Episode 155: SHOW ME THE MONEY! NVIDIA Earnings, and more from the Week!

The Circuit · 2 Mar 2026 · 1h 01m · Episode 157

What this episode covers

Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldstein discuss a week of major semiconductor announcements, focusing on AMD's strategic partnership with Meta involving custom Instinct GPUs and equity, and NVIDIA's record-breaking earnings driven by Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin architectures. They analyze how NVIDIA's massive prepayments for memory capacity create a supply chain moat that challenges custom ASIC roadmaps for competitors like Meta and Google. The conversation also covers OpenAI's $110 billion funding round, its diversified infrastructure strategy involving Amazon's Trainium chips, and the competitive pressures facing neocloud providers like CoreWeave.

Other shows on the same ground, closest first.

  • EE Times Current · 45m

    CEO Interview: Mike Henry of Mythic | The Biggest Chip Deal Ever | Do Androids Dream of Electric Smartphones?

    Mythic co-founder and CEO Mike Henry explains how the company's analog AI accelerator chips use onboard flash memory to achieve best-in-class performance-per-watt for inference tasks like security video analytics and drone depth estimation, avoiding the high power and cost of digital GPUs. Nvidia analyst Kevin Krewell discusses the $40 billion acquisition of Arm by Nvidia, analyzing Jensen Huang's strategic move to control the CPU/GPU ecosystem and the significant regulatory hurdles regarding Arm's monopoly in the smartphone market.

  • EE Times Current · 49m

    Can the Nvidia Monopoly on AI Chips Be Broken?

    Sally Ward-Foxton of EE Times discusses the AI chip market with hosts Dr. Sunny Bains and Dr. Giulia D’Angelo, analyzing the dominance of Nvidia and the potential for neuromorphic and specialized inference chips to break its monopoly. The conversation covers the spectrum of AI hardware from data center GPUs to ultra-low-power edge devices, highlighting the critical role of software stacks and latency in determining adoption. Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings joins to critique the industry's focus on power versus learning capabilities and to discuss the future of neuromorphic computing, including memristors and photonic integration.

  • EE Times Current · 26m

    China’s $28B Big Fund | The Cockiest Startup | Sony’s Ambitions

    Brian Santo and Junko Yoshida discuss three major developments in the tech industry: the launch of Nuvia, a startup founded by former Apple and Google chip architects aiming to challenge Intel's data center dominance with a new System-on-Chip; Sony's creation of an independent AI research hub focused on gaming, sensors, and robotics; and China's announcement of its $28 billion Big Fund Phase 2 to build a self-sufficient semiconductor supply chain. The hosts analyze the feasibility of Nuvia's ambitious goals, Sony's strategic pivot in AI, and the long-term implications of China's state-backed semiconductor investments.

  • EE Times Current · 41m

    Interview: AMD CTO Papermaster | Interview: Imagination CEO Black | Where to Invest in 2020

    AMD CTO Mark Papermaster discusses the company's transition to 7nm Zen architecture, chiplet-based designs like the Threadripper 3990X, and the integration of specialized accelerators for AI workloads. Imagination Technologies CEO Ron Black explains the company's strategic pivot toward automotive graphics, ray tracing, and RISC-V cores, highlighting the resumption of its partnership with Apple. EE Times editors analyze 2020 investment trends, emphasizing that data generation from apps is driving semiconductor growth, with specific focus on memory, RF front-ends, and power infrastructure in developing economies.

  • EE Times Current · 29m

    How Much is Enough for Hyperscale Companies?

    Brian Santo hosts a discussion on how hyperscale companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft are reshaping the semiconductor industry by demanding extreme power efficiency and designing custom AI accelerators. Experts Rick Merritt, Gary Hilson, and Dylan McGrath explain that these giants are pushing beyond standard roadmaps, collaborating directly with equipment vendors like Applied Materials, and leveraging their vast capital to drive innovation in memory and process technology. The episode concludes with Wally Rhines' insight that these companies' ultimate goal is owning the data and systems rather than just selling silicon, raising concerns about their growing societal power.

The summary, chapters and topics are generated from the episode’s audio by this directory, not written by The Circuit. The episode itself belongs to its publisher.