Hello experts and pundits and antagonists, happy holiday!
A few residual random thoughts in 2025:
It is hard to believe that Ukraine thing is still going on. It is a textbook stalemate, yet it is not turning out to be a quagmire. For that, Russia owes a big one to China. Meanwhile, the west have all the resources and prerequisites to drag Russia into a textbook quagmire. The fact that Russia is breathing normally tells the world how miserable the "west" has become. Oh, BTW, Macaron just borrowed a pair of shinny new panda from Chengdu, where J10A/B/C are made. Talk about drama.
AI revolution is more and more look like Internet Revolution of late 90s. AI will go on changing the world just like the Internet, but "AI" in MSM is a different beast, just like 1999. My guess is that chips are going to be less and less prominent as we getting deep into 2026 and beyond. As always, "it is app, stupid!"
It is also a little surprising that, at this moment, Trump 2.0 is more friendly to Chairman Xi than all other "leaders" in the west. I think Xi owes a shinny big party to Trump 2.0 in April 2026.
Huawei Mate 80 Pro uses a N+3 feature with 28nm DUV, which performs on par with early TSMC "5nm" feature. I guess China semi has a decent chance to squeeze Korea into the 3rd place in terms of raw transistors per square kilometer.
Jensen Huang was at CSIS with John Hamre early this week,
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I think Washington has realized they have got a dilemma in "to be or not to be" allowing US chip companies to compete in China AI eco-system. Similar to many other areas, US is leading the way while China is a close second and there is no 3rd place on the horizon. The funny thing is that China is de facto champion of open source. I still remember vividly the early years of US open source moments. It is surreal seeing China and open source on the same sentence while US is on the other side.
The first half of 2025 was indeed a very exciting and interesting time, and it is getting more boring as we are inching toward 2026.
That all being said, I sincerely wish everyone makes more money in 2026 and beyond!