SCN Staff
Staff Editor
Articles (16)
Chiplets in 2026: from architecture slides to production silicon
The Chiplet Summit marked the transition from "chiplets as concept" to "chiplets as product." The winners won't be the ones with the best silicon. They'll be the ones with the best software and the deepest packaging ecosystem.
Electro-optic polymers hit the foundry: the materials battle for next-gen photonic interconnects
Lightwave Logic's deal with Tower Semiconductor puts polymer modulators into production silicon photonics. Meanwhile, III-V compounds are pushing 400G per lane. The fight to replace silicon's optical limitations is getting real.
NVIDIA's $4 billion photonics bet tells you where copper dies
Investments in Coherent and Lumentum, OFC 2026 timing, and the conspicuous absence of NVLink CPO. NVIDIA knows optical interconnects are the next bottleneck, and it's moving to own the solution.
The Cambrian explosion in quantum error correction
Phantom codes, QLDPC codes, iceberg codes, cat qubits, neural decoders. Five years ago, surface codes were the only game in town. Now there's a genuine competition, and it might get us to fault tolerance faster than any single approach could.
IonQ's $100 million milestone and the vertical integration gambit
The first pure-play quantum computing company to cross $100M in annual revenue just spent $1.8 billion acquiring a semiconductor foundry. That tells you where quantum is heading.
Quantinuum's iceberg codes just changed the error correction math
For the first time at meaningful scale, error-corrected qubits outperform the raw hardware. That's the threshold the entire field has been waiting for.
The shadow TOP500: private AI superclusters are redefining supercomputing
xAI's Cortex 2, Meta's mega-clusters, and the $100B NVIDIA-OpenAI deal represent computing installations that dwarf anything on the official rankings. The supercomputing world hasn't reckoned with what that means.
100 Gigawatts: The Data Center Supercycle That's Rewriting Energy Policy
Power has replaced transistor density as the binding constraint on computing growth. The consequences are reshaping everything from real estate markets to geopolitics.
ORNL's Next-Generation Data Center Institute: National Lab Expertise Meets the AI Buildout
The people who built Frontier - the world's first exascale supercomputer - are now designing the next generation of AI data centers. The hyperscalers should be paying attention.
Physical AI Is NVIDIA's Quiet Second Act at GTC 2026
Two dedicated "Physical AI Days," Isaac GR00T N1.6, and a robotics stack that mirrors the CUDA playbook. NVIDIA is building the operating system for the physical world - and most of the GTC coverage is ignoring it.
Agentic AI in 2026: The Infrastructure Isn't Ready for What's Coming
Chatbot inference is stateless and cheap. Agentic AI is persistent, multi-step, and compute-hungry. The data center architectures built for one don't work for the other.
The $5 Trillion Question: AI Capex Is Outrunning AI Revenue by a Dangerous Margin
The hyperscalers are spending $700 billion this year on AI infrastructure. The enterprise adoption rates don't justify it yet. Something has to give.
Majorana Qubits Just Became Readable. Here's Why That Changes the Quantum Computing Race
A team at Delft and CSIC cracked the readout problem for topological qubits - the same architecture Microsoft bet its entire quantum future on.
NSF's $457M Horizon Supercomputer Is Going to Morehouse College
The Leadership-Class Computing Facility's first new site selection in a generation lands at an HBCU. The workforce implications matter as much as the FLOPS.
The Cooling Crisis Is Here: Immersion Hits $1 Billion as GPUs Make Air Cooling Obsolete
Every new GPU generation pushes TDP higher. The industry's messy transition from air to liquid is no longer optional — it's a design constraint for every new build.
NVIDIA's Vera Rubin Is a Capex Grenade - and Every Hyperscaler's 2027 Budget Knows It
The Blackwell-to-Rubin transition is a forcing function for the entire data center industry.