A rare close look at the huge anti-drone protective structures installed over Moscow’s oil facilities. Those are usually only seen from afar in attack footage, so this angle gives a much clearer sense of their scale.

A missed opportunity to increase output at a time it's most needed. The delayed cokers at Tula and Salina Cruz are supposed to upgrade low-value fuel oil into lighter products, including diesel. Completion has now slipped to 2027, reportedly because funding ran short.

$VICR KEY READ-THROUGHS FROM VICOR Q2 2026 EARNINGS CALL The Vicor Q2 2026 call provides a high-signal view into the increasingly critical interface between AI accelerator silicon, advanced packaging, server assembly, semiconductor test, and data-center power infrastructure. The clearest conclusion is that AI and high-performance-computing demand remains firm into H2 2026. Vicor’s 1-year backlog increased 26% sequentially to $379.7 million, book-to-bill remained above 1x, product revenue increased 15.2% sequentially, and management stated that it saw “no weakness at all going forward” in high-performance compute. Reported Advanced Products growth of 45% sequentially was inflated by licensing revenue, but underlying Advanced Products hardware still appears to have increased approximately 28% sequentially after removing royalties from both periods. More importantly, Q3 total revenue is expected to increase nearly 10% even though revenue from the new license will decline by $10 million sequentially, implying that product revenue may need to increase by more than 20% sequentially under reasonable royalty assumptions. The call therefore represents a meaningful positive read-through for near-term AI infrastructure activity, while also identifying power delivery as a potential architectural and supply-chain bottleneck for 2027 and beyond. Rumored customer references to Avago, Google, AMD, and Cerebras were not confirmed by management and are not treated as evidence of specific commercial relationships. AI ACCELERATORS, CUSTOM SILICON, AND POWER MANAGEMENT AI ACCELERATOR AND CUSTOM-SILICON DEMAND REMAINS DURABLE (READ-THROUGH 1) Affected companies: NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA: US); Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD: US); Broadcom Inc. (AVGO: US); Marvell Technology, Inc. (MRVL: US); Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSM: Taiwan); Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL: US); Microsoft Corporation (MSFT: US); Inc. (AMZN: US); Meta Platforms, Inc. (META: US). Directional impact and magnitude: Positive. The read-through is moderate as a confirmation of 2026-2027 AI hardware demand, but low-to-moderate as a stand-alone earnings revision input for the large-cap beneficiaries because Vicor remains small relative to the aggregate accelerator and hyperscaler supply chain. The signal is most relevant to accelerator, custom-silicon, and foundry companies whose revenue is closely linked to the number, complexity, and power density of AI systems deployed. The supporting data are unusually strong for an upstream power-component supplier. Vicor’s backlog increased 26% sequentially to $379.7 million, book-to-bill exceeded 1x, and management stated, “I don’t see any weakness at all going forward,” adding that “high-performance compute is strong.” The company expects nearly 10% sequential total revenue growth in Q3 even though the new licensing agreement will contribute only $5 million, down from $15 million in Q2. Assuming other royalty revenue remains relatively stable, the guidance requires product revenue to rise from $112.9 million in Q2 to approximately $135 million-$140 million in Q3, implying low-20% sequential growth. The transmission mechanism is direct. High-density power modules are required production inputs for AI accelerators, custom ASICs, wafer-scale processors, and the systems into which they are assembled. Rising backlog, stretched lead times, and double-digit sequential product guidance indicate that customers are reserving capacity ahead of production ramps rather than merely conducting early-stage evaluations. This is supportive of continued accelerator shipments, custom ASIC deployments, and advanced-node wafer demand. The architectural update is also positive for the long-term AI silicon roadmap. Vicor has completed a Gen 2 vertical power delivery baseline at 3 amps per square millimeter and is targeting more than 5 amps per square millimeter around late 2026 or early 2027. Management also cited current gain above 40. These capabilities would allow processor designers to increase package power, transistor utilization, chiplet count, and compute density without requiring proportionate increases in board area or upstream current. Power delivery is therefore becoming less likely to cap the performance of future accelerators if Vicor or competing architectures can scale. Broadcom and Marvell are relevant because hyperscaler custom-silicon programs require extensive co-design across the processor, package, board, power system, and cooling architecture. NVIDIA and AMD benefit because improved power delivery supports higher accelerator power envelopes and denser system configurations. TSMC benefits indirectly through higher advanced-node wafer and packaging demand. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta benefit operationally because better point-of-load power delivery increases the amount of compute that can be placed into a constrained data-center footprint. The near-term trading catalyst is the evidence that AI infrastructure customers are continuing to place long-lead orders into H2 2026 rather than entering a material digestion phase. The longer-duration fundamental shift is that higher-performance power delivery can extend the AI accelerator roadmap beyond the limits of conventional board-level voltage regulation. The principal qualification is that customer identities and concentration were not disclosed, and the reported Advanced Products figure includes royalties. The read-through is therefore directionally positive but does not establish exact unit growth for any named accelerator vendor or hyperscaler. CONVENTIONAL MULTIPHASE AND GEN 1 POWER ARCHITECTURES FACE A 2027+ SHARE THREAT (READ-THROUGH 2) Affected companies: Monolithic Power Systems, Inc. (MPWR: US); Infineon Technologies AG (IFX: Germany); Renesas Electronics Corporation (6723: Japan). Texas Instruments Incorporated (TXN: US) and Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI: US) have lower, more diversified exposure. Directional impact and magnitude: Negative over the longer term. The potential impact is moderate for Monolithic Power Systems, which has substantial exposure to high-current power management in AI systems, and low-to-moderate for Infineon and Renesas. The near-term earnings impact is likely limited because Vicor’s broader Gen 2 production ramps are not expected until late Q3 or Q4 2027 and Vicor remains capacity constrained. Management argued that competing solutions deliver only “slightly over 1 ampere per square millimeter” under real operating conditions after thermal derating, while Vicor has reached 3 amps per square millimeter and is targeting more than 5 amps per square millimeter. Patrizio Vinciarelli stated that existing competitive capability is “quite limited” and that the market requirement, especially for wafer-scale engines and other advanced HPC systems, is already above those levels. Management also claimed that Factorized Power Architecture provides materially better current gain, efficiency, transient response, thermal performance, and signal integrity than conventional multiphase or integrated-voltage-regulator approaches. The transmission mechanism is a potential reallocation of the AI accelerator power-management bill of materials. Conventional systems typically rely on multiphase controllers, integrated power stages, inductors, and a sequence of voltage conversions from 12 volts, 6 volts, or 1.8 volts to the processor’s sub-1-volt operating rail. A successful vertical factorized architecture moves voltage transformation and current multiplication closer to the load and can reduce the number or economic value of conventional controller and power-stage components surrounding the processor. The greatest risk is not a collapse in total power-management demand. AI processor power continues to rise, which increases the aggregate power semiconductor opportunity. The risk is that the highest-value core-rail content migrates toward proprietary vertical power modules and away from conventional multiphase suppliers. This could reduce socket share, pricing power, or content per accelerator for exposed vendors even while the broader market continues growing. The call also identified an important offset. Vicor has been approached by 2 companies seeking a building block that would support integrated voltage regulators through a high-current 1.8-volt intermediate bus. Management explicitly described this as an incremental opportunity rather than a replacement for the full Factorized Power System. Hybrid architectures could therefore preserve some point-of-load IVR or multiphase content while Vicor captures the upstream conversion stage. The likely outcome is partial content displacement and greater architectural competition, not complete elimination of incumbent suppliers. The near-term catalyst would be a disclosed hyperscaler or OEM design win, qualification milestone, or sourcing agreement for Gen 2 VPD. Until such evidence appears, the call is not a strong near-term negative earnings signal for Monolithic Power Systems or other incumbent suppliers. The longer-duration implication is more material: a successful 2027-2028 Vicor ramp could challenge terminal market-share assumptions and require incumbents to increase R&D spending, reduce pricing, or accelerate their own vertical and integrated power architectures. The competitive performance statements are management assertions and have not been independently validated in the source material. Production yield, reliability, system cost, customer qualification, supply assurance, and ease of integration may prove as important as peak current-density specifications. CAPACITY LIMITS DELAY DISRUPTION AND CREATE SINGLE-SOURCE PROGRAM RISK (READ-THROUGH 3) Affected companies benefiting in the near