Sunday, September 20, 2026
Chip stocks fell before Monday's open after the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI said the industry should slow the rate at which AI models improve. Nvidia was down 3 percent in premarket trading, Marvell and Arm 6 percent, and ASML 9.5 percent. The labs are mostly private. The public way to express a view on slower AI is to sell the companies that supply it.
Positron raised $875m on Thursday at a $5bn valuation, having been worth about $1.06bn in February. Its chips are built around memory capacity and bandwidth rather than raw compute, using commodity LPDDR5X rather than the high-bandwidth memory that constrains everybody else. That choice is the entire thesis.
Twelve disclosed AI chip funding rounds raised $5.37bn between late January and mid-August. Eight of them, and about 67 percent of the capital, went to companies building for inference rather than training. Venture money is a forecast, and this one is about where the permanent cost of AI is going to sit.
The constraint on the AI buildout has been described as electricity for two years. The nearer one is a procurement queue for hardware whose price and availability are now set by trade policy rather than by fabrication.
One policy pays you to break ground before the year ends. The other may raise the price of the equipment you would break ground with, and has not yet said by how much or on what. Waiting is the only move that answers both.