Ep 191: Agents Gone Wild: Broadcom’s ASICs and the AI Frontier

The Circuit · 7 Sept 2026 · 51m · Episode 184

What this episode covers

Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg discuss Broadcom's recent earnings, highlighting the shift in custom ASIC customers from Google to Anthropic and OpenAI, and the increasing complexity of modeling mixed-chip programs involving competitors like MediaTek and Marvell. They debate the semiconductor supply chain, with Bajarin predicting peak constraints in 2027 and capacity relief in 2028, while Goldberg warns that this oversupply could shift pricing power and compress margins. The hosts also analyze Nvidia's $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, arguing it secures Nvidia's position in AI software without locking in open models, and conclude that both open and closed frontier models will coexist, with frontier models remaining essential for enterprise cybersecurity and national security.

Other shows on the same ground, closest first.

  • EE Times Current · 38m

    AI Chip Revelations | A Corporate Soap Opera | The Sounds of a Pandemic

    EE Times editors discuss the corporate turmoil at Imagination Technologies, where CEO Ron Black was removed following a dispute with Chinese-backed owner Canyon Bridge over board control and IP security. Analyst Kevin Krewell reports on the Spring Linley Conference, highlighting new AI chip architectures from Groq, Cerebras, and Flex Logi, while noting that software complexity remains the primary challenge. The episode concludes with a global audio essay, 'The Sounds of the Pandemic,' featuring personal accounts of life during lockdown from Italy, Taiwan, the UK, France, and China.

  • Built 2 Scale · 1h 11m

    Inside the emerging frontier of models, machines and manufacturing hell.

    Hosts Matt Perrott and Scott Wilcox discuss OpenAI's strategic pivot to hardware by hiring 40 Apple engineers, analyzing whether this signals a competition with Google's compute advantage or a setup for an Apple acquisition. They examine Meta's aggressive acquisition of Limitless Pendant and its privacy policy changes as evidence of a lack of clear vision compared to Elon Musk, while also covering Boom Supersonic's $300M pivot from jet turbines to natural gas energy for AI data centers. The episode further explores the impact of data center demand on construction wages, Travis Kalanick's Cloud Kitchens automating food production with point-solution robots, and the emerging Private Equity playbook of injecting AI logic into traditional businesses to 10x margins.

  • Oxide and Friends · 2h 01m

    Predictions 2025

    Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company host a panel with Simon Willison, Steve Klabnik, Steve Tuck, and Mike Cafarella to review past predictions and forecast trends for 2025, 2028, and 2031. The group discusses the failure of agentic AI, the rise of AI efficiency and open weights models like DeepSeek, and the potential for a chip crisis due to geopolitical tensions and Intel's struggles. They also predict shifts in hardware markets, including NVIDIA's Blackwell struggles, AMD's software acquisitions, and the resurgence of manufacturing as a VC focus.

  • 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.

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.