Intel Investors Everywhere | Tech Field Day News Rundown: August 20, 2025

The AWS Oracle. Cisco has radius issues, bad ai. Again, Google goes Nuclear Robot wars.

The UK backs off of their backdoor Druva protection gets a little bit better. And we're gonna be taking a look at all of Intel's future investor issues in this week's episode of the Tech Field Day Rundown. Hello everyone.

Welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown for August the 20th. We hope that you're very excited for National Radio Day, especially if you're listening to us over the dulce tones of an AM radio. If you are, I, I need to figure out how you did that because podcasts and YouTube don't work well over am radio.

I also need to announce that, um, it's my brother's birthday, so happy birthday, John. You're still younger than me and I'm still better looking than you someone else who's better looking than me. Mr.

Alistair Cook. Al, welcome to the show. It's always a pleasure to be here with you, Tom, particularly on na, national Bacon Lovers Day.

Uh, and I think every day is National Bacon Lovers Day, but that's just my preference. Yeah, I Does anybody not like it? I mean, yeah, I know there's people who don't eat it, but I think anybody who does eat it at least has a soft spot in their heart for bacon.

And we have a soft spot in our heart for the news because it's been a busy week, and we want to hit you with some fun stories that have come up. And of course, we're gonna be talking about two of my favorite cloud giants, well, actually one of my favorite cloud giants and, uh, one of my other smaller cloud friends because AWS announced the availability of Oracle database at AWS delivering Exadata on dedicated physical servers inside of AWS data centers. The service integrates with Oracle Cloud infrastructure for some reason, at least for some of the management pieces.

So there you go. Now, I have a question for you, Al, because I like to think on long timelines and the longest timeline that I can think of is wondering exactly how long the lawyers had to argue about this to work out all of the details before the announcement could be made. What do you think?

Yeah, I, I think probably if, if the lawyers weren't involved in this, and, you know, we know that Oracle has lawyers and we're pretty sure AWS has lawyers, the lawyers weren't involved. This might've taken a lot less time because, uh, the technical requirements, the actual ca capabilities that are being delivered here are very valuable to customers and very much in in demand. So I'll dig into that.

But first, what's being delivered here is the, the full suite of the Oracle, um, enterprise infrastructure being delivered on physical hardware inside AWS data centers. Now, AWS has had a, a relational database service for Oracle for a while, but it hasn't delivered all of the, the really cool stuff, like in particular, Oracle's Rack, their database clustering service that's always been left to the, the customer as a, an exercise for them to complete. And it is quite a, a lift to do.

And so the nice thing that's in here is that full Oracle exudate and full Oracle Rack being delivered inside an AWS data center and connected to the rest of your AWS applications. But here's where it gets a little bit funky and why the Oracle lawyers are involved, is that there's this link between the network that hosts these physical, uh, Oracle servers and the Oracle Cloud, OCI, Oracle Compute Infrastructure, uh, cloud infrastructure. Uh, there's a requirement that you have OCI in order to, to run this thing, and yet it's running inside AWS and for the longest time, AWS has not admitted that there's such a thing as multi-cloud, that there are clouds other than the AWS cloud.

It took them a while to accept that there'll be hybrid cloud, but now we've got these Oracle services being, it looks like some managed from the Oracle OCI side, but yet resident inside of AWS and delivered to your AWS applications. Yeah, I, lawyers, lawyers, all, all the way down on that one. Uh, the technical implementation will have been fun, but the lawyers will have spent a long time discussing this, and it, it'd be interesting to see where the money flows when people are, are buying this.

Uh, definitely in the announcement there was a conversation around bringing your existing Oracle licensing to this, which I think is that tie up into OCI. Um, so yeah, there's, there's some interesting elements of who's paying for what bits of which, which parts as customers are consuming this. And we'll see that over time.

