Two years ago, custom silicon for inference was a contrarian footnote. This week it's a $5 billion valuation with Jane Street and Geoffrey Hinton writing checks before the first chip ships.

Elsewhere, Tesla swapped concept renders for an actual pedal-free robotaxi on Austin streets, and AWS is deploying engineers like boutique consultants to lock in enterprise cloud deals.

The pattern: bets that looked incremental six months ago are now arriving with billion-dollar price tags and regulatory momentum, whether the infrastructure is ready or not.

The index's top ten stocks make up nearly 40% of its total value as of Q226. All have some connection to AI.

Now SpaceX is filing its IPO. Priced at 92x sales. Lost $5 billion last year. 

Robert Arnott, chairman of Research Affiliates, called it "ludicrous" in the WSJ this month but said he'd gladly buy SpaceX anyway. His reason? Index funds have to buy it to avoid trailing the benchmark.

It’s becoming a very crowded boat, and moreso with Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs around the corner.

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AI is now a chip thesis with a trading desk accent. Etched just raised $800 million, led by Stripes with Jane Street, a TSMC-linked fund, Thiel, Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and others piling in, pushing the startup to a $5B valuation and $1B in signed contracts.

Instead of chasing training FLOPs, Etched’s Sohu chip hardcodes transformer inference into silicon and runs at lower voltages, then shows up in a fully designed rack; boards, cooling, networking included. That’s a Groq-style “full-stack hardware” bet, but arriving as Nvidia is already buying inference IP and Google is steering its own chips toward serving.

The real test starts when Etched plans summer shipments. If those racks survive production workloads, the market will have quietly validated that specialized inference silicon is now its own asset class, not a GPU afterthought.

💸 Most people think stock options are free money.
They’re not.

Employee stock options are one of the most misunderstood parts of startup compensation — by both founders and employees. In this episode, we break down what they actually are, what they’re worth (usually nothing at first), and how they can become life-changing… or completely useless.

We cover the biggest misconceptions: why options are NOT percentages, the difference between shares vs options, how strike price really works, what happens when you leave a company, and when it actually makes sense to buy your options.

For once, the steering wheel debate at Tesla is literally over. In Austin, the company is now testing a two-seat Cybercab with no wheel, no pedals, and a safety monitor riding shotgun; a production-looking capsule, not a lab mule.

The timing isn’t accidental. NHTSA just proposed allowing AVs without brake pedals, clearing a key regulatory blocker as Tesla moves from modified Model Ys to purpose-built robotaxis. The company has already been stockpiling Cybercabs in lots, signaling an intent to scale fast once rules solidify.

This is the purest version yet of Tesla’s vertical-integration thesis: own the car, the autonomy stack, and the marketplace, while betting on cameras over lidar. If it works, it pressures anyone building on third-party hardware or expensive sensors and shows how designing to anticipated regulation, not current law, can be a defining advantage.

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