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Information Technology · week of 10 Aug – 16 Aug

Information Technology: 10 Aug – 16 Aug

Pressure held steady across the week (66 to 68) — a flat week is a real result, not a missing one.

68

pressure at the week’s end, 0–100

+2

move across the week

7

editions published

127

sources read behind them

The arc · 7 days with a board

The band each day fell in.

No written analysis for this week

Everything on this page is measured from the week’s own boards and editions. The written read is added when the engine runs its report pass; a week without one still has its record.

What we said to watch

10 Aug Whether the money keeps pouring into ever-bigger build-outs, or the reality checks - power limits, cloud failures, and doubts about AI's actual payoff - start to slow the pace.

The beat ended the week Getting dearer.

11 Aug Whether the new Agent Plugins standard - which packages what AI agents can do but hands safety back to each company - holds up as agents from rival vendors, already tied to a wave of breaches, run into each other more often.

The beat ended the week Getting dearer.

12 Aug Whether AMD's bet on etching models into silicon ships and holds up at scale next year - it would tip the whole industry from chasing bigger models to chasing faster answers.

The beat ended the week Getting dearer.

13 Aug Whether the shrunk-down, laptop-sized models actually get used on real devices, or the giant models keep pulling the demand - and the spending - back toward the data center.

The beat ended the week Getting dearer.

14 Aug Whether a freely downloadable frontier model gets pulled into serious misuse - the first real case would test whether 'open' can ever be undone, and whether regulators move to force the door shut.

The beat ended the week Getting dearer.

15 Aug Whether new memory supply lands before the shortage bites harder - SK hynix's Dalian expansion is a 2027 event, and Intel's hinted return to memory has no date at all.

The beat ended the week Getting dearer.

16 Aug Whether Google's January price doubling actually lands. If these introductory rates keep getting quietly extended, cheap AI is being propped up by investor money rather than by the cost of running the machines genuinely coming down.

The beat ended the week Getting dearer.

The honest half. These are the markers the boards named at the time — kept on the record whether or not they turned out to matter.

The board on Monday, and the board at the end

Opened

10 Aug

AI compute build-out 90
Power and grid limits 80
Failure at the top layer 68
Over-reach risk 60
Falling model costs 34

Ended

16 Aug

Cost of running AI 66
Money pouring in 84
Profits leaning on each other 70
Memory and chips 79
Relying on someone else's servers 74
Free models you can run yourself 36

Both boards exactly as they were written at the time — not a diff. The engine names the forces fresh every morning, so "The cheap-yen gap" on Monday and "Money leaving the dollar" on Friday may well be the same pressure under different words. Comparing the labels would measure the labels; comparing the two boards yourself is the honest version.

The week’s editions · 7

Tech 16 Aug · 25 SRC

AI's cheapest model gets four times dearer today, and Google halves its own

Tech 15 Aug · 16 SRC

A memory chipmaker just passed Tencent as China's most valuable company

Tech 14 Aug · 18 SRC

Meta gives away its most powerful AI model - and the industry splits over open weights

Tech 13 Aug · 22 SRC

Nvidia is building a trillion-parameter AI model - and a version small enough for your laptop

Tech 12 Aug · 16 SRC

The AI industry is spending billions to kill the slowest step in an answer

Tech 11 Aug · 17 SRC

The AI industry agreed on one plug for its agents - and left the hard part to itself

Tech 10 Aug · 13 SRC

Musk's Terafab bets up to $119 billion on doing the entire chip supply chain in one building

The same week, another beat

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