bank has urged governor Andrew Bailey to put contingencies in place to prevent collapse if alien life is confirmed

The Bank of England must plan for a financial crisis being triggered by an official announcement confirming the existence of alien life, one of its former policy experts has claimed.

Helen McCaw served as a senior analyst in financial security at the UK’s central bank, preparing for events that could impact the economy.

She has now written to Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s governor, urging him to organise contingencies for the possibility that the White House may one day confirm we are not alone in the universe.

• UFO hearing: Congress tells government to come clean on what it knows
McCaw, a Cambridge graduate, believes a declaration of that magnitude would send shockwaves through the markets and could trigger bank collapses and civil unrest.
Until recently, suggestions that governments were covering up the existence of alien life were limited to a small coterie of conspiracy theorists and UFO activists.

However, a host of senior American officials, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and James Clapper, a former director of national intelligence, have recently indicated their belief in the possibility of intelligent non-human life. 

Rubio, a close ally of President Trump, told the makers of the recently released UFO documentary The Age of Disclosure: “We’ve had repeated instances of something operating in the airspace over restricted nuclear facilities, and it’s not ours.” 

This month, The Sunday Times disclosed previously classified state files, which showed that the British military sought to obtain “extraterrestrial” technology after receiving credible intelligence that UFOs appeared to be real and could outperform any known human craft. 

McCaw, who worked for the Bank of England for ten years until 2012, insists that politicians and bankers can no longer afford to dismiss talk of alien life and snigger about “little green men”....

....MUCH MORE

And more recently: 

March 15 - "Meanwhile, In Extraterrestrial Markets... (UFOD)" 

March 19 - "White House registers ‘Aliens.gov’ domain name, sparking hope of Trump news on UFOs"

Personally I don't think there will be any mass panic from a jaded and satiated public, maybe a listless "Meh". 

If interested see Krugman (2011).

Paul Krugman: An Alien Invasion Could Fix the Economy 

Creighton University's "Rural Mainstreet Index Falls Below Growth Neutral Again"

From Creighton's Heider College of Business, March 19:

Conflict in Iran Creating Significant Volatility in Ag Sector

March 2026 Survey Results at-a-Glance:

• The overall RMI dropped below growth neutral for March to its lowest level since October 2025.
• Weakness in the farm sector is spilling over into the business community with approximately 27.2% of bankers reporting that small businesses in their area were experiencing declines in business activity.
• After falling below growth neutral for January and February, the March farm and ranchland index rose to 50.2 from 45.5 in February.
• The 2026 conflict in Iran has created significant volatility in the agricultural sector, primarily impacting agricultural equipment sales, with the index falling below growth neutral for the 31st straight month.
• More than half, or 52.4%, indicated no change or declines in delinquency rates, with 47.6 percent reporting that loan delinquency rates increased modestly.

Creighton University Rural Mainstreet Index (RMI)

OMAHA, Nebraska (March 19, 2026) - According to the latest monthly survey of bank CEOs in rural areas of a 10-state region dependent on agriculture and/or energy, the overall Rural Mainstreet Index (RMI) dropped below growth neutral for March to its lowest level since October 2025.

Overall: The region’s overall reading for March plummeted to 40.9 from February’s 47.9. This marks the 13th time since January 2025 that the index has moved below the growth neutral threshold. The index ranges between 0 and 100, with a reading of 50.0 representing growth neutral.

“Weakness in farm commodity prices and elevated agriculture input costs are spilling over into the business community. Approximately, 27.2% of bankers reported that small businesses in their area were experiencing declines in business activity,” said Ernie Goss, PhD, Jack A. MacAllister Chair in Regional Economics at Creighton University’s Heider College of Business.

Farming and ranchland prices: After falling below growth neutral for January and February, the March farm and ranchland index rose to 50.2 from 45.5 in February. “Farm and ranchland prices have been holding up much better than farm income,” said Goss....

....MUCH MORE

The Rural Mainstreet Index is one of two monthly coincident indicators that Professor Goss puts together, the other being the Mid-American Economy Index.

There is nothing else like them and when I write that I include the output of the big four ag-adjacent Federal Reserve Banks: Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City and St. Louis.

Media: "Business Insider has added AI-generated Q&A to stories"

 From TalkingBizNews, March 19:

Business Insider chief product officer Jeff Rabb sent out the following on Thursday:

Today, we’re launching an exciting new feature directly on our story pages to help readers dig deeper into topics related to our coverage....

....MUCH MORE 

"Jeff Bezos aims to raise $100 billion to buy, revamp manufacturing firms with AI, WSJ reports"

From Reuters, March 19:

Jeff Bezos is in early discussions to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would acquire ​manufacturing companies and seek to use AI to ‌drive and speed up automation, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. 

The Amazon.com (AMZN.O) founder is holding talks with some ​of the world's biggest asset managers to secure ​funding for the project, WSJ said.

Bezos traveled to ⁠the Middle East to discuss the new fund ​with sovereign wealth representatives in the region a few ​months ago, according to the report.

Described in investor documents as a "manufacturing transformation vehicle," the fund aims to target companies in major ​industries such as chipmaking, defense, and aerospace, the ​Journal said.

Last year, The New York Times reported that Bezos would ‌serve ⁠as co-CEO of a new startup called Project Prometheus focused on AI for engineering and manufacturing computers, automobiles and spacecraft....

....MORE 

The Journal says the big money is in the Middle East and Singapore. It reads as though the new venture is separate from Project Prometheus.

Here's the 2025 NYT story:

"Jeff Bezos Creates A.I. Start-Up Where He Will Be Co-Chief Executive"

"White House registers ‘Aliens.gov’ domain name, sparking hope of Trump news on UFOs"

From the New York Post, March 19:

A new White House URL is out of this world (wide web).

The eyebrow-raising domain name — “Aliens.gov” — has been added to the federal government’s official website registry, amplifying speculation that President Trump could be gearing up to pull back the curtain on what US intelligence agencies really know about whether we’re alone in the universe.

Though the website is not yet live, the government has reserved the domain name for an as-yet-unknown purpose, registry records show.

The revelation came after it was flagged by an automated tracker of new federal websites on Wednesday, almost exactly a month since the president said he would order top administration officials to identify and release government files related to UFOs and extraterrestrials....

....MUCH MORE 

This follows on March 15's "Meanwhile, In Extraterrestrial Markets... (UFOD)":

ETF Bets on Alien Tech With UFO Disclosure Strategy
A new actively managed ETF is positioning for a hypothetical “Disclosure Day,” when UFO enthusiasts believe the U.S. government could reveal evidence of non-human technology.

One of the strangest ETFs to ever hit the market, the Tuttle Capital UFO Disclosure ETF (UFOD) aims to invest in companies that it says could benefit from “advanced or reverse-engineered alien technology.”

Yes, really....

"Human Brain Cells Run New Data Centers in Singapore, Melbourne"

From Bloomberg, March 9:

Biotech startup Cortical Labs is working on two small data centers run by human brain cells, putting lab-grown neurons onto silicon in an experiment that could one day challenge chips from the likes of Nvidia Corp.

The Australia-based startup unveiled its first biological data center in Melbourne and is building another in Singapore with partner DayOne Data Centers Ltd., it said in a statement on Tuesday. Instead of racks of servers running on conventional processors, the facilities will house biological computers known as CL1 units, powered by human brain cells.

While years or decades away from challenging mainstream technology, the project highlights scientists’ search for novel solutions to address problems arising from an artificial intelligence-induced need for increasing amounts of computing capacity. The swift buildout of AI data centers across the planet has led to environmental concerns over their power needs and water consumption as well as shortages in silicon....

[They grow up so fast.] 

...The computing capacity of Cortical Labs’ systems is modest, but the company is making progress. One of its earlier achievements was to teach its brain cells to play the rudimentary computer game Pong. Last month, it said it had trained them to play the much more advanced title Doom....