I think it's a, a pretty good thing for customers to be able to have, uh, the Oracle Rack environments and their exudate, hyper-converged, kind more converged kind of infrastructure, uh, for running Oracle applications inside AWS data centers where they can rapidly build things. Maybe it's a little bit of an, an acceptance by Oracle that OCI isn't gonna take the world by storm and become the, the, uh, third biggest or well, who knows what number biggest, uh, of the cloud providers. So we'll see how they things play out over time.

I think it's good for customers to have this as an option and, uh, I think there's, there's a little risk that, uh, it'll be used as a springboard to migrate off Oracle onto other AWS services as, uh, Amazon themselves had done for a while. Cisco has a new 10, outta 10, woo-hoo. Oh, wait, no, it's not that kind.

It's a 10 out of 10 severity on the CVE list. Oh, dear. Uh, this one involves particularly, uh, exploiting the Radius service to allow remote coal code execution on the secure firewall, uh, management PLA center platform.

Kind of a worry if your central management allows remote code execution. The good news is that Radius is an optional external method that might not be enabled, uh, the even better news. That vulnerability was discovered internally by Cisco researchers and no reported exports in the wild.

There's a patch if you want to install it, if you can't just disable radius. Tom, is this a big deal? Is this, uh, something we should be deeply concerned about?

I think it's a big deal because it involves remote code execution, but you have to meet a very specific set of circumstances in order for this to be able to be exploitable because you have to be running an external radius authentication system. The nineties called they want their authentication mechanisms back. I, I only kid a little bit because I really did have to learn how to use Radius when I was studying for a lot of my exams, because it is a fairly common and ubiquitous way to authenticate users on certain kinds of devices.

However, we've gotten to the point now where we have much more robust methods for using it. And I think that you should be configuring one of those. Uh, as pointed out in the article that we're linking to, one of the things that is using Radius a lot is outdated government issued servers, which makes me think that this was kind of more of a targeted thing.

Now that, hold on, that's not true. Cisco found us internally and they immediately patched it and issued patches and honestly even admitted that you may not be able to patch some of your older servers for one reason or another. And if you do, just turn off radius and you'll be fine.

Of course, that means that if you were using the Radius system to do your authentication, you're probably gonna need to dig up some other way of doing it, which you probably should have been working on for years. Um, just to do, I I applaud the fact that it was discovered, patched released. No, nothing's in the wild.

Cisco's taken the Maya cul on this one. And this is another one of those situations where people really need to read the entries in the CVE database in CVSS because yes, it earns a massive score for the fact that it can allow for remote code execution, but it is such a narrow, like affected system setup that you could be scrambling a lot this weekend to patch things that may not even apply to you. So make sure you read through it, make sure you have a plan in place if, if you're still using Radius patch now, but figure out how to get off of it, use some kind of single sign-on, use saml, use anything else.

I I can't think of a good reason to still be using Radius unless you like reruns of the Andy Griffin show on me tv, in which case you might want to go check the doctor because I'm sure there's some checkup stuff that you need to do too. Our friends over at Meta have an internal policy document on ai, and it's causing a little bit of a problem because the document outlines policies where an AI bot is permitted to be racist. It's also permitted to have romantic conversations with children.

Naturally. I think there's been a little bit of reaction on the internet. There's been a lot of reaction on the internet as a matter of fact.

And of course, predictably folks over at meta dialed things back quite a bit. There are plenty of stories about AI bots that have been misbehaving and humans who kind of accepted at face value. Are these policies a big deal, the fact that they're written down by meta?

Or is this really that AI is starting to pattern itself off of what humans are already like? Well, I think you look at how generative AI models are trained. They're trained by what humans create, and so it's no surprise that they don't just get the good parts of being human, but the not so good parts.

And this is why having guardrails and controls around generative AI systems, particularly chatbots that you are letting interact with humans, and particularly the great unwashed humans, all of us in the public, um, having guardrails and controls around those, uh, generative AI tools is absolutely vital. So it is important that there are some standards around here, and that those standards in the generative AI tools reflect our standards as a society. Uh, the backlash on this one has been pretty strong.