term: Monolithic Power Systems, Inc. (MPWR: US); Infineon Technologies AG (IFX: Germany); Renesas Electronics Corporation (6723: Japan). Affected companies potentially exposed to program risk: NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA: US); Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD: US); Broadcom Inc. (AVGO: US); Dell Technologies Inc. (DELL: US); Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE: US); Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI: US); Quanta Computer Inc. (2382: Taiwan); Wiwynn Corporation (6669: Taiwan). No relationship between Vicor and any of these companies was confirmed on the call. Directional impact and magnitude: Positive, low-to-moderate, for incumbent power-management vendors through 2027 because Vicor’s limited manufacturing capacity slows architecture displacement. Negative, potentially moderate-to-high at the individual program level, for any accelerator or server platform that becomes dependent on Vicor before a 2nd source or 2nd fab is operational. The consolidated impact on diversified large-cap customers would likely be smaller unless the affected platform were strategically important. Management stated that the 1st fab is “approaching capacity utilization” and that Vicor will become “very selective” in choosing customer engagements. The company has evaluated several sites for a 2nd fab and made offers, but no offer had been accepted as of the call. Management confirmed that the $2.5 billion revenue objective cannot be achieved with the existing factory and said the 2nd facility is expected to provide an initial doubling of capacity, with the site ultimately capable of supporting 2x-3x the capacity of the 1st fab. The timing is consequential. Management described broader Gen 2 customer programs moving toward production around late Q3 or Q4 2027, while meaningful 2nd-fab capacity appears associated with a late-2027-to-2028 time frame. The company also stated that external alternate sources are unlikely to provide the predictable capacity required for key customers over the next several years. This leaves the Andover facility as the critical manufacturing node during the initial commercial transition. The mechanism protecting incumbent power suppliers is customer reluctance to commit a major accelerator or server architecture to a single-source component with limited near-term capacity. Hyperscalers and OEMs typically require supply assurance, qualification redundancy, and visibility into multi-year volume support. Even where Vicor’s electrical performance is superior, customers may retain Gen 1 VPD, conventional multiphase, or hybrid IVR solutions until manufacturing redundancy is established. This extends the revenue runway for Monolithic Power Systems, Infineon, and Renesas and makes the competitive threat more likely to affect 2028 estimates than 2026 estimates. The corresponding customer risk is that a platform specifically designed around Vicor’s Gen 2 architecture could encounter allocation constraints, delayed qualification, or insufficient volume during a rapid ramp. Management’s willingness to prioritize only strategically attractive customers can improve Vicor’s economics but may force other customers to delay deployments or maintain parallel power architectures. A significant process interruption at the 1st fab would also have a larger impact because the company lacks a near-term external manufacturing alternative. The near-term catalysts are selection and acquisition of the 2nd site, disclosure of expected capex and commissioning dates, installation of the remaining equipment in the 1st fab, and evidence that product gross margin and throughput improve as utilization rises. The longer-duration shift occurs once Fab 2 is qualified. Successful execution would remove the supply-assurance obstacle and could accelerate share loss for incumbent power suppliers. A delayed or costlier Fab 2 would preserve incumbent architectures and limit the pace at which Vicor’s technology can affect the broader AI market. AI SERVER OEMS, ODMS, AND IMPORTED SYSTEMS ITC ENFORCEMENT CREATES A LOW-PROBABILITY, HIGH-SEVERITY IMPORT RISK (READ-THROUGH 4) Affected companies: Dell Technologies Inc. (DELL: US); Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE: US); Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI: US); Quanta Computer Inc. (2382: Taiwan); Wiwynn Corporation (6669: Taiwan); Wistron Corporation (3231: Taiwan); Inventec Corporation (2356: Taiwan). No company on this list was identified by Vicor as infringing, unlicensed, or involved in the proceedings. The names represent major public exposures within the imported AI-server and contract-manufacturing supply chain. Directional impact and magnitude: Negative tail risk. The probability-weighted near-term financial impact is low because no specific company was identified and management’s base case assumes no further licensing agreement before the 2nd ITC case reaches final determination in 2027. The event severity could nevertheless be high for an individual server program if an exclusion order disrupted imports or forced an accelerated redesign. Management emphasized that patent