We’re Reaching the Physical Limits of Chips
Sep 30, 2026 · 13:41
Molly O'Shea asks what comes after the GPU with Steven Latré, VP of AI at imec, and Adam Chambers of Strike Capital, who argue that AI's real bottlenecks now sit in memory, power, cooling and data transfer rather than compute. Latré says the world's biggest chipmakers come through imec's unique Belgian clean room years before chips ship, that transistors at roughly one nanometer are at the end of physics of Moore's Law scaling, and that the era of ever-bigger models — from 175 billion to 10 trillion parameters — is ending. Chambers notes only Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung make 95% of memory — prices rose 700% this year — and calls photonics the key technology likely to win, moving from pluggable optics to co-packaged optics near the GPU. Latré's hottest take: in 5-10 years we'll laugh at today's LLMs like dial-up internet.