....MUCH MORE 

From playing Doom one month to running a data center in Singapore the next. 

March 7 - "Human Brain Cells Learn to Play Doom in Cortical Labs Experiment"

Possibly also of interest:

September 2018 - Lab Grown Mini-Brains Raise Some Ethical Questions

June 2024 - Another Way To Beat AI's Power Consumption Problem: Brain Organoids

Previously in organoids and such:

"Lab-Grown Mini Kidneys 'Go Rogue,' Sprout Brain and Muscle Cells"
Getting into a weird area here.

Ah, the Swiss: "Nestle Finds a Reliable Supply of Brain Cells"

ICYMI: "Researchers Teach Human Brain Cells in a Dish to Play 'Pong'"

"Cyborg computer with living brain organoid aces machine learning tests"

The Act of Thinking Can Accelerate Brain Tumor Growth
Yikes. Shut it down, shut it down, Ōm shanti shanti shanti, Ōm.

"Is proximity to doom good or bad for the stock market?"

A repost from 2016.

Ahead Of This Weekend's Votes In Italy and Austria: Is Doom Bad For The Stock Market?

TL;DR: No

Unless it's doom like getting caught on the wrong side of the Denarius/Shekel pair in A.D. 70 where it wasn't just the FX guys but the real estate developers out at the "Future site of Masada Manor" who got hammered.
Then it's a problem and you should probably brush up on your Latin.

From CXO Advisory:
Is proximity to doom good or bad for the stock market?

To measure proximity to doom, we use the Doomsday Clock “Minutes-to-Midnight” metric, revised occasionally via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which “conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging biotechnologies, and cybertechnology that could inflict irrevocable harm, whether by intention, miscalculation, or by accident, to our way of life and to the planet.” Using the timeline for the Doomsday Clock since inception and contemporaneous annual returns for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) during 1947 through most of 2016 (23 doom proximity judgments), we find that:
The following chart relates annual DJIA return (2016 partial) to same-year “Minutes to Midnight” judgment as available over the sample period based on two assumptions:

1. Changes in “Minutes to Midnight” occur near the beginning of years. For example, the 3-minute proximity to doom for 2015 relates to the 2015 DJIA return of -2.2%.
2. When there is no change for a given year, “Minutes to Midnight” is that same as the most recently issued judgment. For example, the proximity to doom for 2013 and 2014 is the same as that for 2012.

The Pearson correlation between these two series is -0.04 and the R-squared statistic 0.001, indicating practically no relationship between proximity to doom and annual DJIA return.

Might there be a lag between proximity to doom and stock market return?

The next chart summarizes annual correlations between “Minutes to Midnight” and DJIA annual return for lead-lag relationships ranging from DJIA return leads proximity to doom by five years (-5) to proximity to doom leads DJIA return by five years (5). All correlations are too small to indicate any relationship....MORE

Comments On Nvidia From Some Fans (NVDA)

As GTC, San Jose, 2026 wraps up, some commentary.

First up, Yahoo Finance, March 19:

Nvidia's changing its strategic approach to AI, going all in on inferencing and agents 

Jensen Huang took the stage at Nvidia’s (NVDA) GTC event in San Jose, Calif., on Monday, clad in his usual leather jacket, to provide the world with an update about what the world’s most valuable company has been cooking up over the last few months.

Huang was as indefatigable as ever as he ran through his roughly two-and-a-half-hour keynote in front of some 30,000 attendees. But what’s come to be known as the Super Bowl of AI featured a noticeable shift in Nvidia’s overall AI strategy — a deeper focus on inferencing, or powering AI models, and agents.

Nvidia’s chips are traditionally known for their general-purpose use. They can train and run AI models, power robots, and serve as the backbone of self-driving cars.

And while Nvidia’s offerings are still the industry standard, upstart chip companies like Cerebras and Groq have begun designing and rolling out processors geared specifically toward running AI models, creating a potential threat to Nvidia’s formidable AI moat.

Huang and company answered that at GTC with a slew of announcements meant to prove Nvidia is the inferencing leader to beat, including the debut of its Groq 3 chip and rack system.

Nvidia didn’t just go further with its inferencing capabilities, though. The company also showed off its addition to the much-hyped world of OpenClaw high-powered AI agents.

OpenClaw, which debuted as Clawd in November 2025 before being renamed Moltbot and finally OpenClaw in January, has taken off thanks to its ability to run AI agents powered by different AI models on users’ machines via apps like WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, and others.

Now, Nvidia is getting in on the buzz with its NemoClaw platform designed to improve the security and privacy of the agents.

“They are evolving in a big way, not only in inference, agentic, too,” TECHnalysis Research founder and chief analyst Bob O’Donnell told Yahoo Finance.

“The switch to OpenClaw, and now NemoClaw, to me, is even more indicative of this. It just shows how quickly they are reacting to the market.”

Nvidia moves further into inferencing 
Nvidia’s decision to include Groq 3 as one of the seven chip platforms that make up Vera Rubin is part of its effort to stay ahead of the broader industry.

Nvidia signed a $20 billion deal with Groq in December, hiring founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other members of the Groq team and giving Nvidia access to Groq’s intellectual property.

The results of the deal are Nvidia’s new Groq 3 language processing unit (LPU) and Groq 3 LPX server rack. That’s right, Nvidia now has graphics processing units (GPUs), LPUs, and central processing units (CPUs). It’s a lot of units....

....MUCH MORE 

And at Barron's March 19:

Nvidia Is Giving Apple Vibes. Why That Spells Big Things for the Stock.

The artificial-intelligence revolution has entered a new phase, one in which running AI models, known as inference, is taking over as the main source of demand for AI computing. Nvidia was the winner of round one when training the AI models drove chip sales. But things change quickly in tech, and the company still has to convince the market and customers that it remains indispensable.

CEO Jensen Huang devoted his keynote address at Nvidia’s GTC conference this past week to make the case. He reminded everyone that Nvidia had spent two decades building an ecosystem of hardware and software that makes its platform the least costly for AI. By the end of his speech, Huang had delivered a vision of Nvidia that reminded me of just one other company: Apple.

For years, Wall Street didn’t appreciate that Apple was more than just a hardware firm. Apple’s version of consumer technology provides a carefully thought-out bundle. The hardware is expensive, but it comes with a lot of free software and services that bring everything together seamlessly. In the end, the platform is sticky and full of value.

This is sometimes called Apple’s “walled garden.” iPhones, Macs, and Watches work like one because Apple controls the entire technology stack: the chips, the devices, the operating systems, the applications, and the cloud services. It’s all developed together, so it all just works together.

You’re free to leave the garden through a well-hidden gate, but the flowers are nice and the sun is shining, so why would you?

Nvidia is employing that Apple model of full control in an entirely different market: AI computing. More and more, Nvidia is moving toward being a full platform with an ecosystem of hardware, software, and partnerships that could be sticky like Apple’s, notwithstanding growing competition in the AI chip market.

It begins with Nvidia controlling as many layers of data center infrastructure as it can, what CEO Jensen Huang calls “extreme codesign.” A lot of attention is paid to Nvidia GPU chips, the workhorses of AI data centers, but there are five other Nvidia chips inside its coming Vera Rubin AI server, each with a crucial role in making a product that can’t be matched. The chips work better because they are designed together to work together.

Nvidia also makes data center network switches that alleviate a key computing bottleneck. In the last quarter, networking sales were responsible for 16% of Nvidia revenue, up from 8% the year before. It’s now the fastest-growing unit in Nvidia’s reporting.

This year, Nvidia will integrate a new server design built around AI inference chips from start-up Groq. Vera Rubin will work in concert with Groq on demanding inference tasks. Creating a data center with mixed servers that collaborate with each other is a thorny problem that Nvidia solved with software called Dynamo. Nvidia’s hardware still leads the industry, but the deepest part of the company’s moat is all the software it’s created to run on its hardware.

