Is The CHIPS Act Crushed? || Tech Field Day News Rundown: March 12, 2025

Vast new capabilities, X gets crossed out. A SML goes East. Druva is helping to secure Azure customers.

CBRA spreads AI far and wide, and we're gonna take a closer look at the latest on the CHIPS Act. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Tech Field Day rundown. My name is Tom Hollingsworth and I am your host.

And joining me of course, is my co-host, Mr. Steven Foskett. But before we get into our usual witty banter, we wanted to take a moment because Eagle Eared viewers may have noticed in my intro, I used a different name for our weekly podcast here.

This is now the Tech Field Day rundown. Steven, why is it the Tech Field Day rundown? Now, I don't know, this is the first I'm hearing of it, Tom is what, what's going on here?

You Know, I must have type out it whenever I typed up the show notes. I guess we're gonna have to go back and rerecord this whole intro. Oh, we, we actually, um, so we have big news, um, breaking news.

Uh, those of you who've listened to this show or read anything that we've written associated with it for the last, uh, 16, 17 years, have probably heard the name some sort of weird German word that they didn't know what it meant. Gestalt it. Well, guess what?

I got fed up with the fact that people didn't know what that word meant. No, actually, it, it was just never a great name. And so like Kaiser Soze, it's gone Gestalt it is going to become Textron It, and the news rundown is not going with it.

So the news rundown is going to be sitting with us here in the tech tech field day side of the business. So, uh, as you know, so we're all part of the Futurum Group. Uh, tech Strong is our sister company that focuses on media.

Uh, they're gonna be taking over gestalt it, making it tech strong it, and, uh, gestalt it, uh, is no more. And that means that the rundown is gonna become the Tech Field Day rundown. Did I, did I explain that clearly, Tom?

Yeah, I think, I think I got the gist of it, and I know that of course, if I need to find out any more information about that, I can head over to our YouTube channel, which will now be known as Tech Field Day Plus. It'll still have the old handle on it for the time being, but just know that we're bringing you additional content that's all related to Tech Field Day. And that's part of what we do here, and we're very excited to be bringing it to you.

So with that on, with the show, because of course, I must shout out the fact that it is March 12th, and it is a very important day for those of you who love Cookies because it is National Girl Scout Day. So go out and find one of those entrepreneurial young ladies and, uh, help her meet her cookie goals. Uh, and remember that the serving size for Thin Mints is, is exactly one sleeve, which is half a box.

Um, but if you're, uh, maybe looking for something a little bit more savory, it is of course also National Baked Scallops Day, which I'm not quite sure how those two things go together. But the good news, of course, is that we have a great lineup of news that goes very well together with just about anything, whether you want cookies or scallops or possibly even something vegetarian. And we're gonna jump in with a great story about a friend of Tech Field Day, and that would be our friends over at Vast Data, because a few weeks back, they introduced an event broker to ingest real-time events replacing a Kafka cluster.

They also added block storage support making their platform truly unified. Today, they're adding a whole raft of additional features to build real-time rag pipelines with proper access control. Now, Steven, given that you are the one around here that focuses on storage and ai, we thought it would be awesome to give you the chance to react to this news from our friends over at Vast.

Well, thanks Tom, and thanks for saving the news for me. 3 came out a couple of weeks ago. Uh, that's the next rev of the, uh, vast Operating System.

Now, many of you may be familiar with Vast, but if you're not, uh, let me give you a little bit of background. So Vast is part of this current crop of next generation storage solutions. Essentially, um, as has happened, uh, every decade of my career, everybody in storage realizes that what was going on before it ain't gonna work going on in the future.

And so they all kind of get together and start a bunch of new companies and develop new storage platforms that do everything different and actually pretty much better. Now, unfortunately, storage is also an industry with a lot of, um, let's say inertia. And so the companies that, uh, back then that did the things that actually don't work all that well anymore, well, they're still here, but the next generation companies actually do a tremendous job.

Vast is basically the 800 pound gorilla of the current crop of next generation storage. They're doing everything better than everyone else. And it's pretty safe to say that everything that they've added in the last couple of years has really just solidified their existing lead in this next generation storage space.

Vast is essentially the, uh, storage platform of choice for AI applications, uh, for next generation applications. Um, and they've added a lot of stuff that has gotten them beyond storage. I'm sure that they're sitting, sitting there listening to this saying Data, data, not storage data.

Well, I'm with you guys. I'm with you. I am always skeptical when companies start basically getting outta their lane.

