Semiconductors

Tomorrow evening, Nvidia drops the most consequential earnings report of 2026. And it’s not just about one chipmaker’s quarterly numbers — it’s the entire AI investment thesis going on trial. Nvidia isn’t a semiconductor company anymore. It’s the barometer for the AI economy. The single stock that tells you whether hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure spending are paying off or spiraling into speculative excess. With NVDA sitting at $191, a $4.62 trillion market cap, and an AI market rattled by Anthropic-triggered selloffs, the pressure is immense. ...

What if instead of running an AI model on a chip, you turned the model into the chip? That’s the bet Taalas just went public with — and the numbers are making the entire semiconductor industry sit up straight. This 25-person startup out of Toronto emerged from stealth with $169 million in funding and a working product called the HC1: a chip that hard-wires a large language model directly into silicon transistors. No software stack. No HBM memory. No liquid cooling. Just raw, physics-level inference. ...