Technology & AI

Semiconductors, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, what the technology does and who it affects.

Cyber insurance's war exclusion was drafted for navies and now decides who pays for a network attack

The clause that lets an insurer refuse a cyber claim because the attack was an act of war was written for ships, fleets and sovereigns. NotPetya forced courts to read it against a piece of malware, and the answer was that the wording did not fit. Insurers rewrote it. The new wording depends on attribution by a government, which is a political judgment rather than a legal finding, and that is the part nobody has resolved.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 24 October 2026 · 19 min read

Technology & AI

Export controls are a licensing system pretending to be a wall

The United States controls the export of advanced chips, chipmaking equipment and the software used to design them through a licensing regime that reaches foreign companies, foreign factories and foreign-made products. The regime is powerful, it is slow, and it depends on allies who have their own economies to protect. Five years of controls have changed the geography of the semiconductor industry without stopping the technology from spreading.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 24 October 2026 · 47 min read

Technology & AI

The interconnection queue is an option book, and the option is time

Two thousand and sixty one gigawatts sit in American interconnection queues, and roughly thirteen percent of the capacity that has ever asked for a connection has reached one. The queue is not a pipeline of projects waiting to be built. It is a portfolio of options on a place in line, priced in study deposits and years, and at the same auction the load side of the same market went from a forecast to a contract.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 19 October 2026 · 20 min read

Technology & AI

The infrastructure under the infrastructure: cables, repair ships and the new target list

Submarine cables carry about 99 percent of intercontinental internet traffic, and the world's capacity to repair them rests on nineteen to twenty-five ships contracted for maintenance work. The industry records roughly 178 repairs a year against a long run average of 190, which is not an emergency. What makes the arithmetic uncomfortable is where the money goes: private companies are planning more than 16 billion dollars of new cable systems while the shared fleet that fixes a break is thin, ageing in role and commercially funded.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 10 October 2026 · 19 min read

Technology & AI

The $733 billion year: measuring the AI infrastructure boom against its own history

The four largest hyperscalers plan $720 to 745 billion of capital expenditure in 2026, more than double 2025, and, as a mechanical comparison, close to twice the peak-year intensity of the entire 1990s telecom boom relative to the US economy. This report assembles the spending record from company filings, computes what the boom costs relative to the companies' own revenues, follows the money into hardware, buildings and electricity, and examines how it is financed, how much still comes from operations, how much is now borrowed or leased, and what the record says about how such build-outs resolve.

By Muhammad Mehdi · 19 September 2026 · 51 min read