And so when Vast introduced data true database capability in their platform, I was admittedly quite skeptical that this was actually gonna work out. Well, it's actually worked out really well. Uh, the Vast database platform has enabled the company to basically do the same for data.

Real honest to goodness database data that they did for file storage. And now with this release, they've got block storage as well. So they had Object, they had File, they've got Block, they've got actual true database access as mentioned.

They've got a a, a real-time event broker. Um, it's basically replaces Kafka. It's API compatible, uh, kind of like some of those other things.

They're S3 compatible, that sort of thing. Well, this one, um, essentially, instead of having your own, um, fidgety and ridiculous Kafka Kafka cluster for real-time data, you can just point it at your Vast and say, go to it. And the, and the thing just does it.

Now, uh, they've expanded that with, as I said, block storage. So they're using NVME over TCP. Uh, they, this is a native capability.

It's not just what some unified arrays in the past have done, which is basically, no kidding, this is how they do it. Um, basically making a real big file and then pretending that that's a virtual drive and then letting you kind of access it at block wise, but you're actually not, it's actually just a file in the file system. Well, vast doesn't do that.

What they're doing is they've created a first class actual file semantics, a new kind of element within the whole vast system. It supports everything you need. It is high performance, it's flexible.

It supports, uh, VMware, it supports OpenStax sender. It can scale. It's, it's a really nice, honestly, a really nice block storage offering.

And as mentioned today, March 12th, they're adding serverless triggers, um, and functions of vector storage and retrieval, um, fine-grained access control and enabling their database, which is another kind of personality of the vast system to support rag applications. So you can actually have, you know, you can combine this with the Kafka. You can have real-time data coming in.

Uh, the Vast platform will just handle it for you. You can then present that in a Vector database semantics to a RAG application, and do real-time queries against real-time data. It's pretty solid stuff and, and pretty impressive stuff, um, from the folks at Vast.

So essentially, uh, vast has done what very few other companies have achieved. In fact, I can't think of somebody who's actually made the leap from storage to true data in this way, and they just keep stepping on the gas. It is pretty impressive stuff, and we're gonna keep an eye out.

A little Birdie told me that they're gonna have more announcements later this month. Um, so we'll be reporting on that on the Tech field Day rundown, uh, probably next week or the week after. If you had trouble getting into X Twitter this week, uh, you're not alone.

The social media site experienced issues throughout the day on Monday. Uh, uh, the anonymous aligned hacking group, dark Storm sounds like the next Marvel villain took credit for the distributed denial of service attack that forced the servers offline. According to reports, the attackers were even able to bypass the initial efforts to move X services to CloudFlare, to blunt the onslaught of packets.

The group also took to their Telegram channel to refute attempts to link the attack to Nation states. Sounds like somebody's a little peeved with X Twitter, um, other than me. Yeah, actually, if you read the statement from Dark Storm, they specifically said they are very peeved at the people who run, uh, the site formerly known as Twitter, because, um, something, something government, something something fascists.

I'm just record. I'm, that's what they said in the announcement. Um, so it's really funny and shout out to Wired who did a really good kind of analysis on this.

So here's what happened. Um, sites like Twitter are designed to basically take a lot of traffic, right? Like, like we've seen Twitter buckled before, uh, under load during things like the Super Bowl.

I mean, everyone who was on Twitter back when we still called it Twitter, is, is they remember the Fail Whale when the system got overwhelmed. Well, one of the ways that they were able to fix that problem is they front end most of their servers with CloudFlare access, right? So CloudFlare is basically a giant proxy server for everything else on the internet.

Yeah, except the dark storm guys figured out that there were some backend servers that were not fronted by CloudFlare that, um, had some problems. They were not secured properly with access control lists, you know, like only except connections coming from CloudFlare. And so they hit those really hard and knocked them offline, and it took probably, I think they said five or six hours for the engineers over at the, the X building to figure out what was getting hammered and to, uh, nail it shut as it were.

Uh, so that was kind of embarrassing. Uh, anybody did try to jump on on Monday, figured that out. Um, what was even more embarrassing though was, uh, when the, the CEO of the company came out and said, oh, well, um, this, uh, this attack, uh, came from Ukraine.

Um, now I am not purporting to be a genius by, by any stretch of the imagination. Uh, but I do need to educate the CEO of the site now called X, um, Mr. Musk, the d the first D in DDoS stands for distributed meaning not from the same place.

Because as an engineer, if I saw all the packets that were hitting my network coming from one area, say one country, uh, I would create an access control list that would just block all the traffic coming from that country. And I would solve my problem in 10 minutes instead of five hours. However, if the traffic was actually coming from a multitude of places, say, uh, a bunch of DVRs and security cameras that had been compromised as a botnet and was being launched through CNC servers through an anonymous aligned group who prides themselves on not only staying hidden, but by distributing their resources to the point where it's almost impossible to take them down, uh, oh.

And a, a group that purports to be backers of another nation state that is currently under fire from, uh, people that are trying to wipe it out of existence that is not Ukraine. Uh, if, if you'd have noticed that too, you might have not blamed this on someone that you are obviously looking for a reason to blame it on. Uh, but I don't wanna get super political on this.

I just want to educate you, uh, since you know you are a genius, and I'm not, uh, except I'm actually a genius when it comes to networking, and I knew that. So, uh, yeah, this, this is resolved for now until someone leaves the back door open once again. And, uh, people are able to slip in and, uh, you know, a thousand Eyes figured this out because they have some great reporting in the Wired story as well, on, uh, on what exactly happened.

And as we've heard at Tech Field Day before, all you've gotta do, if you have five D DOS scrubbers and four of them work, that means all the traffic goes through the one that doesn't, and, and you get knocked offline. So, uh, here's hoping that, uh, the 28 people that are left at X can, uh, do a better job of securing that infrastructure, because I'd hate to see this thing get knocked offline continuously for the next three and a half years. That would, that would be terrible for, well, somebody, chip Toolmaker, A SML is planning on opening a new recycling center in Beijing.

The odd thing is, is that this comes amid rising tensions between China and the US regarding the sharing of chip making tools and intellectual property. A SML has stated that the facility is designed to refurbish equipment that has been returned from customers and will not be manufacturing net new hardware. Now, the US has been putting its own pressure on companies like A SML to abide by an export restriction list that will prevent advanced semiconductor technology from showing up in China.

And you may not have heard of A SML before, but they are the only supplier of some very advanced lithography equipment, and they are currently being courted by both sides. Uh, there's a lot of money that's being put on the table to make A SML sell exclusively to one side or the other, or possibly ignore sanctions. Steven, do you think that A SML is doing this to say to the, everyone we're gonna abide by what we believe is the best way to do business?

Well, I think it's first, uh, important to make sure that, uh, everyone is clear. Who, who is A SML? Well, A SML is the 800 pound gorilla of, uh, the chip making world.

They make the machines that make the chips. And A SML is really the undisputed champion in this space. They make the most advanced machines.

When you hear about TSMC and Intel and Samsung and all these other companies coming up with new, uh, approaches to chip making and investing billions of dollars into these fabs, all of that, well, not every bit of it, but a lot of that is going to A SML because they're the ones that are making those big machines that go in there and make the chips. So it may surprise you to think that A SML who's on the leading edge here, is investing in China, which is, of course behind the, uh, embargo or, uh, you know, blockade, uh, if you will, from western countries in terms of these advanced machines. So what is A SML doing?

Well, what they're doing is actually pretty clever. They're, uh, recycling and reusing and repairing existing equipment that's in China already, especially older equipment that needs to, or that can be redeployed to manufacture maybe less ma uh, less cutting edge, more mature products. And so, essentially A SML is, they, they, they're certainly not bypassing the embargo.

What they're doing is they are addressing, uh, great market demand for the tooling to make more mature chips. And, um, they're able to take in equipment that's no longer being used at other fabs. They're able to refurbish it, to reuse it, to resell it perhaps, uh, but probably just to keep it running for a long, long time.

In these, uh, in these other fabs, of course, they will also probably be, uh, working with the, uh, scientists and engineers in China who are working on, uh, their own advanced, uh, chip making nodes. And that's an important aspect because, uh, Chinese researchers are working on alternatives that would get them the kind of, uh, tiny wavelength light that would allow them to compete with the most advanced, uh, Western chip making, uh, in, in a variety of different ways, multi pattering, maybe a new way of producing the light itself instead of EUV, which is what's embargoed. Uh, there also, um, heavily leaning into these mature process nodes that frankly, um, many of the western companies have given up producing, but are still incredibly important to, to the world.

In fact, the news is that Chinese, uh, fabric fabs are, are actually ramping up production of mature, uh, process node chips that are used to make all those other chips, not the cutting edge stuff, the latest iPhone processor or the latest GPU, but all the other chips that we all rely on every single day. And if China can do that, if they can corner the market for mature node production and, uh, flood the market with, uh, inexpensive, uh, mature node chips, then they can drive competition out and end up with, uh, their own chip making monopoly. And, and of course, all of this requires that their A-S-M-R-A-S-M-L machines, uh, continue to work, and that's what A SML is gonna be addressing.

So this is a long way of saying that all of this plays into China's hands in terms of being a powerhouse chip maker, and all of it refutes the attempts of the US government to keep that from happening. So we're gonna be watching this space closely, and, uh, we'll be reporting here in a, in a little bit about some other news related to CHIP making. Druva has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft to help bring more security options to Azure Cloud users.

Druva has a suite of cloud focused tools to help protect data, including go global ddu, uh, unified security views across all platforms, and the scalability to help manage growing workloads. The Druva Data Security Cloud will soon be available in the Microsoft Azure marketplace to help provide ease of installation for customers, looking to increase data security. Tom, uh, we've worked with DVA many times over the years with Tech Field Day.

It's exciting to see them moving forward. It is, and I love the fact that they're kind of rebranding this as a cloud security suite and not just backup and disaster recovery. That's something that the industry, this part of the industry has been going through probably for the last 18 months, is this pivot away from BCDR to data protection, to, to really calling it what it is.

And I think that the value here is that, or I'm sorry, the Azure marketplace, Amazon or the other guys, uh, the Microsoft Azure marketplace, uh, inclusion. Because think about this. When you were going out and you were trying to stand up net new servers, you need to be able to do everything to them from the beginning, right?

Like, Microsoft has done this for years with Windows. It's like, oh, you, you want to preload antivirus on it? You wanna preload Microsoft Office on it That way you have all the product productivity tools you need right away.

And I think that having the ability to have maybe like a marketplace pop up and say, oh, yeah, well, we're noticing that you're not running any, you know, data protection software. Um, here are the strategic partners that we partner with in Druva now would be one of those that pops up. And I think that's a great way to kind of create, if not a de Azure secure by default installation, maybe a defacto one.

Because, you know, if, if you stand it up and you immediately are told, Hey, you know, it would be great if you install these things, or if you're a company that already utilizes Druva and you know that it's just one or two clicks to get that suite put down on the server so that you're protected automatically, that is a huge step up because we know that we have talked for years about some of the, uh, leaky situations that other cloud providers put themselves in, you know, like, uh, S3 being insecure by default, and that's problematic. Plus, you know, what happens if I get that thing online and then something catastrophic happens and the server gets knocked offline or, or something gets deleted or, or worse encrypted. Uh, this is a great way to ensure that you have good, um, reliable data from the point when the installation happened, and you don't have to worry about these problems.

You know, it's, it's like buying AppleCare for a phone, right? As long as I bought AppleCare on it, I can walk out without a screen protector or a case and everything feels just fine. This is the software version of that.

And the fact that Druva has spent a lot of time building a, a very scalable platform that isn't hardware reliant, means that you don't have to worry about hitting some of those artificial limitations of, oh yeah, you have too many nodes for this, uh, you're gonna have to upgrade to this other version of the suite. Or worse yet, you spend all of this money, uh, deploying new hardware, and then you find out, oh, actually we are, um, we're short on the, you know, capabilities here, so you're actually gonna have to put in another unit and load share between the two of them, and that won't be in for three more weeks. So we hope that your system can run without any protections for that long.

You know, that's not gonna be a problem, is it? Um, this is the way that software really should be delivered and consumed and, and Bravo to Druva for getting, you know, in close with Microsoft to make this something that is available on Azure very quickly, whenever customers need it. Tech Field Day presenter Cress is starting to deploy more of their AI accelerators and new data centers across the US and France.

The latest CS three offering from the company has over 4 trillion transistors, 900,000 cores and 44 gigabytes of sram. The largest installation of these new CS three clusters is gonna be in Minneapolis, Minnesota, home of the twins, and they're gonna have 512 of those joined together for an aggregate of 64 exa flops of compute power. Now, there are gonna be a couple of sites.

One of 'em is gonna be right here around me in Oklahoma City, and the other one's gonna be in Montreal. Those are gonna be owned directly by Cerus. However, the other sites are gonna be operated in concert with G 42 Cloud.

CEUs videos have been some of the most popular ones that we've had on the tech field, a YouTube channel for a number of years, and I think a lot of it comes down to them being on the cutting edge of some of this AI accelerator technology. Steven, do you see getting these AI accelerators into more data centers as a way for CEUs to kind of lift their customers up and kind of give them more horsepower? Well, this is a pretty clever move, um, by the company, I have to say.

Uh, one of the challenges or one of the surprises to me in this AI market is that accelerators haven't been more popular. I would've predicted that companies would be rapidly adopting products like Riss along with a lot of the other accelerators out there, uh, for their, uh, AI needs, especially when it comes to inferencing. So, as a reminder, we hear a lot about the supercomputers that are used for training ai, and those are really impressive clusters, typically of Nvidia hardware, but inferencing happens everywhere on all sorts of different platforms.

Uh, surprisingly to this day, most inferencing is still happening on Nvidia. In fact, it's happening often on a lot of the same hardware that's used for training. And the reason I say that's surprising is because that stuff's, uh, pretty exotic and pretty expensive and pretty hard to maintain.

Many companies, notably Intel, have created really compelling, uh, inferencing accelerators, and, um, many of those have, uh, not really found the traction that we would've thought. Now, uh, Seuss is probably the coolest chip maker out there just on the face of it, because they're doing what's called wafer scale compute. And, and if you wanna see a bunch of nerds get excited, uh, open up the, uh, men in black, uh, metal suitcase that contains a cress, uh, wafer scale, uh, processor and wave it around, as you said, we're talking 900,000 cores.

We're talking incredible, incredible, uh, amounts of compute on something that's the size of a dinner plate, and you just don't see that every day. And it's a lot of fun to look at it. That's what, that's what they're making.

The problem is that they haven't found much market traction. They're now on their third generation of processors. They're, uh, they've improved them every single time.

They've made them better. But a lot like, you know, companies like Intel, they just haven't found the traction that we would've predicted that certainly I would've predicted. And so the company is actually moving in a very, very clever direction.

They're doing. You know, there, there is a space where, uh, accelerators have found a niche, and that is as a service. So if you look at, for example, um, Microsoft and Google and Amazon, they're running a lot of AI workloads as a service on in-house or other vendors, um, uh, specialized hardware instead of trying to run it on the conventional Nvidia chips.

And that's where service is going here. So essentially what they're doing is they are deploying data centers full of their, uh, wafer scale compute modules, and, uh, trying to find a good application for them. Is inferencing a good application for them?

Well, my friends in the AI space are a little bit concerned because, uh, CBRA doesn't actually have as much memory per accelerator as some competing platforms. That means that you may need to use more cores than you wanted to in order to access enough memory. Now, the company would contend that that's not really a problem because they have incredible amounts of memory throughput.

In other words, yes, there's not as much memory per accelerator, but there is just an incredible amount of bandwidth that lets you use memory that otherwise wouldn't be used. And as we know from, uh, the latest research, uh, and future of intelligence, as well as what we're hearing about at AI Field Day, AI accelerators, the cores themselves are actually not all that a hundred, they're not a hundred percent utilized in these environments. In fact, it is practical to borrow memory if you've got enough bandwidth, and that's what Sebus is saying that they can do.

Or, uh, they can run smaller models that do fit in their memory footprint. And many of those have a lot of practical applications. In fact, we have, again, heard from customers of the future and research side as well as, uh, anecdotally at, uh, AI Field Day that many companies are beginning to want to run smaller inferencing instances.

Maybe they're not, uh, you know, the latest cutting edge LLM, but maybe they're a different type of AI as a service. And frankly, the wafer scale, cyberus compute modules would be a great fit for that. So all of this is to say, I think this is a tremendous idea for the company.

Essentially, they've built this thing that is really impressive, but really expensive and a little bit scary. And instead of asking customers to buy it themselves, they're saying, Hey, just use it. Use it as you need.

Run your inferencing here in the cloud and see if it works for you. I think that could work for all of us, and I think that it's a good move by the company. Um, so we're definitely gonna keep watching.

Uh, again, it's a, it's a very impressive technology, and I think they may have found the proper niche for a AI accelerator. We've spoken at Link about the CHIPS Act for the past year or so on the rundown, and you know that we've been pretty big proponents of bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the us. However, the latest news from the federal government isn't quite so rosy.

The latest reports say that the current administration is trying to find a way to prevent funding for the act from being dispersed. Options floated have, including firing all of the people at NIST who are responsible for sending that funding out, because they were all considered to be probationary employees, as well as clawing back the funding for non-performance, which is the only way that that money can be clawed back by the government. Now that news comes, as the administration has said, that they're going to place tariffs on TSMC.

And TSMC has announced $100 billion worth of investment in chip making facilities here in the us. But the CHIPS ACT doesn't just involve TSMC, it involves a number of other industries that were clamoring to get some money from the federal government to offset the large capital gains or capital outlay that was necessary to realize capital gains on chip manufacturing. Steven, we have talked about this at length, but it just seems like this story keeps taking some very weird turns, though every week that we hear about it.

I wanna start off with you, how do you feel about this report that the CHIPS Act could have in end up being put out to pasture? And how will that affect the people that were set to receive the money from it? Well, uh, first off, I, I think that a lot of people were stunned while watching the not a State of the Union address.

Yes, it was not a State of the Union address, it was just an address, um, by Trump where he suddenly lashed out at the CHIPS Act. And among those who were reportedly stunned were, uh, the senators and representatives, uh, Republican and Democrat alike in many of the states where that money was going to be dispersed. In fact, that includes a lot of deep red Republican states that would very much like to receive that funding and have those jobs and have all that stuff built out, like so many of the other actions of the Trump administration initially, it wasn't clear that this could even happen, but as you mentioned, they've been finding all sorts of clever ways to stop spending in its tracks.

Uh, I heard about, uh, another, another one where they're, uh, setting the, uh, maximum, uh, transaction value on government credit cards to $1. Uh, that's a good way to not cancel the cards, but also, you know, cancel the spending, as you mentioned, um, having the, uh, the, the folks responsible for dispersing the money, firing those, well, that's another way to keep the money from being spent. All of this is really terrible for the economy and, uh, terrible for the companies that we're planning on building these chips to begin with.

And frankly, it's really perplexing because it hurts the very, um, US first anti-China messaging that we've heard from this administration. Essentially, they're shooting themselves in the feet by trying to cancel this CHIPS Act funding. I think that Trump believes, if you listen to the speech and you heard the sort of, um, positioning of this, I, I think he believes that the companies are gonna spend this money anyway, and maybe TSMC gave him that impression by telling him that they were going to invest an additional a hundred something billion dollars in chip funding in the US without CHIPS ACT funding.

But of course, they wouldn't be doing that if it hadn't been for the CHIPS Act funding that they think they already got, that they're waiting to get paid. So is it really without CHIPS ACT funding? I, I would say that overall this is really puzzling.

Um, I don't understand how this makes any sense at all, unless you are an aggrieved person who's mad at the guy who signed that bill and took credit for it, in which case, I guess it makes sense. That's about the only way that it makes sense to me. Uh, so I'll make a bold statement.

It is March the 12th. Uh, if this happens, Intel will die. The company will go away, and, uh, we will find out that, uh, the chip, it turns out the CHIPS Act was actually very important after all.

Uh, I say that because last week on the rundown, we mentioned the fact that Intel's already pushed back the opening of their Ohio Fab, that they were hop hoping to get open this year. Uh, it's now not gonna open until at least 2030, if not later than that because well, yeah, Intel's going through some financial issues right now, but remember, as we've said repeatedly, uh, you don't just bless people with CHIPS ACT funding, and then tomorrow there's like, you know, a a new dollar store on the corner, like you have to build these facilities. And, and I get that there's a game of political brinkmanship when it comes to these things.

Maybe you don't like the fact that the guy before you was super successful and made things work, and you want everybody to think that you're the one that took credit for it. So maybe what you're gonna do is you're gonna threaten to cancel that funding, but what you're secretly gonna do is renegotiate with all of those other companies to maybe actually give them the money, but you want them to admit that you are the one that did it and not the other guy. I mean, that wouldn't happen, right?

Because that's, that's being really stupid with, um, funds that were already allocated, uh, legally by, uh, legislative body. And, and we wouldn't wanna violate the constitution around here because that's bad. We also wouldn't want to do something really, really stupid like court a, uh, foreign investor, say a a, a Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing company into investing a whole lot of money to build facilities in the US because they face an existential threat, uh, being invaded by, uh, another foreign country.

And then once that construction starts, I don't know, maybe go to them and say, well, if you're already building 50% of your new facilities over here, why don't you move all of them over here so that they can all be in the US Because I'd hate to cancel any kind of defense pact that I have with your island, uh, because you won't do what I say. Again, nobody would do that, right? Like, because that is not the way that normal people should behave in a society.

Uh, but I'm just saying hypothetically, uh, I I I'm glad that TSMC kind of stepped up and said, Hey, we are gonna invest here. Um, but I also know that saying that you're going to invest and actually investing are two completely different things as we learned. All you gotta do is go look up the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin.

The other thing, as I mentioned on, uh, the, uh, packet pushers network break that I recorded with Drew Connery Murray last week is one of the reasons why TSMC has been so successful over the years is that they have a pipeline from their university system directly to TSMC. So it's like one of those things, you, you remember how college used to be, right? Like, you go there, you get a degree, you, you make some connections with people in the industry, and then as soon as you get out of college, you have a job lined up waiting for you because you've basically been studying to do that job the whole time.

One of the things the CHIPS Act was supposed to provide was that kind of funding for that kind of education, because I don't know about you, but in a lot of the places where these facilities are being built, they're not exactly known as tech hubs. They're not exactly known for the kinds of education that were, are required for things like, you know, ultraviolet lithography and stuff like that. So you're gonna have to skill those people up.

Or what you end up with is a whole lot of people that live near the facility where it is now being imported into another country because, well, they're the only people we have that can run these things. And I know that we said we were gonna have a lot of jobs for you, because that's what the whole point of this act was. But really, if we don't have the money to train them, we don't have a lot of jobs for them.

Maybe they can sweep the floors or put things in boxes and do kind of manual labor, but the really smart people are the ones that we're training already. And that is probably the biggest casualty of the CHIPS Act, is to create the kinds of jobs that, quite frankly Americans want to be doing when they think about where's the openings in the job market. Again, there's, there's a lot of political dimensions to this that unfortunately we can't really separate from this.

And we did a great job of reporting on how the CHIPS Act was gonna be great for technology when we were covering it last year, when it was politically neutral and aimed at Micron and Samsung and TSMC and Intel and so many other companies. But now it feels like that it's the carrot that's being dangled in front of these companies, and there's a baseball bat headed towards their heads if they don't play well. You know, some of the argument that I've heard for canceling the CHIPS Act has been around this whole concept of non-performance, essentially, that these companies are not delivering what they said that they were gonna deliver, and that they're spending all this money, uh, American, you know, taxpayer money building, uh, plants that will never manufacture anything.

I wonder about that. First off, I mean, the nature of chip production is that it is a long, long lead time. It takes a lot of investment, it takes a lot of time to build up, and it also depends on sort of the winds of the market.

You know, if you are following this, you wonder, for example, which chips are gonna be manufactured where there are rumors, uh, that this chip or that chip is manufactured in Arizona or in Ohio or in, you know, wherever it is. Is it yet, is it, uh, and what else is needed? We've talked about this as well, packaging.

I'm really glad that you brought up the education portion as well, Tom, because that also shows this long lead time that brings us into the ability to actually manufacture chips in one country versus another. But the thing that really kills me here is, uh, about this and, and so many other stories that were coming, and again, I don't wanna be political about this. Uh, if you watch me on the Textron Gang, you know that, that I'm kind of the neutral middle of the road guy in a lot of those conversations.

Uncertainty is a killer for businesses, especially businesses that are making huge investments. And there frankly is no bigger investment on the planet. There is no product on the planet that requires a longer lead time and more money and more, um, input as chip making, especially cutting edge chip making.

It is literally humanity's most important product. In order to create that, we need certainty. And unfortunately, what we're seeing outta Washington is not just not certainty, but anti certainty.

We're seeing people, uh, you know, we're seeing, uh, commitments pulled back. We're seeing threats, and then take away the threat and then give the threat again, and then take away the threat on a whim, on a daily basis that kills investment. Absolutely.

If I was a, you know, monopoly man, blue blooded, fancy pants investor, there is no way I would invest in an economy that runs at the whim. And, uh, and, and as the wind blows, like this one, and this is really that, that's why the chips act, uh, pushback from, from Trump was really so damaging because no company in their right mind would put hundreds of billions of dollars behind something that could be shut down on the whim of somebody in such an unpredictable way. What we need is bipartisan certainty around investment, around commitments, around treaties, around, uh, tariffs, around so many things in order to build the economy and in order to build businesses.

And again, this is, this is my, you know, CNBC, Fox News hat on. We need certainty. If you're making Jim Kramer cry about whims and, and uncertainty in tariffs, you're doing it wrong.

And that's what's happening here. And the Chips Act is the biggest thing that, that, that they're, that they could possibly screw up. And they're screwing it up and it's counter to everything that they're saying.

It's counter to Trump's stated goals on a, on a global basis. It's counter to what Americans want. It's counter to what the Western world wants.

