Posts tagged “ai-infrastructure”

10 posts on SDAD Writes.

October 9, 2026

The Strait of Hormuz Is Not an Oil Story. It Is a Sulfur, Helium, Fertilizer and Cable Story.

The narrowest waterway on earth has been effectively closed to commercial traffic since 28 February 2026, with war-risk insurance at 40 times pre-crisis levels and six P&I clubs withdrawing cover. Oil is the headline. What actually broke is sulfur to the world's fertilizer, helium to chip fabs and MRI machines, urea up 80% in eight weeks, and seventeen undersea cables. One nautical mile, four supply chains.

geopoliticssemiconductorsai-infrastructuredeep-dive

October 3, 2026

The US Government Used an Export Control as a Model Kill Switch. It Fired on the Wrong Model.

On June 12 2026 the US government suspended Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals over a single narrow jailbreak. Anthropic's own testing found eight other models, from Claude Haiku 4.5 up through GPT-5.5, could do the same thing. Three days after launch, a control aimed at the dangerous model denied the safe one to everyone, including US customers.

ai-agentsai-infrastructuregeopoliticsregulation

October 1, 2026

I Indexed 53 YouTube Tutorials That Broke a Free GPU Pool: An Investigation

Kaggle's free 2x T4 accelerator became hard to get this month. I traced why: 53 YouTube tutorials with 612,813 views teaching people to run LLMs on Kaggle around the clock, 80% of that reach landing in a single 16-day format-cloning wave. Here is the full anatomy of how a shared resource gets eaten.

local-aiai-infrastructuredeep-dive

September 30, 2026

The AI Pipeline, Part 5: Nobody Owns the Stack, Everyone Owns a Switch

Part 5 closes the AI Pipeline deep dive: the full stack laid bare as a chain of seven monopolies, the evidence on whether AI is producing real value, what every layer's kill switch means, why nothing about the current arrangement is stable, and what a country that owns none of it can do.

geopoliticssemiconductorsai-infrastructuredeep-dive

September 29, 2026

The AI Pipeline, Part 4: The Geography of Compute and the India Lens

Part 4 of the AI Pipeline deep dive: AI compute hubs exist in only about 30 countries, and India is the world's biggest consumer with almost no ownership. 20% of global data, 3% of data centers, the 1989 Mohali fire, a fab starting two decades behind, and the first credible counter-moves in decades.

geopoliticsindiaai-infrastructuresemiconductors

September 28, 2026

The AI Pipeline, Part 3: The Buyers and the Export Control Era

Part 3 of the AI Pipeline deep dive: the three clouds and five labs that buy everything parts 1 and 2 make, NVIDIA's software moat, the custom-silicon rebellion, and the full four-year timeline of export controls, mineral curbs, and counter-moves between the US and China, with Russia as the cautionary tale.

geopoliticssemiconductorsai-infrastructuredeep-dive

September 27, 2026

The AI Pipeline, Part 2: One Machine and One Island

Part 2 of the AI Pipeline deep dive: the ASML EUV machine that prints the world's chips, the Zeiss mirrors polished to below one atom of roughness, TSMC's 70% foundry grip, the HBM oligopoly, and the single suppliers (including an MSG company) hidden inside the machine.

geopoliticssemiconductorsai-infrastructuredeep-dive

September 26, 2026

The AI Pipeline, Part 1: Dirt, Sand and the Software That Draws Chips

Part 1 of the AI Pipeline deep dive: before AI is software, it is sand, quartz, rare earths and gallium from a handful of mines, drawn into chips by three American software companies on two proprietary architectures. The ground floor of the most concentrated supply chain humans have ever built.

geopoliticssemiconductorsai-infrastructuredeep-dive

September 18, 2026

Cloudflare Workers AI Free Models & OpenCode Integration Guide

Cloudflare Workers AI serves 50+ models from its edge network with 10,000 free Neurons a day. Since July 2026 the frontier coding models need the $5/mo Paid plan, but the free tier still covers real daily coding through OpenCode. What is free, what moved to Paid, and how I wire it up.

llmopen-sourceai-infrastructure

September 14, 2026

Best Google Colab Alternatives Free GPU Tiers Ranked

I ranked nine free GPU notebook platforms against Google Colab in 2026. Kaggle (Tesla P100, 30 hrs/week, 29GB RAM) and AWS SageMaker Studio Lab (T4, 4 GPU hrs/day, persistent storage) take S tier, Paperspace Gradient is A tier with persistent storage, and Colab itself lands B tier for vague limits and 2-3 hour disconnects.

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