enforcement is not limited to copied power modules. Patrizio Vinciarelli stated that the right to exclude can reach “the competitors’ customers, the contract manufacturers and those customers’ customers, OEMs, hyperscalers.” Management argued that users of Vicor’s technology must ensure that intellectual property is respected throughout the supply chain and stated that the appropriate remedy is to obtain a license. The transmission mechanism is more severe than an ordinary component-level patent dispute. An ITC exclusion order can potentially restrict importation of complete computing systems containing disputed modules, rather than only blocking the modules themselves. A server OEM or ODM could therefore face shipment delays, customs uncertainty, inventory impairment, redesign costs, supplier changes, or expedited qualification requirements even if the power module represents a small percentage of the system’s total bill of materials. The direct royalty cost is unlikely to be financially material for a large hyperscaler or server OEM. The more important economic risk is interruption of a high-value AI server shipment. A modest licensing payment may therefore be rational if it removes the risk of exclusion and permits continued use of an existing power-module supplier. The recently signed approximately $60 million agreement supports this interpretation because it does not require a sourcing relationship with Vicor during the initial years. The license appears capable of preserving the licensee’s current supply chain while resolving legal exposure. This structure creates a secondary read-through for incumbent power suppliers. A customer-level Vicor license could allow an OEM or hyperscaler to continue buying power products from a competitor, preserving the competitor’s unit demand while transferring part of the economic rent to Vicor through licensing. Consequently, additional Vicor licensing agreements would not necessarily imply an immediate product-share win for Vicor or a corresponding unit loss for Monolithic Power Systems, Infineon, Renesas, or other power vendors. The near-term trading catalysts are ITC procedural milestones, settlement announcements, new OEM or hyperscaler licenses, and disclosures regarding the renewal of current 2-year agreements. The longer-duration fundamental implication is that power-delivery IP becomes a system-level supply-chain issue rather than a narrow semiconductor dispute. Server OEMs and ODMs may respond by requiring stronger intellectual-property indemnification, dual-source qualification, or direct license coverage from hyperscaler customers.

we built muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by openclaw. After I used openclaw in january I bought hundreds of mac minis for the MSL team and lots of us fell in love with using openclaw (and other personal agents). @steipete is a genius and his harness was pioneering from the jump. I think a lot of people were inspired by it. our goal with muse was to build something like openclaw that we could make safe and secure and easy to use and scale to billions of people.

$GS Factor Dashboard updated. GAI factors are the top performers on the list; Energy Refiners are at the bottom. As I've said countless times on this app, the low correlation (and small negative correlation for some) between the Energy Refiners and the GAI infrastructure names is a beautiful thing for a portfolio.

Introducing Volare Shipping — a new Trafigura group company built to own, operate and scale a modern fleet of oil tankers. 🚢 The fleet: six VLCCs on the water, eight newbuilds on order, commercially managed by Trafigura's global shipping business.

I was there Friday night in San Francisco for the @REK event, and this is something you had be in the room to get it, but I’ll try to describe it. It hit completely differently from robot-versus-robot fights. Those are entertaining, sure, but after a while they start to feel strange. You’re empathizing with machines that aren’t conscious, don’t feel pain, and don’t feel anything. Robot versus human hits different and raw, it was an emotional rollercoaster. I felt real fear for the human fighter, and real excitement, mostly fear, and when it ended there was a huge wave of relief. The robots were remote-controlled, of course, but the kicks were genuinely powerful. We know how power-dense those actuators are, and the human fighter took real hits to his body. The kicks from the six-foot-tall EngineAI T800 seemed nearly impossible to dodge when they were hurled in the right direction. The Unitree H1 was even harder to deal with because its dynamic balance is so good that it just refused to go down. This could be the start of a genuinely new entertainment genre. But I can tell you this: if someone wants to fight a robot with a real AI brain and real perception, you’d need robots that are far less powerful, throttled down, and compliant. Otherwise it ends in serious injury or worse. This is the beginning of something different in robotics and entertainment, and we need to think seriously about it before regulators use moments like this as fearmongering fodder to throttle the entire humanoid frontier.

