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Flash

first_img Tesla Cybercab launched in the United States, with no steering wheel and pedals costing 0.84 yuan per kilometer

On September 3 local time, Tesla held a Cybercab launch event in Austin, Texas, USA. This vehicle is a mass-produced model designed for autonomous driving scenarios, eliminating the steering wheel, pedals, and traditional rearview mirrors, and adopting a two-seat layout, with driving entirely controlled by Tesla's autonomous driving software. The Cybercab was unveiled as a concept car at the "We, Robot" event in October 2024, with the first mass-produced vehicle rolling off the line at the Texas Gigafactory in February this year, and mass production starting in April, taking about 18 months from concept to mass production.The vehicle relies on 8 high-definition cameras to perceive the environment and makes driving decisions through an end-to-end neural network, without relying on lidar and high-precision maps. According to Tesla's data, as of September 2026, the global fleet's cumulative assisted driving mileage has exceeded 22.5 billion kilometers. In terms of energy efficiency, it is expected to travel 9.8 kilometers per kilowatt-hour, with an energy consumption of about 10.2 kilowatt-hours per 100 kilometers. The curb weight is 1412 kilograms, equipped with a 47.6 kilowatt-hour battery pack and a 163-kilowatt motor, with a laboratory range of 673 kilometers. After scaling up ride-hailing operations, the cost per mile can be reduced to $0.2, equivalent to about 0.84 yuan per kilometer.The Cybercab will be showcased in multiple cities such as Beijing and Shanghai starting in mid-September. This exhibition does not involve the sale of the vehicle in China, nor does it represent that Tesla will conduct autonomous ride-hailing commercial operations domestically.

first_img Google claims that the cost of AI server memory has exceeded 75%, promoting a dual-track strategy for software and hardware

The SEMICON Taiwan 2026 Memory Summit took place on the 1st, where Nikhil Cherian, Senior Director of Supply Chain Infrastructure at Google Cloud under Alphabet, pointed out that with the popularity of multimodal and mixed expert architectures, AI computation has shifted from being power-limited to memory-limited, with high-performance memory accounting for over 75% of the cost of AI server hardware bill of materials. In the face of capacity, bandwidth, and power consumption bottlenecks, Google is breaking through the AI memory bottleneck through a dual-track strategy of hardware offloading for inference and training, and lossless quantization software algorithms.Google adopts an offloading strategy in hardware architecture, launching TPU 8i for low-latency inference and TPU 8t specialized for large-scale training. The TPU 8i is equipped with 288 GB of high-bandwidth memory, with SRAM capacity on the chip increased threefold to 384 MiB, placing dynamic conversation states and key-value caches on the chip itself to achieve zero chip-off latency. The TPU 8t forms a super-large computing cluster with 9600 chips, achieving a shared pool of HBM at a scale of 2 PB, eliminating chip-off data transfer bottlenecks, along with TPU Direct Storage technology.Google has developed the training-free TurboQuant lossless quantization algorithm, compressing the key-value cache of large models from 32 bits to 3 bits, reducing memory usage by six times without loss of accuracy, resulting in an eightfold acceleration in attention computation, and integrating old-generation DRAM technology to extend the lifecycle of components.

first_img SemiAnalysis: HBF non-HBM alternative, cost and heat dissipation still have uncertainties

P Equity Research and SemiAnalysis researcher Nick Doyle and others discussed high bandwidth flash (HBF) in X Space. Nick stated that it is still too early to determine how much the cost premium of HBF relative to HBM can shrink; existing data mostly comes from vendor claims, such as Sandisk stating that the cost per bit is about one-eighth that of HBM. Yields, testing, and other factors will improve with scale, but structural costs such as TSV, stacking, and pSLC mode will always exist, and durability is a key unknown; if wear exceeds expectations, costs will rise.The application scenarios for HBF are narrow, targeting only AI inference, especially low batch and long context MoE models, and it is not a substitute for HBM. The actual bandwidth target is about 1.6 TB/s, which is at the HBM3E level, suitable for sequential reads to load model weights, more aligned with the capacity needs of a small number of GPUs in local or private enterprises, rather than ultra-large-scale bandwidth scenarios. Heat dissipation reliability has not yet been resolved; flash memory will degrade faster at high temperatures next to GPUs, and mitigation measures such as UCIe separation and daily refresh have yet to be validated.In terms of manufacturing, Sandisk/Kioxia has experience with 3D NAND, and SK Hynix complements HBM-style stacking capabilities, but mass production is still to be confirmed. Overall, storage is shifting towards a specialized layered market, with NAND shortages expected to continue until 2028, and HBF may further impact supply and demand.

