For most of the past two years, the scarce input for AI was chips. Increasingly it is electricity. Companies can order GPUs, but they cannot easily get a few hundred megawatts of grid power delivered to a site, and the wait for a new grid connection in many US regions now runs for years. That is why data center deals are announced in gigawatts, why tech companies are signing contracts to restart nuclear plants, and why some sites are building their own gas turbines.

Bluetooth version numbers show up on every phone, laptop and earbud spec sheet, and they tell you less than you’d think. The Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group), the industry body that owns the standard, publishes a Core Specification every so often; “Bluetooth 5.3” on a box means the product was qualified against version 5.3 of that spec. It does not mean the product supports every feature in 5.3. Almost everything added since 4.

Since October 2022 the United States has required a licence to ship top-end AI accelerators to China. Nvidia’s A100, H100 and later chips, and the servers built around them, can’t legally go to Chinese buyers without one, and for most of that period licences were rarely granted. Demand didn’t go away. A grey market grew to fill it, and since 2025 US prosecutors have brought a run of cases showing how servers worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and in one case billions, were rerouted.

The CHIPS and Science Act, signed in August 2022, set aside $52.7 billion for US semiconductors, including $39 billion in manufacturing incentives run by the Commerce Department’s CHIPS Program Office. Those incentives pay for new fabs, packaging plants and suppliers of wafers, gases and equipment, mostly as direct grants, sometimes with loans. Most of the big awards were finalized in the last months of the Biden administration. The Trump administration kept the programme but changed how it works, most visibly by turning Intel’s grants into a government shareholding.

Co-packaged optics (CPO) moves the part that turns electrical signals into light off the front panel of a network switch and onto the same package as the switch chip. Today, almost every fiber link in a data center runs through a pluggable transceiver: a small module, about the size of a pack of gum, that slots into the front of a switch or a server network card. CPO gets rid of most of those modules.

CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate) is TSMC’s method for placing a large processor and several stacks of high bandwidth memory side by side on a shared slab of silicon wiring, then mounting that slab on a package substrate. Almost every leading AI accelerator is built this way: Nvidia’s Blackwell and Rubin GPUs, AMD’s Instinct chips, Google’s TPUs and most custom chips designed with Broadcom or Marvell. For the past three years the number of CoWoS wafers TSMC could process each month has capped how many of those chips could ship, more often than the supply of leading-edge wafers did.

A credit spread is the extra yield a company pays to borrow compared with the US government for the same length of time. If a five-year Treasury yields 4 percent and a company’s five-year bond yields 5.5 percent, the spread is 1.5 percentage points, or 150 basis points (one basis point is 0.01 point). That gap is the market’s price for the chance the company won’t pay back, plus a bit for being harder to sell than a Treasury.

Every security advisory, scanner report and patch note leans on the same small set of public systems. CVE gives a vulnerability its name. CVSS says how bad it could be. EPSS estimates how likely it is to be attacked soon. CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (KEV) says it already has been. They are run by different organizations, answer different questions, and get confused with each other constantly. Anyone who has to decide what to patch first, or who reads that a flaw is “a 9.

Diplomatic titles look like a loose pile of French and Latin, but most of them sit on a short legal ladder. Two treaties set it: the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, which covers embassies and the people who run them, and the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 1963, which covers consulates. Almost every state is a party to both. If you read that a country “downgraded relations to chargé level” or “expelled a counsellor”, the rank tells you how much the move actually means.

The US can block exports of American chipmaking tools, but it does not make all the tools that matter. The world’s only maker of EUV lithography machines is ASML in the Netherlands. Japan’s Tokyo Electron is a top supplier of the coating, etching and deposition systems found in every advanced fab. Without the Netherlands and Japan on board, US equipment controls on China would leak badly. Both countries did sign on, starting in 2023.