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.
An hour south of Seoul, in Pyeongtaek, there is a fabrication plant where wafers are produced at a speed that was previously calibrated for gaming PCs and smartphones. That calibration has changed recently. The majority of what is currently produced there is going somewhere else entirely, such as a data center in Northern Virginia, perhaps Oregon, or an under-construction campus in Abu Dhabi that no one outside the industry has yet heard of. The cost has changed along with it. About 30% of all hyperscaler capital expenditures in 2026 will go toward memory, according to SemiAnalysis. Compared to 2023, when…
For many years, the majority of people connected Dell with the beige tower beneath a professor’s desk or the laptop a cousin purchased because it was on sale at Costco. It’s not precisely the brand that people associate with the “AI revolution.” This perception is disintegrating more quickly than even some seasoned analysts anticipated. Experienced tech observers were clearly recalibrating after Dell released numbers late last week. Revenue reached almost $44 billion, an 88% increase from the previous year. Orders for AI servers alone totaled $24.4 billion in a single quarter, and the backlog of orders that have been scheduled…
A silent change is taking place somewhere between Santa Clara and the dusty outskirts of Phoenix, and most Americans won’t be aware of it until their electricity bills alert them. This fall, Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform—named for the astronomer who discovered dark matter—will go into full production. The racks themselves, which weigh almost two tons apiece and are assembled from about 1.3 million parts, will begin to arrive at data centers around the nation. It’s the kind of moment that seems important in a way that can only be verified in retrospect. The way the industry has been discussing Vera…
There’s not much to the quiet hum emanating from Stanford’s research buildings. Mostly cooling fans. The sound of someone occasionally unplugging a cable. However, behind those walls, racks of NVIDIA GPUs are powering nearly every recent advancement in artificial intelligence, and the researchers in charge of them are subtly taking control of what gets tested next. This wasn’t always the case. Most computer science departments regarded neural networks as a bit of a dead end in 2008. Gently or harshly, graduate students were told to look elsewhere. Then, in 2012, a group at the University of Toronto used Fei-Fei Li’s…
At an AI server launch in New Delhi on a muggy afternoon in late March, Sushil Pal, a mid-level bureaucrat, made a statement that most people in the room had likely been considering for months. AI servers were not covered by India’s flagship hardware subsidy, which is being hailed as the foundation of its AI aspirations. Laptops were covered. tablets. all-in-one computers. The hardware that was important in 2019. Not the type that uses a frontier model in 2026. MeitY had discreetly announced a policy review of the ₹17,000 crore PLI 2.0 scheme by the following morning. No press conference…
A server at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center in Germany is using only light to perform AI inference somewhere inside a beige rack. There are no flickering transistors. There are no electrons racing through copper. The speed at which photons, shaped and guided through a chip, perform math is far faster than that of conventional silicon. The device, manufactured by the German startup Q.ANT, was one of the first commercial photonic processors installed in a functional data center last year. A brief moment, but the kind that usually counts in retrospect. For many years, photonic computing was in the disappointing category…
Most tech writers completely ignored a detail buried in SolidRun’s press release for the CuBox-M. The company discreetly mentioned an optional Power over Ethernet upgrade amid discussions about ARM cores, neural processing units, and LPDDR4 memory. Just one line. Not much fanfare. However, after considering that for a while, it’s difficult to avoid feeling as though that one feature alters the entire discussion about the true nature of this tiny cube. The ability to receive both data and electrical power through a single Ethernet cable is known as power over Ethernet, or PoE for those who haven’t wired a remote…
After spending four years and tens of thousands of dollars on a computer science degree, there’s a certain kind of frustration when you sit across from a hiring manager who keeps looking at your resume’s blank certifications column. It occurs more frequently than people acknowledge. Additionally, it is continuously occurring in AI hiring in 2026. The truth is that cloud-specific AI certifications, such as those associated with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, are quietly and remarkably improving resumes, according to what job platforms and staffing experts are actually seeing in posting data. Roles requiring these credentials are paying 15…
When someone learns something difficult on their own, they exhibit a certain level of confidence. Perhaps less polished, but in some ways more earned, it’s more subdued than the assurance of formal training. There’s a good chance the person in charge of the AI pipeline at any mid-sized tech company today didn’t learn it in a lecture hall. They learned it on a laptop at midnight, most likely with three open browser tabs and a refreshing cup of coffee close by. Although they don’t fully convey the texture of what’s happening, the numbers support this. 79% of businesses are currently…
At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, there is a structure that was intended to last for fifty years. 48,000 square feet of computer space, a domed roof, and flying buttresses. It was known as the Terascale Simulation Facility, and those who have stood inside claim that it was constructed to resemble a cathedral. It was already having trouble keeping up less than ten years after it opened. I’ve always found that particular detail to be the most accurate metaphor for the current state of supercomputing. Everything designed to house them is outgrown by the machines. The Department of Energy is concurrently…