Uh, you know, really telling me Neil Young has withdrawn from Facebook completely and, uh, will no longer be using Facebook for any Neil Young related activities. I think, you know, there's a big vote for us, for those of us who can remember using Radius and, uh, and, uh, some of these other elements. Uh, of course, Senator Josh Hawley, uh, Republican Missouri has launched an investigation and wants to look at whether generative AI products from, uh, meta are enabling exploitation, deception, or criminal harm to children.

So won't somebody think of the children? Uh, but it is deeply troubling that people within Meta's AI team wrote this 200 page document. Now, I haven't read the whole 200 page document.

Maybe I'll get an AI to summarize it for me. Uh, has Definitely, um, reflected some of the elements that are less desirable in society, the ability, and one of the elements that's that's described in here is generating false medical information and helping users argue that black people are dumber than white people know that kind of bigotry and stupidity that is being built out in these AI models yeah, kind of reflects the bigotry and stupidity that's in the massive humanity, but is probably not what we want and what not. Our view of what this utopian society aided by AI should be, we should be hoping that AI is gonna help us to be better people overall, not encouraging us to continue to head into the sbit of society.

So, uh, this document enabled gen AI content risk standards, I think probably is, is not the best guiding document. Having some guiding documents in here that talk about how generative AI should be helping us to be better, not worse as people would be a much more desirable state, we should all be trying to improve ourselves too. As, as one of my, uh, catchphrases is, uh, suck a little less every day, let's hope generative AI can help us to be better.

Speaking of ai, Druva has Dr launched an AI agents powered by AWS bedrock to automate data protection tasks like recovery, troubleshooting, and policy creation. Built in zero trust, uh, security with strict guardrails, the agent maintains a 0% hallucination rate and can be tested in a secure sandbox already in use by 3000 customers. Drew AI resolves most issues faster with plans to automate up to 90% of routine tasks and cut investigation times by 70% over the next year.

This is maybe where AI is gonna make us better at our job and help us to focus on being better people. Tom, In this case, I think you might be right, and I'll give you a couple of examples why? Because one of the things that Druva has focused on is, for lack of a better term, the drudgery that happens in modern it, right?

Like, we are no longer doing the weird stuff from like war games where we have to take a pop top off of a soda can to bridge a connection and a payphone to make a free phone call, right? Like, that's old school hacking, if you wanna call it. A lot of what we do now is just monitoring systems and going, oh, something looks weird over there, I need to dig into that.

Or, yeah, something doesn't feel right over here, so I, I need to, to adjust some things. You might even call it vibe ops. Well, what's happening here is that Druva is essentially saying, what if we could automate the vibe ops stuff?

Think about it like this. You've got a new application that you've installed and it's generating a lot more file creation than you're used to in the past, right? Okay, no big deal.

You're in the cloud, cloud storage costs money. You need to back up those files to make sure that if anything happens, you can recover from it. Well, DVA can notice that uptick and give you solutions like maybe you need to buy more S3 storage or you need to expand things.

You can also expand your retention policies and adjust them to take advantage of cloud arbitrage and pricing. And this was one of the things that, like when software defined networking first came out years and years ago that people were trying to sell me on, was this idea that you could have your system pick the cheapest link to use to do data stuff. And I'm like, great, this is boring because I'm not gonna sit here and watch a screen while it tries to figure out which of these links it's cheaper and send the traffic over there.

What Drew has done is they built an agent that will examine when storage gets cheaper for one reason or another, or when tier, uh, arbitrage happens, and it will move some of your data over to those cheaper storage things like, you know, this is data we may not need to get back for hours or days at a time, so why don't we move it into like a glacier type storage where it's dirt cheap, but retention sucks. And I think that that, or not retention recovery in this case sucks. Uh, retention is solid, right?

Because it's on tape, I think. Um, but getting back to the where AI is is helping this, all of that should be automated, right? I should not have to pay a person to stare at a screen to do all of that, to make all of those decisions.

