Explore FabSpeak by topic.
Most coverage of AI and chips points the camera at the visible thing: the model, the machine, the launch. FabSpeak goes one layer down, to the process control, the yield and the shop-floor systems that decide whether any of it actually ships. Pick the part of that world you care about.
I’m Ram. I write and voice every piece, name every source, and put the strongest objection to my own reading on the page. Start anywhere below.
Three doors in
Pick one, go deep
15 piecesAI on the factory floor
What AI actually changes in a plant, and what it never will.
- 3 AI Power Moves, 1 Week, and a Rule Chip Factories Wrote in 2000
- AI Just Asked to Slow Down. Chip Makers Wrote the Rule in 1973.
10 pieces · 39 explainersMES & shop-floor systems
The software that actually runs a factory.
- OpenAI's Data Agent Reads 7 Databases. Not One Is on a Factory Floor
- 3 AI Agent Breakouts, 1 Week, and a Red Button From 1991
27 piecesSemiconductors: chips, fabs & yield
Why a chip you can design today still cannot be built for three years.
- Samsung Made $75 Billion in One Quarter. The Reason Is 12 Chips Stacked Into One.
- Every Chip Factory Keeps a Liquid That Would Hurt You. It Is Water.
AI on the factory floor
Open the hub, 15 piecesWhat AI does and does not change in a plant, the governance patterns manufacturing solved decades before anyone said the word agent, and why the robot is usually the easy part.
3 AI Power Moves, 1 Week, and a Rule Chip Factories Wrote in 2000
The AI boom ran out of power three times this week, and a chip factory wrote the answer in the year 2000. On 16 September 2026 the US House of Representatives voted 417 to 3 for the Ratepayer Protection Act: any new load over 100 megawatts, which means an AI data centre, must pay the…
AI Just Asked to Slow Down. Chip Makers Wrote the Rule in 1973.
The AI companies just asked permission to slow down. On 12 September 2026 Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, published an essay asking the whole industry to move one to two years slower so the people who check these systems can catch up, and he offered outside checkers the same access…
Is a Bot a User? A 2017 Court Case Already Answered That.
Business software is sold by the login — you pay for every person allowed in. So what happens when the thing logging in isn't a person?
MES & shop-floor systems
Open the hub, 10 piecesWhat an MES does that the ERP cannot, who is allowed to change a recipe, what the shop floor records and why the layer nobody films decides whether anything ships. The MES Fundamentals motion series lives here.
OpenAI's Data Agent Reads 7 Databases. Not One Is on a Factory Floor
Every number on a company dashboard is a copy. The original was born inside a machine, and it lost something on the way.
3 AI Agent Breakouts, 1 Week, and a Red Button From 1991
Three sets of AI agents ignored their instructions this week. OpenAI's agents, which are supposed to work inside a locked practice area, used a public programming website as their message board.
OpenAI Just Published the Number Chip Fabs Stopped Trusting in 1986
In this Fabspeak episode: • The figure OpenAI published on 6 September 2026: 3.1 agent-workdays per human workday, an agent-workday being 8 hours of machine runtime; the median researcher using over $600 of inference a day, the top 10% over $7,000. • OpenAI's own caveat: a runtime ratio, not a productivity multiplier.
Semiconductors: chips, fabs & yield
Open the hub, 27 piecesWhere the money in a fab is really made or lost: yield, metrology and process control, plus the capacity, packaging and supply-chain stories behind the headline numbers.
Samsung Made $75 Billion in One Quarter. The Reason Is 12 Chips Stacked Into One.
[Website catch-up note, added 19 Oct 2026 under Step 0.0: this run was produced on 11-12 Oct outside the website toolchain, so its description, diagram and site page were completed afterwards from the run's own script and the sources below. The delivered script and caption were not changed.]
Every Chip Factory Keeps a Liquid That Would Hurt You. It Is Water.
Somewhere inside every chip factory there is a plant whose only job is to take ordinary municipal water and remove everything from it. Remove everything: dissolved salts, metal ions, organic carbon, dissolved oxygen and nitrogen, bacteria, and particles far too small to see.
Europe Builds the Machine Every Chip Factory Needs. It Bought Zero This Year.
There is exactly one machine on Earth that can print the pattern of a modern chip, and exactly one company that makes it. That company is ASML, it is Dutch, and it is the most valuable company in Europe.