October 1, 2026 · ITK Podcast · Hosts: Alex and Jordan

Alex: Welcome to the I T K Podcast, Information Technology. I'm Alex.

Jordan: And I'm Jordan. It is Thursday, October first, twenty twenty-six. Today: a seven-billion-dollar chip deal built on a legal loophole, the least glamorous part of AI posting the wildest earnings you've ever seen, and a diet study that might ruin everyone's favorite food fight.

Alex: Plus our regular reminder that the wellness industry would really prefer you not ask follow-up questions. First, the big one. Tencent has reportedly signed a five-year deal to lease around one hundred thousand advanced AI chips from Oracle, running in data centers across Southeast Asia, for about seven billion dollars, with roughly thirty percent paid up front.

Jordan: Question-everything hats on, because neither company has confirmed any of this. The Financial Times cites people familiar with the matter, and Reuters picked it up while noting it could not independently verify the report. What we know is that multiple outlets describe the same shape of a deal. What we do not know is whether the deal exists.

Alex: And that distinction matters, because the story underneath is fascinating either way. United States export controls bar the sale of the most advanced AI chips into mainland China, but the rules mostly govern physical shipments, not remote access to compute hosted somewhere else. So Chinese firms increasingly just rent the compute abroad.

Jordan: It is the cloud-access loophole. Lawmakers in Washington have been talking about closing it, while Tencent's AI spending keeps climbing and its free cash flow just went negative on huge prepayments for compute. The AI boom is being paid for in advance, in cash, by everyone.

Alex: Which brings us to the least glamorous and maybe most important story of the week. For two years the AI conversation has been all about processors. Micron's earnings suggest the real squeeze has moved. Memory.

Jordan: Micron posted quarterly revenue of about fifty-four billion dollars. A year ago it was about eleven billion. Net income went from about three billion to nearly thirty-eight billion, and they are guiding to about sixty-one billion next quarter. A fivefold revenue jump is not a normal earnings beat, it is a regime change.

Alex: The product everyone is fighting over is high-bandwidth memory, which stacks layers of memory chips so data moves faster. Every new generation of graphics processors from Nvidia and AMD uses more of it, and only three companies on Earth make it in volume: SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron. They cannot keep up, and prices have soared.

Jordan: The most advanced intelligence humanity has ever built is being throttled by a supply problem. There just is not enough of the stuff. And where there is a bottleneck, there is a startup with a laser. A San Francisco company called Volantis just raised eighty-eight million dollars to replace the tiny wires between computing chips and memory chips with beams of laser light, which could let them pack around two hundred twenty memory chips around a single processor.

Alex: My favorite detail: these are the same tiny lasers that power face recognition in hundreds of millions of iPhones. Apple spent a decade building that supply chain, and now an AI chip startup gets to ride it. The chief executive basically said nobody will win a Nobel Prize if this works, but nobody needs to. Boring plumbing decides who wins the future.

Jordan: Speaking of the future, remember Monday's special on rogue AI agents? The industry's immune system is responding. On Sunday, Nvidia announced the Open Agent Safety Platform: OpenShell, secure runtime software that sets boundaries for agents, paired with Sentry, an out-of-band watchdog running on Nvidia's BlueField data processing units. If an agent tries to leave its boundary, Sentry quarantines and stops it in milliseconds.

Alex: Over one hundred organizations signed on, including Anthropic, CrowdStrike, JPMorganChase, Microsoft, and Red Hat. Sentry also verifies agent identity and enforces zero-trust access from an isolated trust domain. After a week of agents wandering into government websites, the industry is building guardrails at the hardware level.

Jordan: And the agents keep coming. On Monday, Robinhood launched trading agents that analyze the market and trade around the clock, with more than one hundred fifty thousand agentic trading accounts already opened. Around-the-clock trading by an agent with standing instructions on repeat. What could possibly go wrong.

Alex: The agent era is not coming, it is here. The question is no longer whether agents will act for us, but what boundaries we build around them. Which is exactly what our sign-off is about. Quick break first, then we wade into the diet wars.

Jordan: Quick pause, because somebody has to keep the lights on around here, and that somebody is at Your Service Techs.

Alex: That's right. For thirty years, the fine folks at at Your Service Techs have been rescuing computers, babysitting servers, untangling networks, building websites, and installing camera systems so you can finally find out which raccoon keeps knocking over your trash cans.

Jordan: Whether you are in Grand Rapids, Michigan or Phoenix, Arizona, if it plugs in, beeps, or connects to the Wi-Fi, they can fix it, secure it, or set it up.

Alex: Give them a call. In Michigan, that is six one six, five three five, twenty twenty-two. In Arizona, six oh two, two three two, sixty sixty.

Jordan: Or visit them on the web at phxfix dot com. at Your Service Techs: because turning it off and on again should not be your entire I T strategy.

Alex: And we are back. For years the loudest voices in nutrition have said carbs are the enemy, or fat is the enemy, or the only diet that works is the one with a book deal attached. This week, two studies looked at all of that and said it is more complicated than your guru told you.

Jordan: Start with the punchier one. A randomized trial in the journal Aging Cell: one hundred four adults, sixty-five to seventy-five, four weeks, four controlled diets, all food provided. The diet with the clearest improvement in biological-age markers was not low-carb. It got fifty-three percent of its energy from carbohydrates.

Alex: Strong design for nutrition research: randomized, controlled, no calorie restriction. And the researchers were clear this was not a license to mainline refined carbs. The diets emphasized minimally processed foods, fiber, complex carbohydrates, and plant foods. Four weeks, in people in their late sixties and early seventies, and the markers moved.

Jordan: Now the bigger one, published in September in Nature Communications: six thousand four hundred seventy participants, plus about a thousand more to double-check, measuring biological age with DNA methylation across roughly eight hundred fifty thousand genome sites. They tested ten dietary patterns, Mediterranean, