Reminder: I’ll be in New York next week until 14 September.
Memory / Storage: Price of Fable 5.1 cache reads dropped 75% (Ant)
Anthropic estimates ~25% lower costs for typical workloads and up to ~45% for highly agentic, context-heavy work.
Two more launches this week according to this account:
eSSD: Top five eSSD revenues double q/q (Trendforce)
TrendForce expects enterprise SSD demand to remain elevated in 3Q26 thanks to the growing adoption of generative AI agent services, steady data center infrastructure deployments by CSPs, and large-scale shipments of NVIDIA GB-series AI server racks. However, the firm continues to have concerns about “rising output from Chinese suppliers and the emergence of China’s domestic cloud market”.
Hynix / Kioxia: SK Chairman floats JV (SED)
SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won said he is considering building a new memory chip plant in Japan, and described joint production with Kioxia, the Japanese NAND flash maker in which SK hynix (000660) holds a stake, as “one option.” He also suggested the group could lay out a concrete investment plan within this year.
Chey made the remarks in an interview with Japan’s Asahi Shimbun on the 2nd. Kioxia is a company with many strengths, he said, adding that the two sides could cooperate on joint production, research and development, and supply chain sharing. At the same time, he said SK would end its investment in Kioxia if no further partnership could be built.
OAI: Astra uses a new reasoning approach called “recurrent depth.” (Information)
OAI’s chief scientist appears to corroborate the story, saying chain of thought monitoring is “fragile and unfortunately trending in a negative direction, for reasons not contingent on architecture changes”. This pushes back on the safety concerns raised in the Information report but not the architecture change.
Discussion on X about whether looped transformer architectures is bearish for HBM: