Blog & Insights

From TSMC to SK Hynix to Ajinomoto — who holds pricing power, and who is just riding the narrative? Series: AI Compute Supply Chain | Part 2 of 5 Author: Po-Sung(Sinclair) Huang The first article in this series explained what CoWoS, HBM, and ABF are. This one answers the harder question underneath: who controls them? Knowing that these three layers matter is the entry ticket. The real analytical edge comes from understanding who in each layer has the power to say no — and what happens to the whole chain when they do. ...

AlphaFold helped us predict what proteins look like. The next wave of models is starting to address something harder: how proteins move, switch states, and perform functions over time.* By Po-Sung(Sinclair) Huang AlphaFold changed protein science by helping researchers predict what proteins look like with unprecedented scale and accuracy. But proteins do not function as frozen objects. They bend, vibrate, open pockets, switch conformations, and transmit signals across time. That is why the next frontier after structure may be something more difficult and more consequential: behaviour. ...

A new working paper suggests that markets often reward narrative clarity more than scientific spillovers. By Po-Sung(Sinclair) Huang We like to think capital markets reward great science. In biopharma, that is only partly true. In a new working paper, I compare market capitalisation with forward citations — a proxy for how much others are actually using a firm’s research. What emerges is not a smooth relationship, but a striking pricing gap. ...

Why is everyone suddenly talking about CoWoS, HBM, and ABF whenever AI, NVIDIA, or AI servers come up? Many people know they are important, but still get stuck the first time they run into these terms. This essay is a plain‑language walkthrough of what they actually are, why they are always mentioned together, and how they map onto Taiwan’s role in the global AI supply chain. When Google, Amazon, and Tesla are all designing their own chips, is Taiwan’s manufacturing ecosystem still structurally important — or just enjoying a temporary window? ...

Every layer that looks solved hides another constraint beneath it. §1 The Illusion of Infinite Compute The headlines say NVIDIA is winning. The hyperscalers are spending. The models are getting bigger. But the real question is not where demand is going. It is where compute, physically, can still be built fast enough to meet it. The harder answer requires tracing the full physical stack — from silicon wafer, through memory stack, through packaging interposer, through substrate material — and asking at each layer: can this actually scale at the speed the demand curve requires? ...

AI in drug discovery is often framed as a speed story. Faster screening, faster structure prediction, faster candidate generation. But speed is only the surface. What AI really changes is the way search space is organized. In traditional drug discovery, much of the challenge lies not only in testing compounds, but in deciding where to look. AI expands the ability to navigate vast biological and chemical spaces, but it does not eliminate the underlying uncertainty of biology itself. ...

For years, digital strategy was built around owning traffic and bringing users back to a company website. That logic may be weakening. As AI systems become better at summarizing, filtering, comparing, and presenting options directly to users, the key source of value may shift from website ownership to interface control. In other words, the winner may not always be the company with the best homepage, but the company, platform, or system that controls how customer intent is interpreted and how choices are presented. ...

In every wave of commerce, people tend to focus on tools first. They talk about better platforms, smoother interfaces, lower friction, faster conversion, and now AI-driven recommendation systems. But the first principle of commerce has not changed. Trust comes before efficiency. Before a customer asks whether a platform is convenient, they ask whether the product is real, whether the seller is credible, and whether the transaction can be completed safely. This was true in early e-commerce, and it remains true in the AI era. ...

Quick thoughts on how AlphaFold 3 is transforming molecular medicine