About

I'm Tony, an AI robotics engineer working in semiconductor manufacturing. I write here about the intersection I work in every day: semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and robotics.

Why this site exists

Coverage of this industry splits into two piles. One is written by people who understand the technology but aren't thinking about what it means commercially. The other is written by people tracking the money who have never had to make a robot repeat the same motion ten thousand times without drifting.

I write for the gap in between — for readers who want to know whether a demo, a roadmap, or a product claim is physically plausible, and what would have to be true for it to hold.

The name is the thesis. Every engineered system runs with margin: headroom between what it does today and what it physically cannot exceed. Engineering margin is what eventually shows up as financial margin — and when it runs out, roadmaps slip and capex gets rewritten. Finding those limits early is the whole job here.

What I write about

• The physical layer — fabs, process nodes, packaging, HBM, equipment. Why only a handful of companies can make any of it.
• The bottleneck watch — power, cooling, materials, capacity. What is actually constraining AI buildouts, and what breaks next.
• Physical AI, reality-checked — what a robotics demo does and does not prove, and what would have to become true for it to ship.

How I source things

Everything here comes from public material: earnings calls and filings, patents, published research, conference talks, and manufacturer datasheets. Where a claim rests on my own professional judgment rather than a citable source, I say so explicitly.

The full set of standards I hold myself to — sourcing, corrections, conflicts — is in the editorial policy.

What this site is not

It is not investment advice. I don't publish price targets or buy and sell recommendations, and nothing here accounts for your circumstances. If you act on something you read here, that decision is yours. See the full disclaimer.

Views expressed here are mine alone and do not represent my employer or any organisation I'm affiliated with.

Contact

Corrections and questions are welcome, and corrections from people who know a subsystem better than I do are the most useful thing this site receives. See the contact page.