Author: Blaze Woodard
Blaze Woodard, an editor at cubox-i.com, is presently working as an intern at a Silicon Valley technology company while majoring in politics at the University of Kansas. Blaze, who identifies as both a policy thinker and a self-described tech geek, offers a viewpoint on hardware and computing coverage that few editors in this field can match: the capacity to relate the workings of a circuit board to the larger political, regulatory, and social forces influencing the technology sector. Even though her academic path led her to political science, her early fascination with technology persisted. She writes about computing, AI, and hardware with the zeal of someone who truly loves the subject, not as someone assigned to cover it. Blaze plays soccer and spends her free time with friends and living her life, which is exactly what a college student should do outside of the office and newsroom.
Someone made a choice somewhere in the offices of the Utah Department of Commerce that would subtly disturb the American medical establishment. They entered into an agreement with Doctronic, an AI startup, and introduced a chatbot that could renew prescriptions for almost 200 medications without informing the medical community. The program was operational and being used by Utahns by the time the Utah Medical Licensing Board learned about it. This particular detail—the board only becoming aware of the program after patients started using it—is at the heart of a disagreement that has become much more heated since April. Eleven of…
Holding a computer in your palm and knowing that it could operate nonstop for years in a northern Canadian factory or on a cargo ship sailing across the South Atlantic without complaining is a subtly amazing experience. That is no longer a hypothetical. That’s precisely what a new generation of ARM-based industrial mini computers are doing, and their engineering is more sophisticated than their diminutive size would imply. Industrial-grade hardware meant bulk for the majority of computing history. Tower workstations, server racks, and bulky enclosures fastened to walls. It was assumed that mass was necessary for reliability. The ARM processor…
One vision of Tesla’s future was quite different from the current direction the company is taking. In that version, Tesla’s vehicles learned how to drive themselves without ever relying on Nvidia, AMD, or Samsung thanks to rows of specially designed D-class chips humming inside a proprietary supercomputer that processed millions of hours of road footage. Dojo was that. For six years, it was one of the most closely watched hardware bets in the entire technology industry, and then, in August 2025, Elon Musk posted a few sentences on X and it was over. The shutdown was quiet. Musk referred to…
A machine is performing calculations that most traditional computers wouldn’t dare attempt somewhere in a cold, climate-controlled facility where temperature is measured in fractions of a degree above absolute zero. It hums. It operates. Additionally, it becomes slightly more capable every year. The majority of people have never considered what occurs when it becomes sufficiently capable. However, those who have are beginning to sound less like theorists and more like real-time observers of a deadline approaching. Since the 1990s, Q-Day—the fictitious but increasingly likely day when a quantum computer acquires sufficient power to crack the encryption algorithms safeguarding almost all…
You can put your fist around a computer because of its almost philosophical qualities. It’s more of a subtle provocation than a symbolic one. The CuBox-M from SolidRun didn’t make a big impression when it first appeared in developer circles a few years ago. It was only slightly heavier than a deck of cards and measured precisely two inches on each side. It appeared just now. By doing this, it opened up a competition that the Raspberry Pi had been dominating for almost fifteen years. Honestly, the Raspberry Pi earned its place. Nothing else in its class was available at…
Rows of GPU clusters humming at full load and consuming electricity at a rate that would shame a small city can be found inside any hyperscale data center currently under construction, such as those rising outside of Phoenix or in the Virginia suburbs. The machines are amazing. What no one shows you is what will happen in eighteen months when those same machines are removed and replaced by the subsequent generation. Press releases usually don’t include that portion of the story. There is a huge and genuine boom in AI hardware. In 2023 alone, NVIDIA reported a 281 percent year-over-year…
When you drive down the right highway in rural Texas or northern Virginia, you’ll notice something difficult to ignore: enormous, windowless buildings stretching across cleared land, humming with the low industrial drone of cooling fans operating nonstop. There are no visible employees, no signs, and no clear reason. These data centers, which are subtly emerging as the decade’s defining infrastructure, are so hungry that the American electrical grid was never built to support them. Even though the public is still not fully aware of the numbers, they are startling. Between 2023 and 2028, AI data centers alone could be responsible…
Suitcases traveling through airports in Southeast Asia, front companies in Bangkok receiving server shipments, and somewhere downstream, Alibaba data centers silently humming with chips they were never supposed to have all have an almost cinematic quality. Depending on your point of view, the U.S. government’s attempt to impede China’s AI development through export restrictions has either produced a manageable deterrent or an incredibly profitable black market. Most likely both. Many in the semiconductor industry were startled when federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment in March. Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, a co-founder of Supermicro, and two other people were accused of plotting to…
The fact that the most potent supercomputer ever constructed—a device spanning 680 square meters and consuming 22.7 megawatts of electricity—performs about the same number of operations per second as the organ inside your skull, using about the same energy as a tiny refrigerator bulb, is somewhat unsettling. Some of the world’s most ambitious and costly engineering projects have been motivated by that gap—or rather, the obstinate lack of one. For many years, computing operated under the simple premise that performance would increase if transistors were made smaller and more numerous. For the most part, it worked. Physics then began to…
Every hardware company has a point in its development when silicon begins to get in the way. It seems that Nvidia has reached one of those points, not because its GPUs are slowing down but rather because the cables that connect them are. Individual data centers are reaching the limits of power and capacity within a single facility as the demand for AI soars. Businesses are dispersing their GPU clusters throughout buildings, campuses, and sometimes entire regions. Furthermore, the decades-old Ethernet protocol that connects the internet wasn’t designed to withstand that kind of punishment. When the off-the-shelf world fails, Nvidia…