Ep. 032 - 300 Datacenter Bans, 3 Projects Delayed: Moratoriums Explained (Datacenter, Energy) | Maya Barkin, Reyk Knühtsen, Jordan Nanos

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1. 

   S1 · E37 · 9 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 23 min

   Ep. 037 - Who's Funding the $11 Trillion AI Buildout? (Capital Markets) | Dan Nishball, Jordan Nanos

   H100 rental prices went up, on a GPU that should be sliding down its depreciation curve. That curve is what lenders underwrite. Daniel Nishball (@dnishball) kicks off our new Compute Capital Markets group by following the money through Nvidia's $497B backstops, ClusterMAX as a credit signal, and whether each token is profitable. Jordan Nanos (@JordanNanos) brings the rental data. AI debt is about to pass auto loans. 0:00 Opening 1:48 Nvidia's Backstop Universe 6:22 The $11T Funding Wall 17:25 Balance Sheet as a Service 26:27 ClusterMAX as Credit Risk 31:51 Why H100 Prices Rose 43:09 Token…

2. 

   S1 · E36 · 7 Oct 2026 · 50 min

   Ep. 036 - $200 Buys $12,000 of Opus Tokens, We Bought Every Plan (AI Cloud TCO) | Max Kan, Jordan Nanos, Andrew Megalaa

   Pay Anthropic $200 a month and you can pull $12,000 of Opus 5.5 tokens at API pricing. Max Kan (@maxkan) and Andrew Megalaa bought every plan, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, MiniMax, Moonshot, Z.ai, Cursor, and measured every token type to find the ceiling. The catch isn't subsidy. Anthropic still books 50 to 60% gross margins on these plans, which means the API itself is the price gouge. 0:00 Cold Open 1:03 Subsidies and Credits 5:23 Token Types and Cache 14:08 Model Value Charts 20:51 Test Methodology 26:54 Other Plans 31:26 Utilization and Limits 36:24 Token Efficiency 41:24 Open Models 44:22 Cyber…

3. 

   5 Oct 2026 · 35 min

   Ep. 035 - Tech DD’s, Performance Projections, Benchmarks, Supply Chain, Investment Thesis (Consulting)| Abhilash Jain, Jordan Nanos

   Jordan (@JordanNanos) and Abhilash (@AbhilashJain17) discuss the clients SemiAnalysis consulting serves, custom projects like the inference simulator, how client work turns into research products, neocloud due diligence, and why SLAs decide who gets funded. They also discuss Feynman specs, de-specced memory, and a 20-trillion-parameter OpenAI model. 0:00 Intro and Overview 2:27 Client Types 5:24 Custom Projects 9:47 Strategy Work 12:27 Consulting to Products 14:33 Neocloud Due Diligence 18:40 SLAs and Insurance 22:32 Risk Assessments 26:45 Build vs Buy 29:19 Favorites and Outlook

4. 

   S1 · E34 · 2 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

   Ep. 034 - Engrams: How DeepSeek Offloads KV Cache to DRAM and SSD (Core Research) | Jordan Nanos, Cam Quilici, Alec Ibarra, Bryan Shan

   The InferenceX team is back after two months. Jordan Nanos (@JordanNanos) is joined by Cam Quilici (@noslawextratost), Bryan Shan, and Alec Ibarra to discuss Engram and DRAM offloading, the AgentX benchmark and its profit calculator, TPU v7 on InferenceX, Vera Rubin vs Blackwell, fast tokens, and TileRT on NVIDIA GPUs. 0:00 Intro 0:31 Engrams 12:27 AgentX Benchmark 16:36 Profit Calculator 23:40 TPU v7 32:03 Vera Rubin 40:49 Fast Tokens 49:33 TileRT 54:00 Chip Startups 1:01:31 Wrap Up

5. 

   S1 · E33 · 23 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 9 min

   Ep. 033 - ClusterMAX 3.0 Is Here! Neoclouds Ranked (Neoclouds, GPUs) | Sam Harshe, Pratt Bhatt, Jordan Nanos

   ClusterMAX 3.0 is here. Sam Harshe (@sharshe02) and Pratt Bhatt (@PrathmeshBhat19) join Jordan Nanos (@jordannanos) after months of testing 77 GPU clouds. Some moved up, some moved down. Health checks, cache hit rates, NCCL recipes, agentic coding on clusters, a Linux kernel bug, neocloud security, SLAs and financing, NVIDIA's backstops, five-year-old H100s, and hosted RL training. Read the full ClusterMAX 3.0 report: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/clustermax-30-the-industry-standard ClusterMAX inquiries: [email protected] 0:00 Cold Open 1:32 The Rankings 6:58 Health Checks…

6. 

   S1 · E31 · 16 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

   Ep. 031 - EMERGENCY EPISODE: Are We Doomed? | Jordan Nanos, Doug O'Laughlin, Max Kan, Joey Brookhart

   Emergency episode. Doug O'Laughlin (@Fabknowledge) , Joey Brookhart (@SaasquatchC), and Max Kan (@maxkan) join Jordan (@JordanNanos) to talk through Dario's "We Must Pace the Frontier" blog and the responses from Sam Altman and David Sacks. Does pacing actually mean less compute, or a lot more? Plus the Hugging Face incident, Moonshot serving Claude, and the security behaviour that keeps them up at night. 0:00 Cold Open 2:50 Glorified Neoclouds 8:21 Pacing the Frontier 12:53 Safety Eats Compute 20:38 Hugging Face Lessons 30:52 Moonshot Serving Claude 36:37 The Coxson Resignation 38:27…

7. 

   S1 · E30 · 14 Sep 2026 · 39 min

   Ep. 030 - Long Live the Short King: Why 4-HI HBM Wins (Memory) | Myron Xie, Jordan Nanos

   NVIDIA previewed Rubin Ultra at 1TB of HBM per package. The part that ships will carry 192GB. Myron Xie and Jordan Nanos get into how the design fell that far, why the reason is supply and not performance, and why shipping less memory per chip might be the right call anyway. For the first time in recent memory, NVIDIA's next flagship will have less capacity than the one it replaces. Read More: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi

8. 

   S1 · E29 · 11 Sep 2026 · 47 min

   Ep. 029 - Modular Data Centers Cut Build Time to 12 Months (Datacenter, Energy) | Nico Bontigui, Jordan Nanos, Nigel Chiang, Eric Wen

   Traditional data center builds ran 18 to 24 months, sometimes past three years. Modular construction cuts that to 12. Jordan Nanos (@JordanNanos) sits down with Eric Wen, Nigel Chiang, and Nico Bontigui to map what modular actually means, from MEP heavy skids to full containerized builds. They break down why the bottleneck moved from construction time to labor, why welders and electricians are the real constraint in Abilene, and how time to power translates directly into tokens at 40 to 100 million dollars per megawatt. Subscribe for weekly SemiAnalysis coverage on data center construction,…

9. 

   S1 · E28 · 2 Sep 2026 · 51 min

   Ep. 028 - Most Neoclouds Suck At Security: How Agents Hacked Hugging Face (Neoclouds, Security) | Doug O'Laughlin, Sam Harshe, Jordan Nanos

   This week Doug, Sam and Jordan discuss the OpenAI vs HuggingFace security incident and our recent article on Neocloud security ahead of ClusterMAX 3.0 Full article: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/most-neoclouds-suck-at-security 0:00 Cold Open 0:57 Neocloud Security 4:38 The Hugging Face Hack 11:47 Agent Swarm Behavior 14:47 Obliterated Models 20:37 Security as a Service 24:30 What the Data Shows 33:08 Attacker Asymmetry 40:55 Nothing Ever Happens 45:22 CMAX Audit

10. 

    30 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 3 min

    Ep. 027 - OpenAI Jalapeño: Better Than Nvidia Blackwell (Accelerators)

    This week Bryan, Myron and Jordan discuss our recent article on OpenAI Jalapeño. They cover the performance, architecture, programming model, implications for NVIDIA and more. 1:05 Jalapeno Overview 4:22 Tokens Per Megawatt 9:15 Benchmark Caveats 13:48 The CUDA Moat 21:12 How OpenAI Did It 32:13 Samsung HBM4 42:10 AI-Designed Silicon 49:24 Architecture Deep Dive 56:58 Doom and Wrap Full Article: ⁠https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/openai-jalapeno-better-than-nvidia