Huang began his GTC keynote by talking about the 20th anniversary of Nvidia’s most important software known as CUDA, or Compute Unified Device Architecture. In 2004, Nvidia hired Ian Buck, an engineer fresh out of Stanford University, to create a way for programmers to use Nvidia GPUs for a lot more than just computer graphics and gaming. Two years later, CUDA was born.

Nvidia kept developing the software, and by 2012, AI researchers had made Nvidia’s platform their preferred kit. A whole generation of researchers grew up on it. When ChatGPT triggered the generative AI craze in 2022, no one was more prepared for it than Nvidia.

Buck remains a Nvidia employee.

Nvidia has continued to build the ecosystem on top of the GPU-CUDA combination. The company’s online code portfolio has 700 repositories, including specialized software for engineering, physics, weather, and medical science, along with tools for AI training, inference, and agents. These are active projects with new versions rolling out all the time. Over a third of the repositories have received updates in the past month.

Nvidia is also the world’s largest contributor to open-source AI models with 715 of them available for download....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at Barron's, March 18:

Sure, Nvidia Stock Is Stuck. But Don’t Ignore Its Huge Cash Returns

The stock is down $2.45 (-1.36%) at $177.95.

This week:

• As Nvidia's Developer Confab Kicks Off, Some Hard-Won Insight (NVDA)
• Highlights Of Jensen Huang's GTC Keynote Speech, March 16, 2026 (NVDA)
• Transcript: Analyst Q&A, Nvidia GTC, March 17, 2026 (NVDA)

Sadly, I don't think we'll see anything as insightful as 2024's "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang debuts new $8,990 lizard-embossed leather jacket, also says something about AI GPUs: (NVDA)

Although....looking back to 2016's "Huh, This NVIDIA Company May Be On To Something (NVDA)" it's possible I''ll come up with something.

After a series of all-time highs last week the stock looks set to open up a couple pennies at $44.35.
From the Wall Street Journal:

New Chips Propel Machine Learning  

Divide by 40 to account for the stock splits and we see $1.11 on the old stock. 

"'Worse Than Nord Stream': Iran's Attack On Qatar's LNG Sends Shockwaves Across Global Energy Markets"

Seeing Brent futures above $119 while WTI was trading around $96 [and oil for delivery to Asian refiners was commanding $150+] earlier today was a bit of a jolt.

From ZeroHedge, March 19:

Brent crude futures surged toward $120/bbl, while WTI remained muted around $96/bbl, as Wednesday marked a major escalation in the US-Iran conflict. Israeli fighter jets struck Iran's giant South Pars gas field with air-delivered munitions, triggering a retaliatory chain reaction in which IRGC forces targeted critical energy infrastructure across the Gulf.

Iranian drone and missile strikes caused heavy damage to Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG hub, while gas plants in Abu Dhabi shut down, Kuwaiti refineries were hit by drones, and Saudi refining assets were targeted.

Unlike temporary shipping disruptions in the Gulf waters or the Strait of Hormuz, damage to upstream energy assets, such as production and LNG facilities, is far more serious and could take months or even years to repair, raising the risk of prolonged tight global supply.

Read overnight report:

• Iran's Attack On Qatar's LNG Plant Is Bad; The Math Behind The Global LNG Fleet Is Far Worse

Some 20% of global LNG exports originate from Gulf countries, and the latest round of Israeli and IRGC attacks on upstream energy assets shows how the conflict has entered an entirely new phase where energy infrastructure is being directly targeted.

Disruptions at Qatar's LNG facilities threaten to tighten the global gas market, with ripple effects quickly spreading worldwide - across Asia, Europe, and even U.S. gas prices.

European natural gas benchmark futures jumped as much as 35% today, pushing prices to more than double their pre-war levels, as traders brace for what only appears to be a prolonged period of disruption from critical LNG hubs that account for a fifth of the world's total supply.

QatarEnergy warned earlier that LNG facilities inside its Ras Laffan Industrial City were attacked by missiles, "causing sizable fires and extensive further damage."

"This could be a game changer for the LNG industry, akin to the attack on Nord Stream or possibly even worse," Susan Sakmar, visiting assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said, quoted by Bloomberg. "This is a sudden disruption, with no indication that Qatar could restart anytime soon."

Global Risk Management analyst Arne Lohmann Rasmussen warned, "LNG from Qatar could in principle be offline for months and, in the worst case, for years. For the gas market, the crisis does not end simply because the war ends and the Strait of Hormuz reopens."

UBS analyst Matt Salmon commented on the exploding energy risk premia due to overnight war developments:

Geopolitical risk premia in the energy complex rose further following attacks on energy infrastructure in the Middle East, after President Trump failed earlier this week to establish an international coalition to support the resumption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. In a clear escalation of hostilities, Iranian energy infrastructure was targeted for the first time in the conflict, with Israel striking the South Pars gas field, while the US claimed no prior knowledge.

Iran had warned early in the conflict that there would be "no red lines" around retaliatory actions, and it made good on this threat with two strikes in less than 12 hours on Qatar's Ras Laffan Industrial City, home to the world's largest LNG facility, with state operator QatarEnergy reporting "extensive damage."

....MUCH MORE 

Norway’s Equinor Drills A Wildcat Well, Hits Oil

Henceforth (and perhaps forevermore) Australia to relinquish the moniker "The lucky Country" to Norway. 

From OilPrice, March 18:

Norway’s Equinor Makes Oil Discovery Near Huge Arctic Field 

Equinor has made an oil discovery in a wildcat well in a prospect close to the giant Johan Castberg field in the Barents Sea, the Norwegian Offshore Directorate said on Wednesday.    

Equinor, as the operator, and its partners in the Polynya Tubåen prospect, Var Energi and Petoro, estimate to have found between 14 and 24 million barrels of recoverable oil equivalent, and are now considering whether they could tie the discovery back to the Johan Castberg field.

In 2025, Equinor started up the Johan Castberg project, which last summer hit full capacity of 220,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil production.

Johan Castberg will produce crude for 30 years, boost Norway’s oil exports, and bolster the role of Western Europe’s biggest oil and gas producer as a reliable and long-term supplier of energy, Equinor said....

....MUCH MORE 

Earlier today:

As Fuel Runs Out: "Australia stops in three weeks"

Capital Markets: "Limited Follow-Through Dollar Today After Yesterday's Surge"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex: 

The US dollar rallied strongly during the Federal Reserve’s press conference yesterday as rates jumped in response to what was widely seen as a hawkish hold, especially given Chair Powell’s framing. There has been limited follow-through dollar sales today, but the technical damage inflicted on many pairs has not been reversed. The Bank of Japan, the Swiss National Bank, and Sweden’s Riksbank have announced unchanged policies, as expected, and now attention turns to the Bank of England and the European Central Bank. Neither will move, but how they view the risks is important. We expect both will indicate the lack of urgency. 

The war appears to have been extended with the attack on the South Pars gas field jointly run by Iran and Qatar. News reports say that President Trump is urging restraint, but the horse seems to have bolted already. Given the feints and attack on Iran during negotiations and after the US claimed to have destroyed Iran’s nuclear capability last June, it is difficult to know what is real and what is a war tactic. May WTI is within yesterday’s range, but the front month Brent contract made new highs today....

....MUCH MORE  

As Fuel Runs Out: "Australia stops in three weeks"

From Australia's MacroBusiness, March 18:

As we know, China has banned refined fuel shipments, restricting the world’s supply. Overnight, Korea capped exports at 2020 levels, and Thailand banned them.

As well, Singapore refinery runs have begun to wane, with capacity utilisation down meaningfully from 20-50% as it runs out of oil.

These shortages have not even arrived in Australia yet, but will over the next week or so as tanker volumes fall away.