And frankly, it's a terrible, terrible, terrible situation. And, um, I just hope somebody can convince these people that they're doing completely the wrong thing by disrupting this. You know, we're gonna be talking about this for a while to come, so you might as well tune in to future episodes of the Tech Field Day rundown, but, uh, you should also check out our namesake event series, because we've got a lot of great stuff coming up and headed your way.

In fact, next week we have a great event Networking Field 8 37 is gonna be taking place in Silicon Valley. I've got two days of great presentations on the 19th and the 20th. Yeah, I know that Nvidia, GTC is going down, down the, the, you know, 1 0 1 in Silicon Valley, but you should tune in and watch what I have to say because let's be fair, I look way better in a leather jacket than Jensen Wong ever did.

Uh, but coming up just a couple weeks after that, Steven, you have something really cool that people are gonna wanna watch too. We are taking Tech Field Day on the road to a city I used to live at Houston, Texas. We are gonna be, uh, visiting our friends from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, better known as HPE.

And we are going to be diving into something I have wanted to do for a tech field, atopic for the longest time. We are doing data center infrastructure and not storage arrays and not network switches. Well, yeah, there's gonna be a little storage and a little networking.

We're doing ProLiant, we're doing ilo, we're doing security, we're doing power and cooling, we're doing data center racks. We've got a whole section on liquid cooling. We've got a whole section on authorization for out-of-band management, all sorts of like, like stuff that, that nerds like us just love.

So keep an eye out for more on the HPE Next Gen Compute event that we're doing as a Tech Field Day exclusive. After that, we are actually coming back with another incredible event. Now, I have to warn you, uh, this is probably gonna be the largest tech field day event in terms of the number of companies, the number of days, the number of presentations that we've done in years, that is AI infrastructure field day two.

Now obviously, AI infrastructure is a huge topic. We are gonna be back at the end of April, April 23rd through the 25th. Yeah, that's at least three days, probably four days with all sorts of presentations, all sorts of companies, all talking about how they're building out AI infrastructure.

Frankly, I don't wanna give anybody short shrift by spending too much time. com and keep an eye on it because we've got contracts coming in. We're gonna be making announcements of companies presenting at that over the next couple of weeks, and it's gonna blow your mind.

And while you're there, make sure you bookmark the, the event coming up after that, which is, of course, mobility Field Day 13, that's gonna be taking place May 7th and eighth. It's gonna be a pretty big event too, because we have a huge lineup of companies that we cannot wait to bring you. They're gonna be talking about the latest in wifi technology, and I'm not just talking about wifi seven, I'm talking about things like ultra wideband, Bluetooth, low energy, 5G, you name it.

They're gonna be talking about it, and we're gonna have a great lineup of delegates there to ask all kinds of questions. And coming up at the end of the month, we're gonna be talking all about security, and it's shaping up to be really interesting. com, because we're gonna be adding presenters to that page for the next month or so.

And I cannot wait to share some of those names with you. I don't wanna tip my hand just yet 'cause spoilers, but trust me, you're gonna wanna tune in just like you tune in every Wednesday for the rundown, whether it's the gestalt it rundown as it was, or the Tech Field Day rundown as it will be. Um, you can catch every episode on Wednesday.

You can head over to the website and check out the show notes and make sure that you are seeing the link stories that we have talked about. You can follow along on the tech field Day plus YouTube channel, which just changed the name. Uh, the, the handle is the same so far, but if that does change, we'll be sure to let you know.

And of course, look for your favorite podcast feed. Um, if you are already subscribed, then there won't be any changes. You'll just start getting the new podcast.

But in the future, if you wanna find us, look for the Tech Field Day rundown and you won't miss it. And if you do subscribe to us there, leave us a rating I review because we, we love to hear what you have to say. We love to hear your feedback.

We love hearing that this is your favorite way to get the news because Steven and I put a lot of effort into, uh, putting the right amount of snark on the news and not going full snark because nobody should ever go full snark, snark, snark. Steven and Al will be back next week while I'm enjoying the, uh, the, the blustery weather that is San Francisco pretty much every time of the year. Uh, until then, uh, make sure that you go find that local Girl Scout and buy all the cookies that you can because let's be fair, you need to put those in the freezer for a rainy day.

And we will be back next week with more great rundown action. Until then, take care, stay safe, and we will see you. Hey Tom, fun fact.

Did you know that little Brownie Bakeries is owned by the people who make Nutella? Really? Yeah.

I did not know that.