Five Things Tech: Hyperscalers, Memory, Software, Robots, CopyFail
This is everything you should read about Tech right now.
Howdy and welcome back to Five Things Tech!
Hyperscalers are spending billions, but only one layer is compounding—and it shows everywhere: Amazon is stockpiling chips and power while still searching for a winning model strategy, Google pulls ahead by embedding Gemini across its products, and Microsoft leans on distribution to mask model gaps. Meanwhile, the real profits are quietly shifting to the infrastructure layer with memory chips turning into luxury goods amid relentless AI demand, software itself is becoming fluid with “personal software on demand,” robots are learning to share skills across hardware, and even the foundations—like Linux—are showing cracks under the pressure of this new stack.
Enjoy Five Things Tech!
The $112 Billion Quarter
Amazon is betting on vertical integration. It landed 2.1 million AI chips over the past twelve months & its chips business has crossed a $20 billion annual revenue run rate, growing triple-digit percentages year-over-year. OpenAI committed to consume approximately 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS starting in 2027. Anthropic secured up to 5 gigawatts.
But Amazon doesn’t own the model layer. Google does.
The hyperscaler that owns the model layer is growing the fastest.
Google can nicely integrate Gemini into their products. Amazon still tries to figure out how to make Alexa smart and Microsoft hopes that people stay ignorant about the “performance” of co-pilot.
AI Has Made Memory Chips One of the World’s Most Profitable Products
While fears grow over whether AI services will eventually reap big profits, an epic windfall is flowing to the companies involved in the build-out of related infrastructure.
The historic run doesn’t look likely to end soon. Based on Samsung’s prebooked orders, the supply crunch is expected to grow worse next year, said Jaejune Kim, the company’s executive vice president for memory. “The available supply is far short of customer demand,” he said on a Thursday earnings call.
Since the start of this year, shares of Samsung have risen by 72%. SK Hynix’s shares are up 90% and Micron has gained 65%.
Memory is the new luxury.
Why one longtime coder says vibe coding matters beyond tech
Up until now, no one has ever been able to get enough software. Engineering was very expensive. It took a lot of time. You had to buy stuff off the shelf.
What we don’t know is: A world in which it’s fast to customize, in which it’s easy to make something that’s really bespoke, and where engineering might be more of your service org — to help you as opposed to this alien entity bolted onto the org that does its own thing — how does that all fit into the future?
Personal Software on Demand - PSOD. I just coined the term, you read it here first.
Robots With Different Designs Can Now Share Skills
Surprisingly, the approach doesn’t rely on AI. Instead, the researchers analyzed the physical properties of several robotic arms with three rotating joints—a popular design in commercial settings—to map out their limits.
To complete a task, a robotic arm must calculate how to bend each joint to reach its target. It also has to avoid pushing the joints past their physical limits or twisting them at weird angles. Engineers call these limits “singularities” because they cause the math governing the robots’ motion to break down. Failures can cause sudden and unsafe movements.
Turns out that robots can play together just nicely, which makes them more or less human? You decide…
The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed
The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-31431 and the name CopyFail, is a local privilege escalation, a vulnerability class that allows unprivileged users to elevate themselves to administrators. CopyFail is particularly severe because it can be exploited with a single piece of exploit code—released in Wednesday’s disclosure—that works across all vulnerable distributions with no modification. With that, an attacker can, among other things, hack multi-tenant systems, break out of containers based on Kubernetes or other frameworks, and create malicious pull requests that pipe the exploit code through CI/CD work flows.
Just at the time when I get my own linux server up and running after like 20 years, it gets hit by CopyFail. Yikes.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
Five Things Tech: Start Cowboys, Evil Tech, CO2 and Data Centers, Military Drones, Artificial Retina
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— Nico