80% of the volumes that flowed through the Straits of Hormuz went to Asia. That is, Asia has lost 12mb/d of its oil supply. It consumes about 40mb/d so that’s about 30%.

I really can’t see how or why Asian refineries are going to be allowed to ship fuel to Australia when home country supply is at risk.

This raises the likelihood that Australia will lose a much larger share of its fuel supply than the 15% of global supply offline.

30% seems more probable within a month.

The nightmare scenario, which is also the base case, is that resource nationalism overruns the oil market globally.

The US, which is legally able to limit oil shipments under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), is currently the focus of attention.

The ban on exports there, especially for refined products rather than crude oil, is a strong possibility as prices climb....

....MUCH MORE 

At the moment, "Exxon, BP, Vitol ship most US fuels to Australia for a single month in three decades, traders say".

From Reuters, March 19:

At least 200,000 tons of refined fuels to be shipped

Tankers will mostly be loaded by the end of March

Voyage typically takes 30-40 days

Australia usually relies on Asia for most of its fuel imports

ExxonMobil, BP and Vitol are shipping a record volume of oil products to Australia ‌from the United States in March, shipping data from trading sources shows, filling a gap left by the loss of regular supplies from Asia as the Iran conflict disrupts supplies.

 

Australia usually relies on Asia for the vast majority of its oil product imports, but China and Thailand have banned fuel exports to preserve domestic supplies ​and refiners across the region are cutting output as Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz sharply cuts crude exports from the ​Middle East.

 

At least 200,000 metric tons of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel have been loaded, or will be ⁠loaded, by the end of March from the U.S. Gulf Coast and West Coast for shipment to Australia, shipping data from three trade ​sources shows.

 

The volume represents the most fuel shipped to Australia from the U.S. for a single month in more than three decades, based ​on U.S. Energy Information Administration data....

....MUCH MORE, including a handy conversion table:

(1 ton = 7.45 barrels of diesel)

(1 ton = 7.88 barrels of ​jet fuel)

(1 ton = 8.45 barrels of gasoline)

Inflation: BLS Producer Price Index Comes In Hotter Than Predicted

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 18:

PRODUCER PRICE INDEXES - FEBRUARY 2026 

The Producer Price Index for final demand increased 0.7 percent in February, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Final demand prices moved up 0.5 percent in January and 0.4 percent in December 2025. (See table A.) On an unadjusted basis, the index for final demand rose 3.4 percent for the 12 months ended in February, the largest 12- month advance since increasing 3.4 percent in February 2025.

More than half of the February rise in prices for final demand can be attributed to a 0.5-percent advance in the index for final demand services. Prices for final demand goods increased 1.1 percent.

The index for final demand less foods, energy, and trade services rose 0.5 percent in February, the tenth consecutive advance. For the 12 months ended in February, prices for final demand less foods, energy, and trade services increased 3.5 percent.

Final Demand Final demand services: The index for final demand services rose 0.5 percent in February, the third straight advance. Nearly three-fourths of the February broad-based increase can be traced to prices for final demand services less trade, transportation, and warehousing, which moved up 0.6 percent. The indexes for final demand trade services and for final demand transportation and warehousing services also rose, 0.4 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively. (Trade indexes measure changes in margins received by wholesalers and retailers.)

Product detail: About 20 percent of the February advance in the index for final demand services is attributable to a 5.7-percent jump in prices for traveler accommodation services. The indexes for food and alcohol wholesaling; securities brokerage, dealing, investment advice, and related services; fuels and lubricants retailing; long-distance motor carrying; and inpatient care also rose. In contrast, margins for apparel, footwear, and accessories retailing fell 4.5 percent. The indexes for gaming receipts (partial) and for airline passenger services also decreased. (See table 2.)

Final demand goods: Prices for final demand goods increased 1.1 percent in February, the largest rise since moving up 1.6 percent in August 2023. Forty percent of the February broad-based advance can be traced to the index for final demand foods, which jumped 2.4 percent. Prices for final demand energy and for final demand goods less foods and energy also increased, 2.3 percent and 0.3 percent, respectively.

Product detail: Over 20 percent of the February rise in the index for final demand goods is attributable to a 48.9-percent jump in prices for fresh and dry vegetables. The indexes for diesel fuel, chicken eggs, gasoline, jet fuel, and tobacco products also increased. Conversely, prices for jewelry and jewelry products fell 4.0 percent. The indexes for home heating oil and for soft drinks also declined....

....MUCH MORE, tables, narrative

Core PPI rose 0.5% on the month, above 0.3% forecasts. The core PPI inflation rate picked up to 3.9% from 3.6%.

Memory: Shortage Could Last Five Years, It's The Wafers

One of the first sources to relay the concern that the memory chip shortage would not be over quickly was Tom's Hardware in October 2025, linked here on the blog on January 3:

"AI data centers are swallowing the world's memory and storage supply, setting the stage for a pricing apocalypse that could last a decade" 

Now we return to Tom's to see what the head honcho at #2 memory chip maker SK Hynix has to say, March 18:

SK Group chairman says memory chip shortage will last until 2030 — wafer supply trails demand by 20% 

SK Hynix's CEO is expected to announce price stabilization measures soon. 

SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won told reporters at Nvidia's GTC conference in San Jose on Monday that the global memory chip shortage is likely to persist for another four to five years, with industry-wide wafer supply lagging demand by more than 20%, Bloomberg reported. Chey, whose conglomerate controls SK Hynix, said leading memory makers are expanding capacity but are unlikely to fully meet demand until around 2030 because securing additional wafers takes at least four to five years, according to The Korea Times. 

Chey warned that excessive focus on high-bandwidth memory could lead to shortages in conventional DRAM, potentially affecting smartphones and PCs. SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron have shifted production in recent years toward HBM for AI accelerators, and the resulting shortfall in conventional DRAM output has driven steep price increases across consumer electronics.

SK Hynix holds roughly 57% of the global HBM market and 32% of overall DRAM, and the company is currently building a $13 billion HBM packaging and testing facility at its Cheongju complex in South Korea, with construction scheduled to begin next month and completion targeted for the end of 2027.

Article continues below...

....MUCH MORE  

And it's not just silicon wafers for memory chips.

From SemiAnalysis, March 12:

The Great AI Silicon Shortage
TSMC N3 Wafer Shortages, Memory Constraints, Datacenter Bottlenecks, Supply Chain Wars Winner 

Token demand is skyrocketing and the need for AI compute continues to accelerate. The improvement in model capabilities combined with the rapid emergence of agentic workflows has driven a surge in user adoption and aggregate token demand. Anthropic added a staggering $6B of ARR in the single month of February alone driven by broad adoption of agentic coding platform Claude Code, and if Anthropic had more compute they would have added more. Despite a huge AI infrastructure buildout over the past few years, available compute is scarce. On-demand GPU prices continue to go up even for Hoppers which are almost 2 generations old.

From our own experiences, we have reached out to every neocloud we know asking if they have small clusters available, but everything is already firmly locked up. This tight supply environment explains the sharp reset in hyperscaler capex plans. Consensus estimates have moved materially higher across the board, with Google standing out as the most extreme example, where 2026 capex expectations have roughly doubled versus prior expectations, primarily driven by datacenter and server spend.

 

Source: Company Earnings, Bloomberg

This is a tremendous level of spending, and hyperscalers would deploy even more capital if they could, but they are constrained by one critical factor: silicon supply. There is simply not enough advanced logic and memory fabrication capacity to support the pace of compute deployments. While the AD (After Da launch of ChatGPT) era has been riddled with various constraints such as CoWoS packaging and datacenter power, we are now firmly in the silicon shortage phase.