I should load a platform with Logic to be able to figure out how to do that. And because this is a data protection company, it's all secure because Truva has a zero trust model that they have enabled. And I would love to dig into that more.

I'm hoping that we can get Druva to come to a future security field day and talk all about it, because data protection is a very hot topic at that. And, um, you know, maybe we'll have a little bit more to tell you about that when we close out the episode. Alistair small modular reactors appear to be a nuclear lifeline for massive data center operations.

Google has announced a deal with Kairos Power for 50 megawatts of electricity from an AS yet Unbuilt SMR plant called Hermes two in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We've covered massive data center power requirements that AI is bringing into the IT space before on previous episodes of the rundown. But my question for you is, are we looking at progress towards new power structures and delivery, or are we just throwing massive reactors at a problem in the hopes that we can contain it before a GI wipes us all out?

Well, a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B, I think, uh, that's, that's our challenge here, right? These massive data centers we're seeing built up have huge power demands, and it's those power demands that are often the driver for where the data centers have to be built. And long-term contracts for supplier power are a vital part of ensuring that it's worthwhile spending the money on building a massive data center.

So we're already seeing some of the neo cloud providers working on models of looking around and seeing where there's power or waste and moving their data centers to where the power waste is. Uh, that works if you're a smaller cloud provider, but if you're a massive cloud provider like Google, you probably need large data centers, uh, um, larger data centers than there is waste power to be had. So this is an interesting deal.

It's the the first announcement of a real deal. So this is Google saying that they're contracted to take 50 megawatts of power, uh, from the Tennessee value authority, that's the power provider, and that the, the power is gonna be generated by this Hermes two plant, uh, that, that Kairos is building, uh, this kind of commitment's in here. It's long term, this kairos, um, plant that the Hermes two plant isn't due to be online until 2030.

And so we're five years away from this power being delivered. The commitment in here from Google is to actually secure the funding for that to be built. This long-term commitment is about making sure that Kaira can actually stay afloat for the five years and the massive amount of money that needs to be invested to build these small modular reactors.

The idea of these small modular reactors is that they're a relatively compact unit that delivers a relatively small amount of power, but that you can stack a bunch of them together to build a bigger power plant. The plan for, for this Oak Ridge plant is 500 megawatts, not just 50 megawatts. So 10 times as much.

I'm guessing the, the 50 megawatts is the size of the small SMR unit, maybe a couple of units and that they'll scale out over time. Uh, that 500 megawatts, they're expecting 2035 to be commissioning time. But of course, as with any new technology being built in particularly very safety intensive technology and like nuclear power plants, uh, timelines may shift, may drift.

So it will be interesting to watch those timelines, uh, as we both Tom and I head towards retirement by 2035 when these, uh, deals are all supposed to be done. But, uh, some of the, um, providers, uh, the Tennessee Valley Authority is saying nuclear is a bedrock to the future energy security. And Google is, is stepping up to shoulder some of that burden, hopefully avoiding future problems of power supply, uh, power delivery.

And we know there's that, there is a shortage forecast for power delivery, uh, to meet the, in ever increasing demands of data centers in the cloud. The UK has dropped its push for a backdoor inside Apple's iCloud. This comes after talks with the Trump administration and was announced by US Intelligence.

Chelsea gaba, the plan faced very heavy criticism. As always, he hates hearing the idea that there's going to be government mandated anything in our privacy, let alone back doors. Uh, the plan was threatening global privacy, uh, privacy.

And Apple responded by saying it might limit the advanced data protection availability in the uk if the option was, uh, advanced data protection with a backdoor or no advanced data protection. I know I'd rather not have the backdoor there. And of course, fighting the battles in in court.

Apple says it's never built a backdoor and it never will. Tom, I think you are probably completely on board with the idea of not letting governments have back doors into anything, let alone highly secure personal data. You, sir, have watched previous episodes of the rundown where I, I have railed against this very topic, and I'm very glad to see that someone finally figured out apple's never gonna build a back door into anything.

