I toured @GrimmwayFarms' Malaga processing facility for a firsthand look at how one of America's leading producers of carrots, potatoes, and organic vegetables is using technology to deliver fresh, healthy, and safe produce to American families. At @USDOL, we're ensuring American workers have the skills and training needed to keep pace with advances in agricultural technology — supporting job creators like Grimmway and strengthening American agriculture. 📍 Arvin, California

Weekly|Singapore Gathering, Malaga ECOC Happy Hour, AI Labs Keep Training, Optics Supply Tightens, AIDC Power, CRM Dreamforce, PLTR Sovereign AI, BE First, thank you to everyone who joined our gathering in Singapore this week. Registration and attendance were well beyond our expectations, and the atmosphere was amazing. Members of both our analyst and developer teams were present and had great conversations with investors and industry experts. Next, our analyst Fabian will attend ECOC in Malaga, Spain on Sep 22-23 and will host a happy hour there. Please RSVP if you are interested. Coming back to the market, the AI hardware selloff after Amodei’s call for restraint looked overdone to us, and the subsequent rebound suggests investors are reconsidering what a slowdown would actually mean. We spoke with people at three frontier labs: internal training and compute expansion are continuing, while additional safety checks are more likely to lengthen evaluation and public-release timelines. Safety risks deserve attention, but our base case remains limited disruption to near-term infrastructure demand. The enterprise side helps explain that view. In our 41-company Tokenomics panel, less than 5% of AI spending goes to the most advanced frontier models. Existing deployments can keep expanding as models become cheaper, more reliable, and easier to integrate. Greater scrutiny also creates work for security platforms and identity providers: enterprises need to monitor agents in production, govern what they can access, and retain logs they can trust. Drug discovery gives us another reason to be constructive on AI demand beyond the current enterprise rollout. The Morgan Stanley Healthcare Conference commentary points to early spending across the workflow: TMO is already seeing AI-driven high-throughput experiments lift reagent consumption, CRL expects more shots on goal to support preclinical demand, and DHR is seeing early lab-automation adoption. SDGR says pharma AI budgets are increasingly incremental, with BMS an early proof point. Morgan Stanley’s healthcare specialist Dan Bone also highlighted Novo Nordisk’s use of Claude Science for drug-discovery challenges, GenScript’s completion of Lilly’s TuneLab validation loop for wet-lab services, and $290mn of financing for Anew Labs, which spun out of ByteDance’s internal drug-discovery team in June. The rally in names such as TWST shows investors are taking notice. For us, the demand case is that more AI-generated candidates can support repeated rounds of modeling, screening and physical validation, expanding compute use alongside laboratory spending. It is early to size that compute opportunity, but the evidence of incremental budgets and reagent consumption makes drug discovery a credible additional source of AI demand. Physical delivery remains the harder constraint across the infrastructure names we cover. CIOE orders and production schedules extend into 2027, but 3nm DSPs, lasers, and PCBs determine which optics vendors can ship. On power, our follow-up channel work supports 2.4–3.0MW of turbine nameplate per MW of IT for the off-grid designs we examined; that ratio doesn’t apply to the entire turbine market. Oracle’s results reinforce the value of earlier energization for Bloom, with permitting, manufacturing, and service capacity still the key checks. This Week’s Reports AI labs keep training despite the pacing debate. Our interviews point to longer evaluation and release timelines with limited near-term disruption to training investment or enterprise inference demand. Optics: orders extend into 2027, and access to supply determines who delivers. Our conference and CIOE notes track higher laser pricing, tight 3nm DSP capacity and the NPO/CPO ramp, with leading vendors best placed to turn strong demand into shipments. AIDC: nameplate capacity needs to be translated into dependable IT power. We answer six investor questions with new channel checks and a rebuilt off-grid sizing framework, separating redundancy, site derating and project readiness from headline turbine supply. Cybersecurity: AI safety concerns strengthen the case for platform and identity security. Our note maps the gaps exposed by agent incidents to runtime monitoring, non-human identity governance, isolation, vulnerability management and tamper-resistant logs. Premium Report Snapshot A portion of our research is reserved for Premium subscribers and is not distributed via Substack. Below is a snapshot of what Premium subscribers received this week beyond the Substack feed. Research | CRM: Dreamforce Clarifies Claudeforce Monetization as Salesforce Cedes the UI Deep | PLTR: Sovereign AI Expands the Opportunity; Partner Delivery Sets the Long-Term Ceiling Research & Roadshow | BE: Oracle Reinforces the Time-to-Power Thesis; Delivery Remains the Test Weekly Expert Interviews Summary A snapshot of the expert interviews we conducted during the past week is below; full transcripts and takeaways are available on the FUNDA platform. Meta: Muse Monetization and Advertising Share (META, GOOGL) Enterprise AI: Token Budgets and Model Routing (GOOGL) Microsoft: Internal AI Spend and Usage Mix (MSFT) RoboSoft: Workflow Automation and AI Spend Growth LendingClub: Production AI and Model Routing (LC, AMZN) Delta: Vertical Power Supply Bottlenecks and 800V Architecture (FLEX, GOOGL, MPWR, META) Vicor: Vertical Power Economics at Very High Current (VICR, NVDA) Detailed Report

Our next FUNDA Happy Hour after Singapore would be in Malaga, Spain during ECOC next week! If you are around, please come and meet @iamfabian ! RSVP link:

Our next @FundaAI Spanish Happy Hour (as in it starts at 8:00 pm) will be in Malaga, Spain during the ECOC Exhibition next week on the 22nd. If you are around, please come and we can grab a drink. RSVP on the link below in the comments:

🔥 La Liga action is coming up! Atlético Madrid take on Málaga in an early-morning showdown. Who are you backing to come out on top? 👀 ⚽ Atlético Madrid vs Málaga ⏰ August 20 | 03:00 (UTC+8) 👇 Lock in your prediction before kickoff and see how it plays out! #ForeGate# #LaLiga# #AtleticoMadrid# #Malaga# #Football# #PredictionMarket#

Research|Optics: ECOC 2026 Takeaways, NPO Gains Momentum as Slow and Wide Takes Shape We attended ECOC 2026 in Málaga last week. The debate between slow and wide and fast and narrow was a recurring topic in presentations and plenary sessions. Companies presented microLED and micro-VCSEL designs and discussed their performance, manufacturing challenges and production timelines. NPO was also in focus, with live NPO demos on the show floor and more discussion of how and when it ramps. This note covers our takeaways from the presentations, demos and conversations with companies, including developments in NPO, scale-in, external lasers, retimers, DSPs, coherent-lite and test and measurement. Detailed Report

🚨 𝗖𝗥𝗔𝗭𝗬 𝗙𝗔𝗖𝗧: Raphinha has recorded more goals + assists than a whopping 10 teams in La Liga this season. He has an amazing 15 G/A; the following teams have less: • Celta Vigo • Racing Santander • Athletic Bilbao • Real Betis • Real Sociedad • Levante • Osasuna • Malaga • Getafe • Valencia

Nothing is certain in life except death, taxes, and that any healthcare dinner will inevitably end up with someone asking why we haven’t solved the provider directory problem. 😢 @willjg @malagappan @vinaysethmohta