 

Source: SemiAnalysis Accelerator Model

The TSMC N3 Shortage

One of, if not the, biggest constraints is TSMC’s N3 logic wafer capacity. TSMC’s N3 family started shipping for revenue in 2023, with demand initially driven primarily by smartphones and PCs. N3 got off to a shaky start, with the first variant “N3B” having yield issues and being too expensive relative to the density improvement. Greater adoption came with the refined N3E process, a relaxed variant with far fewer EUV layers and therefore lower cost. Key smartphone and PC customers include Apple, which uses N3 variants for its M3 to M5 Mac chips and A17 to A19 iPhone processors, Qualcomm for its Snapdragon 8 Elite series, MediaTek for its Dimensity smartphone SoCs as well as select automotive and PC chips, and Intel for its Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake client processors.

 

Source: SemiAnalysis Foundry Model

Up until today, N3 demand has been driven primarily by consumer electronics. In 2026, all the main AI accelerator families are transitioning to N3, and AI will account for the majority of N3 demand before transitioning to N2 and beyond.

We can see in the table below the industry-wide convergence toward TSMC’s N3 family as the leading process node for AI accelerators heading into 2026. NVIDIA transitions from 4NP with Blackwell to 3NP with Rubin. AMD, typically the earlier adopter of new nodes, has already adopted N3 for MI350X and will stay on N3 for the AID and MID tiles for MI400 (XCD is N2). Google’s TPU roadmap shifts fully to N3E starting with TPU v7, with TPU seeing a huge upsize in program volumes this year. AWS also transitions to N3P with Trainium3. Meta’s MTIA follows a similar path, though it will be at much lower volumes.

 

Source: SemiAnalysis Accelerator Model

This shift is not limited to XPU silicon. The Vera CPU used in VR racks uses N3P for all its silicon. There is also networking silicon in the form of the NVLink 6 switch, as well as scale out switches like Tomahawk 6 and Spectrum 6. With Rubin offering 1.6T of scale out network per GPU, Rubin kicks off the adoption of 3nm 200G optical DSPs.

This sudden convergence of N3 adoption coupled with the continued growth of AI compute demand has resulted in a huge demand shock for N3 wafer capacity. TSMC has been caught flat-footed, with wafer capacity expansion failing to keep pace with surging AI demand. How did this happen? Although the greatest compute buildout in history began in late 2022, TSMC’s capex only exceeded its previous peak in 2025. This year, TSMC is going to smash through last year’s record Capex, because they have realized how far customer demand is exceeding their capacity....

....MUCH MORE 

It's a pretty big deal. If interested see:

Memory: "The inflation spark that could become a deflation shock?"

From M&G's Bond Vigilantes, February 27:
Memory chips have quietly become the most important commodities in the global economy.

 “'Entry-Level PC Segment Will Disappear by 2028,' Says Gartner, as Soaring Memory Costs Start to Cripple Manufacturers"

"....Micron, SanDisk & Memory Stocks Are Crashing Today"

 Thanks for the Memories: "South Korea’s Kospi plunges 12% amid broader declines in Asia markets as Iran conflict rages"
The index, which has been driven by the memory chip makers, Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. et al., up over 145% from March 2025 to the February 25, 2026 peak is now down 10% on the day, March 4th....

Google vs Tesla: "Waymos and Cybercabs see the world through very different sensors" (now with more DARPA)

From Asterisk Magazine, Issue 13, March 2026:

Seeing Like a Sedan 

Waymos and Cybercabs see the world through very different sensors. Which technology wins out will determine the future of self-driving vehicles. 

Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.

Both cars drive themselves, but they perceive the world very differently. 

One robotaxi is a Waymo. From its roof, a mounted lidar rig spins continuously, sending out laser pulses that bounce back from the road, the storefronts, and other vehicles, while radar signals emanate from its bumpers and side panels. The Waymo uses these sensors to generate a detailed 3D model of its surroundings, detecting pedestrians and cars that human drivers might struggle to see.

In the next lane is a Tesla Cybercab, operating in unsupervised full self-driving mode. It has no lidar and no radar, just eight cameras housed in pockets of glass. The car processes these video feeds through a neural network, identifying objects, estimating their dimensions, and planning its path accordingly.

This scenario is only partially imaginary. Waymo already operates, in limited fashion, in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Phoenix, with announced plans to operate in many more cities. Tesla Motors launched an Austin pilot of its robotaxi business in June 2025, albeit using Model Y vehicles with safety monitors rather than the still-in-development Cybercab. The outcome of their competition will tell us much about the future of urban transportation.

The engineers who built the earliest automated driving systems would find the Waymo unsurprising. For nearly two decades after the first automated vehicles emerged, a consensus prevailed: To operate safely, an AV required redundant sensing modalities. Cameras, lidar, and radar each had weaknesses, but they could compensate for each other. That consensus is why those engineers would find the Cybercab so remarkable. In 2016, Tesla broke with orthodoxy by embracing the idea that autonomy could ultimately be solved with vision and compute and without lidar — a philosophical stance it later embodied in its full vision-only system. What humans can do with their eyeballs and a brain, the firm reasoned, a car must also be able to do with sufficient cameras and compute. If a human can drive without lidar, so, too, can an AV… or so Tesla asserts.

This philosophical disagreement will shortly play out before our eyes in the form of a massive contest between AVs that rely on multiple sensing modalities — lidar, radar, cameras — and AVs that rely on cameras and compute alone.

The stakes of this contest are enormous. The global taxi and ride-hailing market was valued at approximately $243 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $640 billion by 2032. In the United States alone, people take over 3.6 billion ride-hailing trips annually. Converting even a fraction of this market to AVs represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity. Serving just the American market, at maturity, will require millions of vehicles.

Given the scale involved, the cost of each vehicle matters. The figures are commercially sensitive, but it is certainly true that cameras are cheaper than lidar. If Tesla’s bet pays off, building a Cybercab will cost a fraction of what it will take to build a Waymo. Which vision wins out has profound implications for how quickly each company will be able to put vehicles into service, as well as for how quickly robotaxi service can scale to bring its benefits to ordinary consumers across the United States and beyond....

....MUCH MORE 

"Bugs Were Supposed to be the Future of Food. Now, the Industry is Collapsing."

Well, first people began questioning the names of the companies:

As noted in "I Said I Want "an Omlette," NOT "an Umlaut": "Ÿnsect acquires Protifarm to raise insects for human consumption"
Ÿnsect, the bug breeder with the gratuitous umlaut is really, really on board with the WEF's "Let them eat insects" pitch. 

Also:

France's Ÿnsect teams up with LOTTE to explore human food applications for edible insects

....VP communication and public affairs director Anais Maury told AFN: “The potential markets for edible insects in human foods may depend on various factors such as cultural attitudes, regulatory frameworks, and market demand. But overall, people are more open to incorporating insects into their diets.” 

And mandates. The power of mandates to force behavior change is immense. We already have our tagline: "When 'nudging' just isn't enough!" 

And will be making inquiries about music rights:

"If you don't eat yer bugs you can't have any pudding, 

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer bugs?" 

Then folks noticed that insect balls were not on the menu in Davos despite being a Swiss product: 

The insect balls represent a healthy culinary specialty that mixes meal worms with rice, carrots, celery, leeks and a pinch of chili, said Essento co-founder Christian Bärtsch....

The insect balls are one of two products to be offered to those doing their groceries in the Alpine nation of Switzerland

 

HT: Going Concern's Accounting News Roundup

And the whole halal/kosher question* and the fact that they are bugs and... 

From Mother Jones, March 12, 2026:

How the farmed-insect frenzy lost its buzz. 

“We have to get used to the idea of eating insects.”

This proclamation came from, of all people, an insect researcher. Dutch entomologist Marcel Dicke pitched eating bugs in his 2010 TED talk as critical to sustainably feeding a growing human population, because insects have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef, pork, and chicken.

To make his point, he even featured photographs of what might be a common meal in this bold new future: a stir-fry with mealworm larvae, mushrooms, and snap peas, finished with a chocolate dessert topped with a large fried cricket.