$FRO $DHT $INSW $LPG $BWET (Bloomberg) -- The soaring cost of moving oil around the world is making some long-distance crude trades uneconomical, threatening to disrupt flows at a time when fuel markets have never been tighter. The jump is being driven by a shortage of available supertankers. In some parts of the world, there are barely any of the ships — each the length of three football fields — left for hire. The squeeze is making faraway barrels less attractive and encouraging refiners to snap up supplies closer to home if they can find them. Moving a cargo from Houston to Asia now adds about $26 a barrel — $52 million a cargo — to the cost of supplying the world’s largest crude-importing region. That’s equal to roughly a quarter of the price of West Texas Intermediate futures. Before the war, shipping typically accounted for only a tiny fraction of the cost. The rally is minting fortunes for the small group of shipowners that dominate the tanker market — several industry executives and brokers said the surge would previously have been unimaginable. The value of the world’s largest oil tanker equities soared to a record of almost $70 billion this week. But for oil traders, the risk is that shipping becoming prohibitively expensive. They’re concerned that the higher costs make it unprofitable for some refiners to turn crude into fuels, deterring them from buying cargoes that have to sail over long distances, even when demand to make diesel and gasoline is strong. On the industry’s main benchmark route, very large crude carriers hauling 2 million barrels of crude from the Persian Gulf to China are earning upward of $1.2 million a day. Similar pressures are now spreading across the freight market globally. “It has never been this expensive to move oil around,” Saad Rahim, chief economist at trading giant Trafigura Group, said at the Bloomberg Commodity Investor Forum on Thursday. With freight becoming a larger portion of the value of the cargo, “it becomes a much bigger issue now when you start to think of that in terms of logistics.” Some long-haul routes that became crucial after wars disrupted energy flows are now looking unattractive as a result of the surge. Ship-tracking data from Vortexa show US-Asia flows have fallen in recent weeks, as freight costs roughly tripled. A Japanese refiner recently bought a cargo of Alaskan crude — a grade not typically well-suited for the country’s processors — because of the relatively short sailing distance, people familiar with the matter said. In contrast, the clamor for nearby barrels shows up in Europe’s crude prices. While Brent futures topped out close to $110 a barrel this week, the European Dated Brent physical crude price climbed above $131 as buyers hunted short-haul cargoes. The region’s processors are also scrambling to replace barrels from the Middle East after Saudi Arabia gave no cargoes to European buyers under their term contracts for next month. Further afield, sales of Angolan oil, which usually sails thousands of miles to buyers in China, are sluggish. “Current freight levels can become self-limiting over time — they eventually close arbitrage routes and reduce demand for the most expensive long-haul barrels,” said Sumit Ritolia, senior manager of modeling at analytics firm Kpler. Photographer: Mark Felix/Bloomberg A crude oil tanker at the Enterprise Marine Terminal in Freeport, Texas. Shipbrokers with years of experience said they’ve never seen supertanker availability so tight, while multiple industry executives said they’ve never known a market like it. Many said there are few, if any, of the vessels available for hire in certain locations, depending on the timeframe in which they are required. That’s rippling down to smaller ships. Asian refiners are turning to 700,000-barrel Aframax tankers for some purchases from the US, rather than the supertankers typically used for those journeys. Shipments loading from ports in the Atlantic, including Brazil, are being booked on two 1 million-barrel Suezmax vessels rather one supertanker with twice that capacity, traders and shipbrokers said. It’s dragged earnings for smaller vessels higher too. Earnings for Suezmaxes are on average north of $300,000 a day, rates typically associated with sailing in and out of war zones. The biggest drivers of the surge are twofold: the knock-on effects of the US-Iran conflict, and a huge wager by a South Korean tycoon that was already sending shipping rates higher before the war began. Vessels shuttling barrels through the Strait of Hormuz are sucking up more ships for longer as they switch cargoes near Oman. Other tankers are sailing thousands of miles around Africa to pick up cargoes in the Mediterranean, while until now, Asian buyers swapped lost Middle Eastern barrels for longer-haul supplies from the Americas. Those factors all help stretch out the tanker fleet and boost rates. The key for oil traders is how long elevated freight rates can be sustained. Diesel futures in Europe are near $200 a barrel, a sign the region’s processors still need to get their hands on every cargo they can. “Freight has never taken a big part of the delivered cost of oil, but it’s now playing a much bigger role in oil markets,” said Xavier Tang, senior market analyst at analytics firm Vortexa. “This is having a knock-on effect on end buyers.”