Locator: 48763TECH.
Locator: 48764CHIPS.
It appears wiki's "Transistor Count" page has been updated. Screenshot, today, June 17, 2025. Adds the world's thinnest chip -- only three atoms thick -- and the chip can be made without expensive EUV lithography.
Transister count (most recent view: September 21, 2024).
Locator: 48762B.
Locator: 48762ARCHIVES.
Four big stories today:
Solar:
TikTok: Trump extends TikTok for another 90 days.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $75.49. Up over 55; up $3.75. Trump says "unconditional surrender now." Netanyahu hinted at major military event Thursday/Friday later this week. Everything suggests US about ready to hit Iran's main nuclear facility with B-2 bunker buster.
Active rigs: 29. First time in a long time, I've seen the number of active rigs drop below 30. Oh, oh.
Four new permits, #42021 - #42024, inclusive:
Three producing wells (DUCs) reported completed:
Locator: 48761STUDENTLOANS.
I think I do this exercise every six months. My math is often wrong. It's for my curiosity only. This is not meant for anyone else.
Student loans, update, CNBC: link here.
Loans: interest rates currently run 7 - 8% and are fixed for the life of the loan.
Let's do the math:
Under the new system, the individual can pay off the loan early and pay less overall (as one can do with the current system).
Under the proposed new system, one would pay a lot more interest over time, but the monthly payment -- the cash flow required -- would be significantly less.
In the big scheme of things, it's the 6 - 7% interest rate that is the big "killer." I would have no problem with converting all these loans to interest-free loans.
The bigger problem: how realistic are these numbers for outstanding loans.
According to ChatGPT, as of 2025, the most reliable data suggests the average student loan balance per borrower in the US is approximately $40,000.
$40,000 amortized, fixed 6%, over 15 years = $337 / month.
$40,000 amoritzed, fixed interest free over 15 years = $222 / month.
Locator: 48760ARCHIVES.
Tesla: to stop production in Austin, Texas. Breaking. Details to follow. Headline exaggerated:
Questions, Observations
Trump's latest comments:
Israel:
Russia:
Boeing:
Inflation:
Locator: 48759AWS.
The big story today, without question, even bigger than the Mideast, is Amazon.
AI says Amazon is building one of the world's largest AI supercomputers. In fact, when completed, as it stands now, Project Rainier will result in the world's biggest supercomputer.
Amazon is building one of the world's largest AI supercomputers, Project Rainier, in collaboration with Anthropic.
It will be powered by Amazon's Trainium2 AI chips and is expected to be five times larger than the cluster used for Anthropic's current most powerful model.
Once completed, it's anticipated to be the largest reported AI machine globally.
Key Details:
Collaboration: Amazon and Anthropic are co-developing the supercomputer.
Purpose: It will be used for training large AI models, including Anthropic's future models.
Chips: The supercomputer will utilize Amazon's Trainium2 AI chips.
Size: Project Rainier is expected to be significantly larger than existing AI supercomputers.
Availability: It's scheduled for completion in 2025.
Location: The project is located in the U.S.
Cost-effectiveness: Amazon claims the Trainium2 chips will offer better price performance than current GPU-powered instances.
Note: the AWS news is breaking and some of it may be in error. I will sort it out later, but this is how I understand it now.
AWS: announced today -- will compete directly with Nvidia -- will sell "new" chips to Anthropic, thus diverting some Nvidia chips away from Anthropic. These AWS chips will be significantly lower priced that Nvidia. The AWS business model is completely different than the AWS business model with regard to chips sales.
Amazon is providing its custom-designed Trainium and Inferentia AI chips to Anthropic, an AI startup, as part of a deepened strategic collaboration. Anthropic will use these chips to train and deploy its future foundation models, including its Claude series of AI models. This collaboration also involves Amazon investing an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, bringing Amazon's total investment to $8 billion
Meanwhile, still with Amazon:
AWS has recently unveiled Ocelot, a new quantum computing chip designed to significantly reduce the costs of quantum error correction.
Developed by the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, Ocelot aims to accelerate the development of fault-tolerant quantum computers. It utilizes a novel architecture with "cat qubits" to suppress errors and incorporates error correction into the chip's design.
Locator: 48758B.
Note: the AWS news is breaking and some of it may be in error. I will sort it out later, but this is how I understand it now.
AWS: announced today -- will compete directly with Nvidia -- will sell "new" chips to Anthropic, thus diverting some Nvidia chips away from Anthropic. These AWS chips will be significantly lower priced that Nvidia. The AWS business model is completely different than the AWS business model with regard to chips sales.
Amazon is providing its custom-designed Trainium and Inferentia AI chips to Anthropic, an AI startup, as part of a deepened strategic collaboration. Anthropic will use these chips to train and deploy its future foundation models, including its Claude series of AI models. This collaboration also involves Amazon investing an additional $4 billion in Anthropic, bringing Amazon's total investment to $8 billion
Meanwhile, still with Amazon:
AWS has recently unveiled Ocelot, a new quantum computing chip designed to significantly reduce the costs of quantum error correction.
Developed by the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, Ocelot aims to accelerate the development of fault-tolerant quantum computers. It utilizes a novel architecture with "cat qubits" to suppress errors and incorporates error correction into the chip's design.
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Back to the Bakken
WTI: $73.05. Tanker collision in Strait of Hormuz; not direct result of hostilities; probably due to GPS issues secondary to hostilities. Trump leaves G7 summit early to attend to matters. Israel says Thursday / Friday this week significant military event. Trump warns folks to leave Tehran immediately. Apparently mass exits already occurring from Tehran.
New wells:
RBN Energy: big-dollar M&A continues, but for many E&Ps the focus is on fine-tuning portfolios.
The pace of multibillion-dollar acquisitions in the upstream sector may have eased a bit after a frenetic couple of years, but M&A among E&Ps is still happening. And, just as important, producers just coming off big deals are divesting assets that don’t fit their strategies, or reaching agreements to buy “bolt-on” acreage and production in key basins. There’s a lot of M&A “fun, fun, fun” going on, though many of the deals don’t make big headlines because there are only nine or 10 numbers after the dollar sign, not 11. In today’s RBN blog, we look at a variety of recent upstream M&A and divestment announcements and what they tell us about the production end of U.S. energy markets.
As we said a couple of months ago in Money Can Buy It, there was a record $120 billion in upstream M&A in 2024, and that was on the heels of three very active years in 2021, 2022 and 2023. The biggest deals last year were gargantuan, with the biggest being Diamondback Energy’s $26 billion acquisition of Endeavor Energy Resources, ConocoPhillips’s buyout $22.5 billion purchase of Marathon Oil, and Chesapeake Energy’s $11.5 billion purchase of Southwestern Energy (to form a natural-gas-focused giant now known as Expand Energy).
The biggest upstream deals so far this year have been considerably smaller. The stand-out is EOG Resources’ May 30 agreement with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CCPIB) and Encino Energy to acquire their jointly owned Encino Acquisition Partners (EAP) — the #1 condensate producer in eastern Ohio’s Utica Shale — for $5.6 billion, inclusive of EAP’s debt. We explained in Might As Well Jump! a few days ago, that EOG sees the deal as transformative for the company in that it gives it a “third foundational play,” the others being the Permian’s Delaware Basin and the Eagle Ford.