Now, just for the record, because I know we have a lot of fans out there who watch us and, and love our opinions on personal day's security and things like that. Yes, I get it. Companies like Apple and Google and so many others are not exactly the best stewards of your data on the best of days, but it's things like this that give me hope for a few of those companies.

Now, if you'll recall, 'cause we've covered this several times, the UK authorities basically went to Apple and said, you've gotta build a back door into iMessage because it's impossible for us to do police work when people are texting each other. I know, right? However, will we be able to solve modern crimes?

Why don't we just outlaw iMessage completely and force, uh, criminals to send letters through carrier pigeons that can be intercepted? Oh, wait, we got rid of all those. Okay, back to back to the drawing board.

Uh, backdoor. Yeah, we gotta have a backdoor and iMessage, you know, like all those back doors that the NSA built into things with hacking tools that didn't accidentally get released to the rest of the internet. Nope.

Crap, that happened too, didn't it? Oh, okay. So what's the plan?

Well, Apple's plan was a little easy. We're not gonna do it, if you remember, they're infamous for not doing those kinds of things. And I brought this up many, many times.

But a perfect example of this was, uh, many years ago when, uh, there was a terrorist incident that involved, uh, people communicating on an iPhone five C. And, uh, the, uh, US authorities told Apple that they needed to unlock the phone, uh, in order for them to collect intelligence. And Apple said, we can't do that.

That's literally impossible. We built the system so that not even we have a key to it. And then the government sued Apple in court, and Apple said, we'll defend our rights.

And then suddenly the government dropped the lawsuit and said, don't worry, we figured out how to get into it. And Apple then turned around and sued the government and said, we wanna know how you got into it so we can plug that little hole, which they eventually did. Uh, if you ever wondered why sometimes you have to unlock your phone when you plug it in to charge it, that's because of that particular little incident, uh, because of a, a gray box manufacturer that was able to unlock iPhones and things like that.

The key here is that Apple not only stuck to their guns on their particular refusal, um, they also told people in the uk, we're going to limit your capability to be even more secure because your government doesn't wanna work with us on this. Uh, sometimes getting the, uh, the populace in an uproar is great. Here's the problem though.

The fact that this came out through the government, and specifically our government here in the US and not the UK government, makes me wonder if the matter has been quietly dropped for the time being to be taken up later. Because one of the things that we see for these kinds of situations is, is that there's any time that there is some kind of a big situation, some kind of a massive crime, uh, this particular little specter always comes back up in the news. And also every couple of years someone will, uh, stoke those fires when it's election time to say that, you know, we need to be able to monitor this to make sure that there's no coordinated effort to do something.

Insert the boogeyman here. Uh, but not only does Apple, but other companies that make mobile operating systems like Google, um, and well, honestly, if there's anybody else left that's doing it, they really, really have to say, we are drawing a line and we will not compromise our security because you guys need a little, uh, less time to harvest information. Um, I'm also wondering if maybe some of the advances in AI are causing governments to back off, because why do we need to collect the data when AI can just reconstruct it for us on the fly?

But of course, that hasn't been tested in court yet, so time will tell. Speaking of ai, we've all seen the Terminator, right? It's a very horrible future, but, uh, maybe it's not quite here yet.

And because I'm not surrendering to our robot overlords, given what I've seen from the last week, because the first world humanoid robot games pitted robot against a robot to see if they could take out the future resistance fighters like John Connor or if they were just gonna spend most of the time tripping over each other and other people. If you've seen the videos, you already know which one it is, and it's not the Terminator. Generative AI may be consuming the world, but it looks like we can probably still outrun or possibly even just corner better than those robots that are looking to outdo us.

Al did you get to see any of the hilarity that ensued when, uh, robots forgot that somebody standing in front of them was not gonna get outta their way? You know, I found this, this continues to be a, a treasured strove of humor looking at humanoid robots completing human tasks. Um, and yeah, it was great to see in particular the, the link video from the article we've linked, uh, where a little tiny baby robot gets just creamed by a, a full size adult robot running straight through it.

