Theme

A silicon curtain falls

Explore this theme’s evidence over time →

Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

Welcome to December 13, 2025 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)

Semiconductors stop being traded and start being aligned. Blocs form around the whole stack, from minerals to logic, and subsidy becomes the instrument of decoupling.

Development timeline

Newest reporting dates first. Reporting dates may differ from event dates.

2026-10-05: China reportedly stockpiles DUV lithography tools

2026-09-12: A lab disrupts five bioweapon-adjacent operations and withholds a model from an ally

2026-09-07: A renamed arm of a blacklisted maker ships $5.6 billion of advanced hardware

2026-08-27: A stealth model is unmasked as MIT-licensed weights served on domestic chips

2026-08-27: A lab offers US clouds 30% of revenue to host its open model

2026-08-25: Video eats 70% of one country's tokens as the two markets diverge

2026-08-23: An audit finds America ahead on benchmarks and China winning on cost

2026-08-21: A chipmaker reportedly plans a licensed inference part for a restricted market

2026-08-17: A fab is framed as a bet that pays off however a geopolitical question resolves

2026-08-16: One open family logs 3 billion downloads and 151,448 derivatives

2026-08-15: A draft letter warns 35 partners that two alliances are incompatible

2026-08-13: A memory maker commits $720 billion and calls demand a war

2026-08-10: One country holds nine of ten video slots and 97% of humanoid shipments

2026-08-10: A state unleashes $28 trillion in markets and fast-tracks chip listings

2026-08-08: AI chips push two economies past Japan in total exports for the first time

2026-08-06: Labeling shops sell judgment to both sides with no chip-level scrutiny

2026-08-03: One country holds most humanoid morphology patents as a rival keeps a quality edge

2026-08-01: Military researchers distill foreign models into targeting systems

2026-08-01: A state practices token diplomacy with cheap models for the global south

2026-07-30: A trade war opens over a ban on foreign humanoids

2026-07-29: A regulator bars imports of new foreign humanoids and quadrupeds

2026-07-29: A rival supply chain matures as the market treats it as a threat

2026-07-26: A leader pitches free models to the global south as an Android play

2026-07-24: A vice premier drives a crash program for homegrown chips

2026-07-23: A government alleges distillation via a covert platform and third-country chips

2026-07-22: A treasury threatens sanctions over watermarks surfacing in rival weights

2026-07-21: A Chinese lab switches on a gigawatt datacenter running entirely on domestic silicon

2026-07-21: Cross-entropy analysis shows one model disproportionately claims to be another

2026-07-19: An investor calls a fifty-to-one token price gap a Cold War in reverse

2026-07-19: A spy's final mission surveilled a Gulf AI firm's China ties

2026-07-19: A 2.4-trillion-parameter model goes open-weight as a chip unit attacks CUDA

2026-07-16: A foundry's US buildout reaches ten fabs and $265 billion

2026-07-15: A lithography maker pledges 30% more EUV capacity two years running

2026-07-14: A proposed framework would cap US models at China's best open weights

2026-07-11: A government converts $9B in grants into a 10% stake in a chipmaker

2026-07-09: A custom bridge chip resurrects old memory inside new servers

2026-07-07: Chinese firms plan to route 46% of accelerator budgets to domestic chips

2026-07-04: A lab explores custom silicon as buying compute becomes becoming compute

2026-07-03: A company bans a rival coding tool over user-fingerprinting telemetry

2026-06-29: A country answers the memory crunch with a $585B semiconductor megacomplex

2026-06-28: Chinese and Japanese labs ship models to fill the gap left by a ban

2026-06-27: Observers sketch a tiered planet of model access

2026-06-26: Observers call the throttling policy self-defeating

2026-06-26: A survey finds Chinese labs hiring engineers with a third the experience

