Research

Primary-source research on AI, from the silicon up.

Deep technical notes for people who need to know what is real at the metal, investors, consultancies, and teams building AI. Every claim is sourced.

Hardware10 min

How an AI Accelerator Actually Works: Matmul, Memory Hierarchy, and Why Bandwidth Is the Bottleneck

A ground-up tour of the matrix-multiply units, on-chip SRAM, and HBM that make up a modern AI chip, and why the memory wall, not the FLOPs, governs performance.

WaferZeroJun 16, 2026
Model & inference economics9 min

Training vs Inference Economics: Why the Cost Curves Diverge, and What It Means for Buyers

Training is a capital event; inference is a marginal cost that compounds with usage. The two obey different physics, and conflating them leads to bad purchasing decisions.

WaferZeroJun 16, 2026
Model & inference economics11 min

Mixture-of-Experts, Speculative Decoding, and KV-Cache: Where the Next Efficiency Gains Come From

The three techniques quietly reshaping inference cost, sparse activation, draft-and-verify decoding, and smarter attention-state management.

WaferZeroJun 16, 2026
Datacenters & power10 min

The Datacenter Buildout No One Budgeted For: Power, Cooling, and Interconnect as the Real Constraint

The binding constraint on AI is no longer chips, it is megawatts, water, and the network fabric between racks. A look at the physical limits of scale.

WaferZeroJun 16, 2026
AI for chip design9 min

AI Designing AI Chips: How Agentic and ML Tooling Is Changing Place-and-Route, Verification, and EDA

Machine learning and agentic tooling are moving into the chip-design loop, from floorplanning to verification. What is real, what is hype, and what it changes.

WaferZeroJun 16, 2026
Applied AI8 min

Applied AI in the Wild: Lessons From Building a Real-Estate AI Product (Tribunus Labs)

What actually breaks when you ship AI into a regulated, document-heavy workflow, drawn from building applied AI products end to end.

WaferZeroJun 16, 2026