Uh, the thing that surprised me is that they both went straight down when they struck. If, if this was humans, we would've probably been rolling over and, and looking a little more, you know, there'd be arms and legs everywhere, and these guys just went, what? They were dead.

Uh, you know, it's, it is heartening to know that, uh, if, if you are still well armed and follow the, uh, the rules that help us stay away from zombies, you can probably stay away from these robots as well. So focus on your cardio, uh, and avoid toilets. Um, It is Still one of those places where progress seems to be slow.

So I recall watching some of the, uh, humanoid robots doing firefighting tasks. So opening doors and, uh, climbing stairs and walking around obstacles. And, uh, a few years ago, the, apparently the same robots, they look a little slimmer now than they did then.

Uh, these same kinds of robots were sometimes not able to even open a door. So es escaping from them is not going to be quite like it seems in the movies. I'm not sure that we've, uh, quite got to the, uh, creation date for the first terminators.

So we may still yet get there. We may still find liquid metal being used to create these more adaptable robots in the future, but certainly it's not time to surrender yet. In fact, it's time to have a good laugh and enjoy yourself.

And I'd like having a story in the rundown that isn't doom and gloom, and that is really some, uh, go out and watch something fun. Well, let's take a closer look at one of those stories, because if you've been watching the rundown for the last month or so, you might feel like it's been doom and gloom for our friends over at Intel. Things might be looking up though, because SoftBank announced that they are gonna be investing $2 billion in Intel by buying some of Intel's outstanding shares at $23 a piece, which strengthens their partnership to advance US semiconductor technology.

Both companies have said that the deal supports innovation, AI growth, and next generation digital infrastructure. That is of course, because Intel plays a key role in US manufacturing. Of course, it's an investment and that agreement has to, uh, be approved by the official regulatory bodies.

But that might actually be something that is gonna sail right through. Because if you recall last week we were talking about the fact that there was some bruhaha with the Intel CEO and the current administration in the us. No sooner did we publish that story on the rundown, and we saw a rumor floating around that the US government might buy a stake in Intel as well.

And if you remember from my, uh, my little political soapbox platform last week, I was wondering, well, what exactly might have been discussed in that closed door meeting? And it's starting to sound like we might have a glimpse into what it could be. But Al before I jump back onto my soapbox platform, I'm gonna let you kind of jump in here.

Obviously, SoftBank investing $2 billion is gonna be a big deal. Do you think it's enough, though, to write the Intel ship? Well, I think you take it in the context of all of the things that Lip Bertan has been doing since he came on board.

So he's leaned out and refocused Intel as an organization, but the problem is that the cashflow hasn't been there to fund building out something new and, and building that new direction out. And so this is why, uh, the deal with SoftBank is significant. A couple of billion dollars.

Yeah, it's, it's not the most massive amount of money. It's not gonna build, uh, 15 new fabs all across the United States to provide, uh, redundancy in, in production and move away from dependency on overseas, uh, silicon foundries. But it is more of a war chest than the the recent losses that Intel has been making, uh, over the last few years.

And I think there may have been a little bidding war where, uh, the, the Trump administration wanted to use some of the money from the Chips Act to, uh, buy into Intel. And, uh, SoftBank was possibly a, a more business, uh, oriented, more, uh, tech oriented investor that might actually bring something to the party more than the Trump government would. Now, clearly, the US government, uh, is interested in making sure that things run nicely for US organizations.

And, uh, there there was a statement that the dependency on Taiwan based chip fabrication is a national security issue for the United States. And that, particularly in light of all of the Sabre rattling from China around Taiwan, of course China claims Taiwan is just a, a bunch of rebels. Uh, there's, there's definitely a, a, a thought around that risk, and that was part of the motivation for the US government wanting to invest in, in Intel.