2026-06-25: Japan unveils a $2.3 trillion plan to quintuple chip output

2026-06-25: A lab accuses a rival of harvesting 28.8 million exchanges

2026-06-24: A CPU-only machine becomes the world's most powerful supercomputer

2026-06-24: Banned chips more than double in price on a black market

2026-06-22: Tracking firms urge Congress to bolt location beacons onto top chips

2026-06-20: Chinese open models take the majority of token use

2026-06-19: A telecom's model access is revoked over alleged China ties

2026-06-17: AI chiefs join heads of state to propose walling off a rival

2026-06-17: A Chinese open model takes the lead while the frontier sits unavailable

2026-06-14: A researcher warns nations without their own ASI become intellectual vassals

2026-06-14: A Chinese lab answers the shutdown with radical openness

2026-06-13: A government suspends all foreign-national access to a frontier model

2026-06-12: A memory-chip maker overtakes an automaker as Japan's most valuable firm

2026-06-09: China plans a $295B datacenter network on 80% domestic hardware

2026-06-09: All three of China's leading AI champions are designated at once

2026-06-08: A hyperscaler orders three million TPUs from a rival foundry

2026-06-02: An open-weight model undercuts the frontier forty-fold

2026-05-29: A server maker's AI revenue rises 757%

2026-05-26: The US backs its first pure-play quantum chip foundry

2026-05-26: China restricts overseas travel for senior AI staff

2026-05-25: A chipmaker announces a scaling law to replace Moore's Law

2026-05-21: A chipmaker posts a record quarter while conceding a market

2026-05-18: Chinese labs overtake the US in video generation

2026-05-17: ASML partners on an Indian foundry aiming at chip peerage by 2032

2026-05-17: Gray-market resellers sell a frontier model at a tenth of list price

2026-05-16: Michigan moves to permanently ban Chinese connected cars

2026-05-15: Washington clears about ten Chinese firms to buy H200s

2026-05-15: A lab sketches two versions of 2028 turning on export controls

2026-05-12: The White House weighs banning Chinese cellular modules

2026-05-11: Cisco releases a kit that reads model weights like a genome

2026-05-09: A 245-terabyte drive ships as a quantum firm files to list

2026-05-08: Europe weighs restricting US clouds from sensitive government data

2026-05-08: South Korea's market overtakes Canada's on silicon demand

2026-05-06: Apple explores Intel and Samsung as US fabs beyond TSMC

2026-05-05: Nvidia says its China market share is zero and policy backfired

2026-05-04: A US body puts Chinese models eight months behind

2026-05-01: Huawei takes the largest share of China's AI chip market

2026-04-29: Tech firms cut 45,800 jobs in the worst month in two years

2026-04-26: An open 1.6T model puts China four to five months behind the frontier

2026-04-17: A 4,000-acre zone in the Philippines runs under US common law

2026-04-17: Britain asks households to consume more during renewable peaks

2026-04-13: Nine Japanese firms form a venture for a sovereign physical AI model

2026-04-09: OpenAI pauses a UK buildout over energy and regulation

2026-04-08: Intel joins the terawatt fab consortium

2026-04-07: Rival labs begin sharing intelligence on distillation attacks

2026-04-02: Chinese accelerators take 41% of their home market

2026-04-01: A leaked codebase reveals decoy tools planted to poison copycats

2026-03-31: Alibaba's newest omni-modal model ships closed

2026-03-29: Senators move to ban Chinese robots from government use

2026-03-24: Cloud workloads migrate away from a region because of drone strikes

2026-03-24: Russia launches the first satellites of a sovereign network

2026-03-23: A Chinese lab says its model participates in its own evolution

2026-03-22: A $500B datacenter campus rises on a decommissioned enrichment plant

2026-03-18: Beijing approves H200 sales as Microsoft weighs suing over a cloud deal

2026-03-13: A company builds a factory for manufacturing AI factories

2026-03-10: A quarter of iPhones are now made in India

2026-03-06: Apple withdraws a configuration as the memory shortage reaches Cupertino

2026-03-05: A submarine sinks a warship for the first time since World War II

2026-03-04: Peking University reaches a 1-nm ferroelectric transistor at 0.6 volts