Three years later, the United Nations published a comprehensive report that echoed many of Dicke’s ideas and argued that insects could be a more eco-friendly food source not just for humans, but also for livestock. The report received widespread media coverage and helped to trigger a wave of investment from venture capital firms and governments alike into insect farming startups across Europe, the US, Canada, and beyond, totaling some $2 billion.

“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects.”

There’s a ring of truth, it turns out, to the conspiracy theory that the globalist elites want us to eat bugs.

This money was pouring into insect agriculture at a time when investors and policymakers were hungry for new models to fix the conventional meat industry’s massive carbon footprint. And what’s more disruptive and novel than farming and eating bugs?

You personally might recoil at the thought of eating fried crickets or roasted mealworms, but many cultures around the world consume insects, either caught from the wild or farmed on a small scale. And while grubs don’t feature prominently in current paleo cookbooks, our paleolithic ancestors most certainly ate plenty of bugs.

But the past decade has shown that even if you build an insect farm, the global market may not come. Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.

All told, shuttered insect farming startups account for almost half of all investment into the industry. “Things have gone from bad to worse for the big insect factory business model,” one insect farming CEO said late last year in a YouTube video.

And Vox can exclusively report that plans to build a large insect farm in Nebraska—a joint project between Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat company, and Protix, now the world’s second largest insect farming company—are indefinitely on hold.

Beyond the financial woes of the insect farming industry, some philosophers worry about the ethical implications of potentially farming tens of trillions of bugs for food, as emerging research suggests insects may well have some form of consciousness and hold the capacity to feel pain and suffer.

“Evidence is building that there’s a form of sentience there in insects,” Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who leads the Foundations of Animal Sentience project at the university, told me last year.

But it looks like they may not have too much to worry about. In spite of the initial hype surrounding the bug farming boom, the insect agriculture industry has learned just how difficult it is to compete with the incumbent, larger animal-based meat industry—and that, perhaps, it never really made sense to try doing so with bugs.

Insect farming is similar to other types of animal farming. The insects reproduce, and the offspring are raised in large numbers in factory-style buildings. Many of the same welfare concerns for farmed chickens and pigs are present on insect farms, like disease, cannibalism, and painful slaughter. In the case of insects, the creatures are killed by a variety of means. They might be frozen, baked, roasted, shredded, grond, microwaved, boiled, or suffocated.

In 2020, insect companies farmed an estimated 1 trillion bugs, and the most commonly farmed species today are black soldier fly larvae, mealworms, and crickets.

While some people might tell researchers they’re open to adding bugs to their diet, these smallest of animals remain a novelty food in the US and Europe, as opposed to a commodity capable of displacing wings or burgers.

“The human food market, basically, has not materialized,” Dustin Crummett, a philosopher and executive director of The Insect Institute—a nonprofit that researches the environmental and animal welfare implications of large-scale insect agriculture—told me. “Only a tiny fraction of farmed insects are used for human food.”

“It doesn’t really make sense to buy chicken feed to feed insects to feed to chicken.”

...MUCH MORE 

*I don't think crickets are halal: 

Halal with conditions
According to scholars it is Halal to eat certain insects under certain conditions:

• Locusts and grasshoppers are Halal to consume.
• If a bug fell in your soup or stew, you can still eat your meal with a tiny amount of insect in it.
• If people do not have access to food and insects are available for consumption, it is permissible to eat insects for survival.

And they are definitely not kosher, again with a possible carve-out for locusts.
Also at AFN:

Ÿnsect wins more time to restructure under court-supervised process; Innovafeed’s US plans ‘very much alive’ 

The commercial court supervising French insect ag pioneer Ÿnsect as it restructures its operations has extended the observation period until January 12, 2026. Fellow French insect ag firm Innovafeed, meanwhile, says its plans to build a large-scale plant in the US are “very much alive.”

Ÿnsect entered insolvency proceedings in February after failing to secure financing under a safeguard plan agreed with the court in Évry last year, and is currently under judicial administration....

....MUCH MORE

I am reminded of one of the links in 2017's "Scientists Swear Cockroach Milk Is the Next Big Superfood"
But how do you milk the wee vermin?

***** 

....Roach milk? I'm still having trouble with that picture of the prime ministers of Finland, Sweden, Denmark,  Iceland and Norway eating their bugs and plankton a couple weeks ago: 
"Nordics could become 'Silicon Valley' of food" (and Norway goes big on seaweed cultivation)
Please don't
As the bumper sticker says: "Mealworms aren't food, mealworms are what food eats".
Or something.

From EU Observer:

Plankton, seaweed and edible insects were on the menu, when the prime ministers of Finland, Sweden, Denmark,Iceland and Norway 

met in Austevoll, southwest of the city of Bergen in Norway on Tuesday (30 May).

They launched an initiative called Nordic Solutions To Global Challenges, which aims to achieve the UN's sustainable development goals for 2030....

Transcript: Analyst Q&A, Nvidia GTC, March 17, 2026 (NVDA)

From Investing.com, March 17:

On Tuesday, 17 March 2026, NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) presented at the Conference GTC Financial Analyst Q&A, highlighting its strategic advancements in AI and financial outlook. The company showcased strong growth prospects, driven by innovative AI systems and robust demand for its architectures. However, challenges in maintaining margins and competition were also discussed.

Key Takeaways

• NVIDIA anticipates over $1 trillion in demand for its Blackwell and Rubin architectures by the end of 2027.
• The company plans to allocate 50% of its free cash flow to stock repurchases and dividends.
• NVIDIA is expanding its AI solutions, integrating CPUs and storage to enhance its AI factory platform.
• The shift towards token-based models is reshaping the IT industry, with NVIDIA positioning itself as a leader in this transition.
• NVIDIA’s customer base is diversifying beyond hyperscalers to include regional clouds and enterprises.

Financial Results

• NVIDIA projects strong visibility in demand, with over $1 trillion expected for Blackwell and Rubin architectures through 2027.
• Excluding other products like Feynman and Groq, the company sees potential for additional business growth.
• Approximately 50% of free cash flow will be directed towards stock repurchases and dividends, with potential increases based on future growth.

Operational Updates

• The rise of agentic systems marks a new inflection point in AI, enhancing NVIDIA’s growth trajectory.
• NVIDIA’s AI coverage has expanded, adding platforms like Anthropic and Meta AI.
• The company is focusing on optimizing AI inference with architectures like Groq, catering to diverse performance needs.

Future Outlook

• NVIDIA plans to ship Vera Rubin before Groq, enhancing throughput with NVLink 72 and Vera Rubin Ultra NVLink 144.
• The company aims to increase throughput and pricing, potentially boosting demand to $1.25 trillion if Groq is fully integrated.
• Jensen envisions 99% of global compute focusing on inference, positioning NVIDIA at the forefront of AI innovation.

Q&A Highlights

• Non-public AI companies are reportedly seeing revenue increases of $1 to $2 billion per week.
• The IT industry, valued at $2 trillion, is expected to grow to $8 trillion, integrating OpenAI and Anthropic models.
• Jensen emphasized NVIDIA’s value proposition, highlighting the importance of integrated hardware and software solutions.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Conference GTC Financial Analyst Q&A:

: Good morning, everyone. As we quiet the back room, I have a very important job. As a reminder, the content of this presentation may contain forward-looking statements, and investors are advised to read our reports filed with the SEC for information related to risks and uncertainties facing our business. With that, I will turn it over to Jensen and Colette.

Colette: All right. Good morning, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the presentation yesterday. Went a little bit longer, but I think it was an absolutely great summary for us. We’re gonna take this time to focus on your needs and some of the additional kind of questions you are. We’re gonna start with a couple, maybe the first slide or so, and then we’ll open it up for questions, and I’m gonna turn this over to Jensen with that.