Uh, but I think Intel has taken the investment from SoftBank because they're much more technical, technologically aligned, and also give them entry into markets. I mean, SoftBank's pretty strong in a whole bunch of, uh, Southeast Asian markets for Intel to sell into. So they're much more of a partner globally for Intel.

But would the US government be a good investor, do you think, Tom, for Intel? I I actually think the US government would be a horrible investor for Intel, because you run a business, like you run the US government, you're never gonna make any money. Likewise, if you try to run the government like you run a business, you're gonna fail at what a government is supposed to do.

But I don't wanna step onto that little box just yet, because when this news broke on Monday afternoon, courtesy of, uh, the, uh, Daniel Newman of the Futurum Group, he pointed out something in just a sentence that I think underscores everything here. SoftBank has a huge investment in ARM technology. If you'll recall, SoftBank was behind the possibility of Nvidia purchasing arm.

We covered that a lot on the rundown. Boy, could you imagine what might have happened if that deal had gone down? But I digress.

SoftBank wants ARM to succeed, and they want ARM to be everywhere. They just put, took a $2 billion position in a company that manufactures chips. Do you think possibly they might be able to have some influence on what kind of chips get produced in all those new facilities if they're footing the bill to make sure that they get completed?

I think they do. I think that they're using this as a way to diversify the armed supply chain away from TSMC in Taiwan, in the event that things go south. And digressing for just a moment, if you watch any kind of political, um, commentaries, uh, they say that the window for any kind of resolution to the China Taiwan situation is gonna occur in the next five to six years, which ironically enough is about how long it's gonna take for those fabs and factories to be completed.

Then there is a very real possibility that we could look at what might happen if a lot of that chip manufacturing needs to be onshore here in the US for external reasons, we'll call it that. And that could signal a very big shift at Intel, because as we know, Intel is a champion of X 86 processors. Well, what happens when most of the found series in the fabrication facilities are churning out arm processors?

Because SoftBank says you gotta, well, I think it could mean that we see a wholesale shift, because when you realize that most of the software that people run now is in the cloud, when you realize that half of the install base for, uh, desktops or end user devices is running on some form of an arm chip, because laptops, tablets, smartphones are all doing that, I think that the supremacy of X 86 as an architecture is waning significantly, and it's one of the reasons for Intel's, um, lack of, uh, market dominance. So I guess then the next question becomes, if Intel's market dominance is going away and arm is gonna be facilitated by companies in Intel, does that mean that the government should stay out of it? Because here's the problem that I have with, uh, Intel, uh, taking investment from the US government.

You know, we, we've seen this before and during the great financial crisis, uh, the US government basically invested in all of the, uh, automakers in the US and they used those funds as a way to bail them out, and then the automakers had to pay them back. I, I don't see that same kind of situation here. This isn't the government throwing intel a lifeline to, to keep them from going under it.

It feels a little less, um, egalitarian and a little bit more, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Uh, not bribery, not, not bribery. We already covered that.

So this is totally not bribery. Uh, maybe more self-serving, um, would, would be, yeah, we don't wanna say bribery, uh, but this feels an awful lot. Like, I'm gonna put tariffs on TSMC because they're not in the US and I'm gonna have an investment stake in a company that is in the us.

What do you think? I a tariff angle's. Interesting, isn't it?

As the, um, the, the aim with the, the tariffs was to bring manufacturing back to the us and I think that's, that's very much the, the current US government's, you know, idea of deglobalization bringing everything back to the us. But $2 billion doesn't build your fab, right? Silicon foundries are 10 to $20 billion to build.

And then the timeline for building them is, is quite a lot of years. So some of me says this maybe is just a bunch of posturing to meet the current government's, uh, objectives. And, you know, it's interesting that the investment and that the turnaround in the view of the US government came from a meeting between lip Bhutan and, uh, I believe it was a closed door meeting with, with the president and turnaround came there.

