Semi Doped

Vikram Sekar and Austin Lyons

Semi Doped

Vikram Sekar and Austin Lyons

The business and technology of semiconductors. Alpha for engineers and investors alike.

May 22

Lithography Masterclass

Spend one hour here and you've caught up on the entire arc of semiconductor lithography. Austin and Vik run a masterclass on the technology that decides who gets to make leading-edge chips, and why so few companies can afford to. The thread is economics. ...

May 15

AI Ready

Cerebras IPO

Cerebras IPO is the only thing to talk about this week. IPO prices at $185/share. Pops nearly 70% right after. The first wafer-scale chip company to make it public — after a 40-year curse killed every prior attempt. A water-cooler-style convo on what Ce...

May 12

Gimlet's Cross-Vendor Inference Cloud

Gimlet Labs runs an inference cloud built on heterogeneous silicon. Their software traces a PyTorch workload, segments it into its component parts, and schedules each piece onto the best-suited hardware — connecting chips from different vendors on a single...

May 08

Power as the Next Physics Wall for AI

What's common to optics and power that ruins everything in the era of AI? Resistance. The same physics that drove interconnects to optics is now driving low-voltage power delivery up to 800V. Austin Lyons (Chipstrat) and Vik Sekar (Vik's Newsletter) unpa...

May 04

CapEx is just Memory Tax Now, Deepseek V4 NAND impact

The hyperscaler memory tax quarter. More CapEx? Pssh. We knew flops needed scaling. But $25B at Microsoft alone just to pay higher component prices? A memory tax. That's the news. NAND? Sold out. HBM? Sold out. What we cover: * SanDisk revenue +97%...

Apr 24

Masterclass on Google's TPU v8 Networking

Google's Cloud Next 2026 keynote? Fire. The TPU is now two chips instead of one — 8t for training, 8i for inference — but more interestingly, it's two scale-up networking topologies too. Austin Lyons (Chipstrat) and Vik Sekar (Vik's Newsletter) walk thr...

Apr 20

Meta VP Matt Steiner on Ads Infra, GPUs, MTIA, and LLM-Written Kernels

Matt Steiner, VP of Monetization Infrastructure, Ranking & AI Foundations at Meta, walks through how Meta's ad system actually works, and why the infrastructure behind it differs from what you'd build for LLMs. We cover Andromeda (retrieval on a custom NV...

Apr 17

Credo + Dust Photonics, XPO, Nuvacore

Austin and Vik discuss Credo's acquisition of Dust Photonics, XPO as the new standard for scale-out (maybe instead of CPO?) and some thoughts about Nuvacore entering the CPU scene for agentic AI. Gavin Baker's tweet: https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/20444...

Apr 10

Is Intel Finally Back with a $300B market cap? OpenClaw can Dream?

In this episode, Austin and Vik discuss if Intel is finally back with CPU partnerships with Google, and heterogeneous inference with SambaNova, while market cap soars above $300B. Vik tries to get his OpenClaw instance to dream every night. Chapters 00:0...

Apr 09

Reiner Pope (MatX): Designing AI Chips From First Principles for LLMs

Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, the startup building chips designed from first principles for LLMs. Before MatX, Reiner was on the Google Brain team training LLMs, and his co-founder Mike Gunter was on the TPU team. They left Google one week...

Apr 07

$300M for 70K Viewers | Intel x Elon, OpenAI x TBPN, Citrini's Strait of Hormuz Stunt

Intel Foundry just partnered with Elon Musk’s Terafab. What is Terafab anyway, why vertically integrated fabs make sense but the economics don’t (yet!), and what Intel is doing here (hint: no idea). Then: OpenAI acquires TBPN for an estimated $100-300M. N...

Apr 03

NVIDIA's Marvell Strategy, Is Memory Different This Time?, Intel's Ireland Fab

In this episode, Austin and Vik analyze NVIDIA's $2 billion investment in Marvell NVLink Fusion, exploring its implications for AI infrastructure, interconnect protocols, and the broader chip ecosystem. They also discuss the current memory market surge, DR...

Mar 27

ARM AGI CPU has entered the chat, TurboQuant thrashes memory stocks

In this episode, Austin and Vik analyze recent developments in GloFo patent lawsuits, the impact of TurboQuant on AI inference, and ARM's strategic move into silicon for agentic AI workloads. Read Vik's substack: https://www.viksnewsletter.com Read Austin...

Mar 20

MicroLEDs Ain’t Dead, Micron Snags Vera Rubin

Austin and Vik break down a packed week in semiconductors, covering GTC, OFC, and Micron earnings. The conversation kicks off with Jensen Huang's bold claim that engineers should spend $250K/year on AI tokens, and whether companies will buy tokens or token...

Mar 17

Quick Takes: Nvidia Keynote at GTC

Vik and Austin unpack the Nvidia GTC keynote with fresh, top-of-mind takes while trying to breakdown key announcements, what matters and what doesn't. They discuss Groq's LPX, optics+copper for scale up, new CPU requirements, CPO for networking, and what a...

Mar 13

Meta's Inference Accelerator & Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI)

Austin recaps moderating an agentic AI panel at Synopsys Converge, then gives an in-depth technical breakdown of Meta's MTIA custom silicon. Why they're building it, how chiplets let them ship a new chip every 6 months, and how the roadmap is shifting towa...

Mar 07

The Great Optics-Copper Crossroads

This week, Austin and Vik break down the optics vs. copper debate that rocked semis this week. Nvidia dropped $4 billion on Lumentum and Coherent, Credo posted a blowout quarter betting on copper, and then Hock Tan shocked everyone claiming 400G per lane w...

Feb 27

Optical Supply Chain: What would you buy?

This week, we move from optics technology to optics companies. We walk the AI optical supply chain from bottom to top. Main debate: Who has a moat? Who is already priced for perfection? *Not investment advice, do your own due diligence* AXTI - Indium pho...

Feb 20

Optical Networking Supercycle - ALL the Tech You NEED to know

Austin and Vik delve into the evolving landscape of optics and networking, particularly in relation to AI and data centers. The conversation covers various scales of networking, including scale across, scale out, and scale up, while also addressing the de...

Feb 13

Memory Mayhem & AI Capex Madness

In this episode of the Semi Doped podcast, Austin and Vik delve into the current state of the semiconductor industry, focusing on the memory crisis driven by increasing demand from AI applications. They discuss the implications of rising memory prices, the...