Jensen: As I was saying yesterday, there were three inflection points in recent AI. The first one was generative AI, the second was reasoning, and we’re at the third inflection point now, and each one builds on the others. There’s a lot of technical reasons why each one of them built on the others, but here we are with the third inflection point, which is agentic systems. Agentic systems that are able to operate autonomously, that’s why they call them agentic, because they have agency. You can give them goals, and instead of just answering questions, they can now perform tasks. Tasks could be anything. Of course, one of the most popular applications of agentic systems is write software.

You know, engineers in your company, I’m sure, and engineers in my company for sure are using agentic systems all day long. What used to be a thing for engineers is, you know, when you come to work, they give you a laptop. Now when you come to work, they give you a laptop and tokens. Token budget is now a real thing. Every engineer is gonna have a token budget. You know, the idea that you would hire a $300,000 engineer and they spend no tokens in doing their job, you gotta ask the question, what are they doing?

It is very, very clear now that every engineer will have a lot of tokens that they will have to consume, and those tokens are going to be produced. Now, I just said something a second ago. If you just connected the dots, we used to be, when an engineer comes to work, software programmer, somebody comes to work, give them a laptop. That’s a tool. Today, we give them a laptop and tokens. Those tokens have to be manufactured. A computer used to be just a tool. A computer of the future is a manufacturing equipment. These computers, as you see, they’re no different than ASML manufacturing equipment of the future. They’re producing something that is sold. Just, it’s no different than a dynamo machine a long time ago that produced electricity.

These are manufacturing systems, and the energy efficiency of it, the production efficiency of it matters everything because it drives your revenues, okay? The third inflection point is here. As you know, OpenClaw. Oh, many of these things when they first drop, these open source projects, they seem like toys. You take a step back and just analyze what is OpenClaw on first principles, and I explained that yesterday. OpenClaw on first principles is really a computer, the operating system of an AI computer, a personal AI computer. It has all of the properties of a computing system. It has all the properties of an operating system of this new computer. You know, it manages resources, it schedules, it does IO, and, you know, it networks.

All of the properties of a fundamental computer it has, okay? You could see the red line is actually not the y-axis. The red line is its growth. That’s just the extraordinary thing. Every company in the world will now need to have it. What is your OpenClaw strategy? Every single software company, every single company needs to have an OpenClaw strategy. Just as we all had our Linux strategy, just as we all had to have an internet strategy, just what is your mobile cloud strategy? Now, the question is what’s your OpenClaw strategy? Okay? This is a very big deal. I wanted to answer the questions about what I said here a little bit more.

First of all, a year ago, I said that we had strong visibility of our Blackwell and Rubin shipments of $500 billion through 2026. I was standing in 2025, right? GTC 2025 was around, what was it? Was it March? April?

Colette: October.

Jensen: It was October?

Colette: October.

Jensen: Okay. October. I was standing there. You sure? It was October?

Colette: I’m sure.

Jensen: GTC DC or GTC. I said it twice, though. The first time I said it was GTC here, right?

Colette: I think you’ve been saying it twice.

Jensen: Yeah.

Colette: I don’t think all the way back.

Jensen: I see. Yeah. Okay. Anyways. Anyhow, in 2025, one of those months, I said that we have strong visibility of Blackwell plus Rubin demand, purchase orders and demand, okay? Very firm demand of $500 billion. There were a lot of questions from many of you that, you know, so where are we now? You wanted an update on where we are now, and I thought I’d give you guys an update. Where we’re standing right now and what month are we? Just for the record. March. Here we are in March. The end of 2027, as you know, is many more months away. I just wanna first let you guys know that.

However, because we’re building infrastructure and factories and the lead times for everyone is long, they wanna make sure they give us firm demand or give us purchase orders and firm demand as early as they can to secure their supply. Okay? We have strong confidence and visibility of $1 trillion plus. You know, it’s not a floating point number, you guys. Okay? It is also not 94 digits of accuracy, okay? We’re not counting cents. You can keep your cents. However, we have strong visibility of $1 trillion plus of Blackwell plus Rubin. The reason why it’s only Blackwell plus Rubin and not all of the other things that we sell is because I referenced it from the last year when I was only talking about Blackwell and Rubin. Does that make sense?

Last year we didn’t have Groq. Last year, we weren’t selling standalone CPUs. Last year, we didn’t have many of the things that we have to sell now, and it wouldn’t have made sense for me to include those today and not because we didn’t have those things yesterday. Does that make sense? Somebody nod, then I can continue. Okay? A couple of things. It’s only Blackwell and Rubin. It’s not Feynman. It’s not Rubin you know, Rubin Ultra. It’s not Vera standalone. It’s not Groq. Blackwell plus Rubin, we have high confidence, strong visibility, demand, forecast, purchase orders of $1 trillion+. We close businesses that we ship oftentimes, and we expect to close and ship more business between now and the end of 2027.

We expect to close, book, and ship more business on top of this between now and 2027. The reason for that is because we expect to be coming to work between now and the end of 2027. Now, unlike other businesses, because we build and complete systems of this quality, we can actually win, book, ship new business in the same quarter. Of course, you can’t do that if you have to build an ASIC or you know, obviously. If you don’t see it now, you’re not shipping it by the end of 2027. That’s not true for us. We build inventory. We have a pipeline of supply that.

We have to take care of customers who come out of the blue because they’re desperate for more compute. Does that make sense? When they’re desperate for more compute, and all of a sudden in the last day, they say, "You know, goodness gracious, I could use more," I would like to be able to say, and we are always in a position to say, "We’d be more than happy to help you." We’re also working on new customers, new markets, new regions that we haven’t put in here yet because we still have, well, about 21 months to go. Okay? I want you guys to understand what that $1 trillion is. It’s, by definition, going to keep growing. By definition, because what I compared it against, it will keep growing, and it’ll be larger than that.

A couple of things that I wanted to say, also, that last year was a really good year because 2025 was our year of inference, and I think we helped everybody understand that the price of the computer and the cost of the token, the price of the computer and the cost of the token are only marginally related. The price of the computer and the cost of the token. Remember, people are buying these computers to produce tokens. The effectiveness of the production of those tokens matter greatly. They’re not reselling the computer. If you bought a computer and it’s expensive, if you resold it, and that’s it, then it’s expensive. But you bought a computer, and it’s expensive because the technology’s incredible, but it produces tokens at such incredible rates.

You had simultaneously have purchased the most expensive computer and produced the lowest cost tokens. Does that make sense? This is what we do every day. This is our job. It is the reason why we deliver the value that we deliver. The value discrepancy that we deliver here, the two numbers that I just described, is how we’re able to secure our gross margins. We have to deliver, and we consistently deliver so much more value, which is tokens per second, which is tokens per second per watt. We deliver so much more value every single generation that customers would prefer to buy our next generation product at a higher price than our current generation product at a lower price. They prefer instantaneously to convert. The moment that Vera Rubin comes, it is smarter to install Vera Rubins than to continue to buy Grace Blackwells.

Are you guys following me? Somebody nod. Okay. The value is better even though the price is higher. I’m comparing these two systems because these are the two de facto systems in the world. Until you can beat these two systems, there’s no point buying something else. These two systems are incredibly hard to beat because Moore’s Law doesn’t give you 35x. Moore’s Law alone won’t do it. Building a faster chip won’t do it. You’re gonna have to build a faster lots of chips. 2025 was year in inference, and I think we demonstrated our inference leadership. Training to post-training to now inference. Then some of the other things that we did last year that was really great is we expanded the reach.

We expanded the number of AIs that now support our platform. Last year, 2025, we added Anthropic to our platform, which is net new. We added Meta AI, which is net new. We’re still working with Meta on all of the other stuff. Meta AI is a net new entity, and they have net new computing requirements. We can all acknowledge that last year, open source software, open source models really took off to the point where API inference service providers now see that open models probably represent, approximately represent the second most popular AI model. Meaning the first one, of course, is OpenAI into total number of tokens generated. In aggregate, open models represent number two. As you know, NVIDIA is the best platform for open models in the world. We are the standard for open models everywhere. Number one, OpenAI.