And, uh, suddenly all of these other plans that are meeting the thoughts of the current government, but maybe they don't have to pan out. And we've seen plenty of these announced deals that don't pan out, uh, irrespective of who's in government. Foxconn, uh, we're looking at you in Wisconsin.

Uh, you know, there's, there's been lots of announcements of things that are gonna happen that fit, uh, the political requirements of the time that don't necessarily pan out for the business requirements. Uh, if this had been a $40 billion stake in Intel, that was enough funding to, to build a couple of foundries that would've been interesting. Uh, but 2 billion, yeah, that's not building foundries, but it is giving a little more runway to in Intel and also giving SoftBank a little more leverage in the US as well, giving them, uh, you know, making them more friendly to the US government.

Now, of course, we are very friendly to many places and one of the places that we are very friendly to, uh, this week, you've just missed it as you are watching. This is the Tech Field Day Extra Act, uh, share in Cleveland, uh, Stephen FSTs been there and, uh, has been producing some content with our team. Uh, check that out on LinkedIn.

If you want to see some of the replays, you'll see the videos out on our YouTube channel. I call the vast number of, uh, events that we've had over time or out on the YouTube channel as well. Uh, I get to travel in a couple of weeks time.

It's been a little while. My feet are kind of at Chi. It's about time to, to spend, uh, hellish time, uh, on a plane traveling across the, uh, Pacific.

I'll be over for AI infrastructure field, day three. That'll be running September 10th and 11th. And we've got a pretty packed schedule for those three days with Satter fa, uh, Morant, Nutanix, hammer space, and Broadcom all presenting there.

Um, Tom, you'll be interested to see that the Jericho, uh, chips are part of, uh, the core of what we're gonna see from Broadcom, and those should be very interesting. Uh, of course, Tom is then also going to take over. You are gonna have some travel as well in September.

That's right. I'm waiting for things to cool down a little bit before I head out to Silicon Valley to talk all things security. And we have breaking news folks.

Infoblox will be joining us for Security Field Day on September 24th and 25th. We'll have the details up on the website very soon. We have a great lineup of companies.

We have a wonderful lineup of delegates. You're gonna want to tune in for that one. Fun Conversations to be had across all forms of enterprise.

It. We don't deal with vibe ops around here. We do real ops, and you're gonna want to check that out and make sure that it's DevSecOps.

Sec sec, DevSecOps, it's all gonna be secure. 'cause that's built in by default. You know, what else is built in by default, all of the humor and the snarkiness that you get here on the rundown, and I'll tell you why that we're so much better than anything else is because all you have to do is just take one of the stories that we've linked in the show notes and, uh, ask, uh, your favorite AI system to give you a humorous, um, interpretation of it.

And I promise you, you'll be laughing not at what it wrote, but how poorly it, it receives humor. Uh, trust me, I, I know I, I tested that. And there's no substitute for the level of snarkiness that you get from us.

We hope that you are enjoying this on YouTube and watching us as we talk about things. But if not, we hope that you're listening to us as well on your favorite podcast application of choice. It is like listening to the radio, sort of, um, trust me, it's probably better than most of the stuff that's out there because we won't play a single top 40 hit, mostly because Corey tells me we're not licensed to play any of that music on YouTube.

Uh, but we, what we are licensed to do is bring you great news stories week after week. Um, we hope that you tune in. We hope that you read the show notes to check out the articles that we pulled from.

And honestly, we hope that you come back next week, um, because I'm sure that there's gonna be some exciting stuff that's gonna happen in the next seven days. And, uh, we're gonna have a great time, uh, getting it all together and finding creative quippy ways to tell you about what's going on and trying not to cry as the robot overlords trip over our feet. And, uh, the modular nuclear reactor in the back of the, uh, house, uh, fires up again.

But as long as we're not glowing, we'll be back next week with all kinds of fun stuff. And if you have any news stories that you wanna see us cover, make sure you send them in. Leave a comment about what your favorite part of this, uh, episode was, and we'll see you next week for the rundown.