first_img Tomasz Tunguz: AI infrastructure exhibits a long tail effect, with bottlenecks gradually transmitting and driving up costs

Venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz pointed out that the narrative of AI infrastructure resembles a slow relay race, with bottlenecks sequentially transmitting from GPUs to memory, CPUs, and storage, each link freezing the supply chain of the next for years and locking in higher baseline costs. At the beginning of 2023, the GPU shock caused H100 rental prices to exceed $9 per hour, and server shipments fell by 22%; subsequently, manufacturers shifted capacity to HBM, leading to an 80% quarterly increase in enterprise SSD prices and over a 60% rise in DRAM.By the end of 2025, the workload of intelligent agents will push the CPU to GPU ratio to about 1:1, with the average price of server CPUs rising by 27% year-on-year; in 2026, nearline HDD annual capacity will be sold out. The construction cost of data centers has risen to about $20 billion per gigawatt, with orders for long-cycle equipment such as transformers and turbines scheduled as far out as 2029 to 2031.Tunguz referred to this as the long whip effect in the hardware sector: years of manufacturing delays amplify downstream demand shocks upstream, and when pressure is relieved at a certain bottleneck, it will be delayed in transmitting to the next link, with transformers scheduled for delivery in 2027 to 2028, NAND wafer fabs, and turbine production lines potentially facing the risk of overcapacity.

first_img HPC Report: Perpetual contracts are a supplement to futures contracts rather than a replacement, achieving risk transfer at a lower cost

The latest research report from the Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC) states that perpetual contracts expand hedging options and improve price discovery, with no evidence found of statistically significant harm to the benchmark futures market. The report argues that perpetual contracts are complementary to traditional futures with expiration dates, rather than zero-sum substitutes.The study utilizes the natural experiment of traditional markets being closed on weekends while perpetual markets continue trading, comparing 205 weekends of Bitcoin trading and 19 weekends of on-chain crude oil perpetual (xyz:CL) samples. The report states that expiring futures require calendar-based forced rollovers, with the cost of rolling a $10 million exposure on the Monday of April 2026 being about $950,000, while on Friday it is about $110,000; perpetual positions do not have this forced cost. The median transaction price for on-chain crude oil perpetual during non-trading hours is about $1,300, approximately one percent of the benchmark WTI median transaction price.HPC also provides an example where the crude oil weekend repricing on the week of March 6, 2026, was 15.8%, with the benchmark market completely closed; if hedged through on-chain crude oil perpetual, a $10 million position loss could be reduced from about $1.58 million to approximately $62,000 (after accounting for all costs).

first_img Italian Central Bank Study: Stablecoin Remittances Have No Systemic Cost Advantage, On-chain Components Only Account for a Small Portion

In a research report released by the Bank of Italy in July 2026, a "mystery shopper" empirical investigation was conducted for the first time, tracking 200 USDC transfers across ten corridors between Italy and Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, the UAE, and Japan. The results showed that the total cost of stablecoin remittances fluctuated greatly, with a minimum of only 0.3% and a maximum close to 9%. On-chain transfers accounted for an average of only 0.4%, with the bulk of costs concentrated in fiat withdrawal and deposit stages—traditional intermediary fees such as exchange buy-sell spreads, credit card fees, and withdrawal fees were the decisive factors. Compared to traditional channels like Wise, stablecoins have a cost advantage in some corridors like Brazil to Italy, but the costs are higher in corridors like UAE to Italy, showing a high degree of "corridor specificity."In terms of speed, blockchain transfers themselves take only a few minutes, but end-to-end efficiency entirely depends on the quality of the traditional payment infrastructure in the destination country. Countries with instant payment systems, such as Brazil (PIX), Italy (TIPS), and Argentina (Transferencias 3.0), can keep the entire process under 20 minutes; whereas countries like South Africa, which rely on traditional bank transfers, see the arrival time extended to 1 to 2 business days. The report pointed out that the efficiency of stablecoin remittances is jointly determined by their own infrastructure and the surrounding traditional payment infrastructure, with both being complementary rather than substitutive. The report also analyzed the impact of global regulatory fragmentation: the EU's MiCA and the US's GENIUS Act represent mature compliance frameworks; Japan's strict "safety first" access, while lowering nominal costs, complicates processes leading users to offshore platforms; countries like India and Turkey are in a transitional regulatory phase; while countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with prohibitive measures, have failed to suppress demand, instead pushing transactions into gray channels.
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