Chinese Gold Medal, Supply Crunches, & Job Risks

TLDR;

Welcome back! This week, we have lots to talk about. From learning how an AI that gets a gold medal in maths is built, to what are possibly two of the most important trades in 2026, memory and debt (currency debasement is most likely a better description), this post will put you up to date of what’s going on in technology, markets, and product, the latter with a new product that might send UI designers to a better life.

Enjoy!

FOUNDRY BUSINESS

Intel to become Apple’s low-end M chip manufacturer

Unbeknownst to many, NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, or Qualcomm don’t manufacture the chips they design.

Instead, they send the ‘tape out’ to TSMC, a Taiwanese mega corp in charge of manufacturing more than 90% of the entire world’s advanced chips (7 nanometers and below)… precisely the types of chips that NVIDIA’s GPUs, AMD’s CPUs/GPUs, Apple’s iPhone, or Qualcomm’s chips need to work.

As you may realize, given that a company has most of its factories on the west coast of an island 160 km (~100 miles) from Mainland China, while the People’s Republic of China argues that the island is theirs, this is probably not the best national security situation.

Nevertheless, in the event of a non-peaceful invasion, this would cause massive destruction of US equity markets, as most of its largest companies would lose the capacity to deliver products. Thus, for the longest time, the US Government has sought the emergence of a US national champion capable of manufacturing these chips domestically.

However, this has been mostly a failure, considering we are talking about what’s possibly the most complex and advanced manufacturing process in the world, executed in factories (known as ‘fabs’) which each cost $20 billion on average to build.

To put it into perspective, the EUV machine that prints circuits onto silicon wafers, built by Dutch company ASML, costs around $400 million… a piece. And that’s just one part of the entire fab!

Seeing its chip design business destroyed by its rivals, Intel has decided to position itself as a foundry national champion, betting strongly on the fab business (the business of manufacturing chips for others).

And now, it seems it’s well-positioned to win the contract to manufacture Apple’s low-end M chips (used in MacBook Airs and iPads) as soon as 2027, making it the first big company that could see its full-blown dependency on TSMC being alleviated by having a decent portion of its chips built at home.

NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips can be produced at TSMC’s Arizona Fab, as they use a 4nm process node. Not sure about lower process nodes, though.

This is, of course, a massive—yet speculative—victory for Intel, which rose 10% on the news.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

In this newsletter, we have been discussing the great stock opportunity Intel could be, even before both the US Government and NVIDIA invested heavily in the company. The reason was simple: the US desperately needs a foundry national champion.

If Intel delivers on its foundry roadmap (and…

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