2026-03-02: The US constrains 70% of seaborne crude to buy reshoring time

2026-03-01: A State Department official is described as working on GPU diplomacy

2026-02-27: Meta rents Google TPUs to diversify away from Nvidia

2026-02-24: Anthropic alleges 24,000 fake accounts used for distillation

2026-02-24: Meta contracts up to 6 GW of AMD GPUs

2026-02-20: US imports from Taiwan pass China for the first time since 1992

2026-02-18: Apple accelerates three camera-bearing wearables

2026-02-10: Driverless cars enter commercial production with Toyota

2026-02-10: The White House seeks 40% of Taiwan's chip production

2026-02-05: Russian satellites linger beside EU satellites for weeks

2026-02-04: American labs go dark at the top conference and rivals fill the vacuum

2026-02-02: Blue Origin pauses suborbital flights for the Moon

2026-01-29: China approves 400,000 H200 purchases

2026-01-29: Tesla names chips its bottleneck and plans a terafab

2026-01-27: Chinese models match the frontier on nineteen benchmarks

2026-01-26: The White House takes a 10% stake in a rare earth miner

2026-01-25: China consumes twice US electricity as datacenter load jumps 17%

2026-01-14: The US allows H200 sales as China forbids buying them

2026-01-13: A Taiwan trade deal would buy five more Arizona fabs

2026-01-12: Alibaba puts Chinese odds of leapfrogging below 20%

2026-01-12: China files for 200,000 satellites

2026-01-11: Nanoimprint lithography reaches 1.4-nm logic

2026-01-11: Taiwan's US exports pass its China exports

2026-01-10: Grok 5 is a seven-trillion-parameter model

2026-01-09: Micron breaks ground on a $100B megafab

2026-01-06: Intel ships its first 18A consumer chips from US fabs

2026-01-05: A Korean inference chip enters mass production

2026-01-05: Rare earths are refined without emissions in New Hampshire

2026-01-04: Japan quadruples its AI chip budget

2026-01-03: London becomes the US-China autonomy testbed

2026-01-01: TSMC pulls in its 1.4-nm fab on better yields

2025-12-31: China fuses flash storage directly to GPUs

2025-12-30: Samsung raises Texas 2-nm output to 50,000 wafers

2025-12-30: South Korea launches a 500B sovereign model

2025-12-29: GLM-4.7 takes the top open-weight slot

2025-12-29: Frontier research collapses to three cities

2025-12-29: SK Hynix weighs the first US 2.5-D packaging line

2025-12-25: Samsung preps a $19B Austin plant for iPhone camera sensors

2025-12-24: Intel enters high-volume 18A production in Arizona

2025-12-23: GLM-4.7 tops GPT-5.2 on WebDev Arena, trailing the frontier by six months

2025-12-21: TSMC pulls Arizona 3-nm production forward to 2027

2025-12-20: LightGen runs generative tasks entirely in light

2025-12-20: China's orbital AI datacenter has run for six months

2025-12-18: China mounts a Shenzhen effort to reverse-engineer EUV

2025-12-17: OpenAI hires George Osborne to export the American AI stack

2025-12-16: US backs a $7.4B critical minerals refinery in Tennessee

2025-12-15: Interactive AI children's toys repeat CCP talking points

2025-12-15: SkyWater fabricates a 3D carbon nanotube chip domestically

2025-12-14: China fuses its datacenters into one machine

2025-12-14: Europe approves €623M for two first-of-a-kind fabs

2025-12-13: China answers with a $70B chip subsidy package

2025-12-13: The US launches a Pax Silica Initiative

Knowledge graphopen in browser →

Cite or correct this record

Citation formatCitation text

A silicon curtain falls
Innermost Loop KB — secondary record
Reporting date: unknown
KB permalink: https://nicholsn.github.io/innermost-loop-kb/themes/silicon-curtain
Attributed sources:
- Welcome to December 13, 2025 — https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/welcome-to-december-13-2025
This citation does not imply independent verification of linked-source claims.

Suggest a correction — opens a GitHub draft for you to review and submit.