Number two, all the open models. Number three, Anthropic. Number four, xAI. Just take your list, keep working. I think NVIDIA’s coverage of models last year increased substantially, which explains our accelerating growth at a very large number. We are already a very large company, as you know, and we’re now accelerating. Our rate of growth is actually accelerating. Anyways, that’s I think about it. Oh, one last point. We love our hyperscaler partners, and we work very, very closely with them, but it’s important to understand that our relationship with hyperscalers is we’re not just selling to them. We attract customers for them. Having CUDA in their cloud brings all of the CUDA developers, all the AI natives, all the large companies that we work with.

Whenever we accelerate those large or small companies, we bring them, we train them, we have them hosted in the world’s CSPs. We are one of the best sales forces of the world’s CSPs. It is the reason why if you go down to the show floor, they have all of the largest booths. AWS has the largest booth here. Google Cloud has the largest booth here. Azure has the largest booth here. Oracle, giant booth here. CoreWeave, big booth here. Does that make sense? Because we bring customers to them. Why are they here? To sell to my developers. All of our developers only know how to program one thing. They only know how to program CUDA, and they only use CUDA-X libraries.

when we win and when we help those developers integrate NVIDIA, they land on one of our CSP partners. We are one of the CSP’s best sales forces. All right. However, we’re also seeing tremendous customer diversity outside of the CSPs. Regional clouds, industrial, enterprise on-prem, when Dell and Lenovo and HP, they’re all growing so fast and all the ODMs are growing so fast. A lot of that business go towards the right-hand side of that chart, the 40%. Most people see our business in the left 60%. The right 40% without NVIDIA’s full stack, the fact that we can build you the entire AI factory and the fact that all of the world’s open platforms run on top of NVIDIA, you have no hope addressing the 40%.

The net of this chart is this, a big part of that 60% is NVIDIA developers landing in the cloud. 100% of the 40% is impossible without full stack, without end-to-end. Was I successful in communicating that? It’s important to understand our business. We aggregate that whole thing into what is called accelerated computing, and it’s probably a disservice to you. Next year, we’re gonna separate it out a little differently. Well, in the future, we’re gonna separate it out a little differently, and it’s gonna look probably like this chart. You’ll see something like hyperscalers or something like that in 60% of it. Even when you see that, remember, a lot of those customers, we brought to the clouds.

On the right-hand side, that 40% is completely impossible if you just build a chip because they don’t buy chips. They buy platforms. Three messages all in one slide, which probably made your brain blew up, and therefore, I did it again. Was that helpful? You know what I should have done? I should have made three panels or three slides. It would’ve been a seven-hour keynote. But it would’ve been worth it. Okay. That’s it. Thank you. Questions?

: We’re opening it up for questions now.

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Hi, it’s Ben Reitzes, Melius Research. Thanks for having us here at this event. It’s amazing access that you guys provide. Congrats to you and the team for that. This is great. Jensen, last night, when we took a picture. By the way, you all can still like that picture. I need to beat last year’s record.

Jensen: What, what picture?

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Well, we took a quick picture, and I posted it.

Jensen: Uh-huh.

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: I’m trying to beat last year’s likes.

Jensen: Oh, okay. All right.

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Yeah. Anyway.

Jensen: Was I in some vulnerable position or anything?

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Let’s put it this way. The camera added 10 pounds to me, but not to you. I don’t know how that works.

Jensen: Thank you.

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: You look great. So, I promised I’d ask you an inference question, and this is related, is, you know. This is great. Like, I think a lot of people here get this. I think the main pushback we get is the juice worth the squeeze, and will the hyperscalers have upside to their revenues for API and cloud that justify all the spend, and what is Jensen seeing? Because, you know, I have estimates for the hyperscalers, and I’ve said there’s upside to the revenues. For now, the CapEx is 20% above their cloud/API revenue, and I’m wondering what you’re seeing. You’ve said in the past that there’s this massive upside to these cash flows and from your customers, particularly hyperscalers and those that are serving Anthropic and OpenAI. When do we adjust those higher?

I know this is a tough question for you because you got to guide for five other companies. If we see that upside, I think your stock will behave a lot better because then we’ll realize this build can keep going. When is this inflection? I mean, we’re seeing the inflection, but when is it, you know, what is the upside to their revenues, and how do we feel better about it?

Jensen: I wish those companies were public, and the reason for that is because then you’ll see what I see. No companies in history has ever grown as a startup company, non-public company. As a startup company, increased revenues by $1 billion or $2 billion a week. That’s what they’re experiencing right now. Now, remember, I just said a week. The entire IT software industry is, call it $2 trillion. That $2 trillion industry, I don’t believe is gonna be disrupted. I think it’s going to be transformed.

I believe that $2 trillion IT industry is going to integrate a combination of OpenAI, Anthropic, and open models and connect it with an open source software called OpenClaw that we turned into an enterprise-ready version called NemoClaw, and you have instantly an agent. 1.5 million people downloaded OpenClaw and built themselves an agent. It’s one line of code. Then you tell the agent to finish building itself. Oh, you don’t know this thing? Go learn it. It goes off and learn it, you know. In the future, those agents will be integrated into the IT industry. This IT industry is $2 trillion of software licenses today.

It’s probably going to be, let me just pick a random number, $8 trillion that also resells an enormous amount of tokens. 100% of the world’s IT industry will become resellers of OpenAI and Anthropic. Are you guys following me? No?

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Take your estimates up for OpenAI and Anthropic.

Jensen: I believe that Anthropic and OpenAI and of course all of the IT company will also modify and customize their own software, their own models with open models, and that’s what Nemotron’s for, and that’s what Nemo’s for and we’ve created all the tools, and that’s why we’re working with all of them. They’re all going to create agents that integrate these three components. I believe they’re gonna grow incredibly. The time is gonna come, it’s gonna come soon. The reason for that is you could see it in Anthropic’s numbers, you could see it in OpenAI’s numbers. They’re growing an entire IT company in a month. The revenues of these AI companies, their AI will be used by enterprise directly, but it’s also going to be resold through IT companies, integrated into IT companies. Does that make sense?

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Yep.

Jensen: Because just think of it, that AI is just software. Their software is gonna be offered directly to enterprises, but it’s also going to be integrated and become domain-specific and specialized, governed, secured, easily provisioned, connected to their system of records, so on and so forth. There’s gonna be a whole, you know, and that agentic system will be rented to customers, but they still would have to consume tokens through factories. If it comes down through OpenAI, that’s terrific. It comes down through Anthropic, that’s terrific. If it comes down through open models, that’s terrific. They all have to have tokens generated. The net-net is IT companies of the past license software. IT companies of the future will rent tokens, will generate tokens. Are you guys following me? Their business models will change. The companies will become bigger. Their gross margins will change.

Gross margin profile will change because they have COGS in their business model now. They offer greater, much, much more value. This is exciting for them. Super exciting for them.

Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Okay, great. Passing this $8 trillion microphone.

C.J. Muse, Cantor Fitzgerald: Thank you. Good morning. C.J. Muse, Cantor Fitzgerald. Thank you for hosting this event. Really appreciate it.

Jensen: Yes, C.J.

C.J. Muse, Cantor Fitzgerald: Wanted to, I guess, maybe follow up on Ben’s question, and think about the evolution of this chart of 60/40. You know, you talked about NemoClaw, and then you announced yesterday the Vera Rubin DGX AI factory reference design, essentially, providing the blueprint for your non-hyperscale customers to compete with the hyperscalers. I’m curious, you know, as you put it all together, you see, you know, massive spike in token generation, how you’re expecting, you know, pretty much this chart to evolve over time, and how we should be thinking about the different players inside there, as to their relative kinda growth vectors....

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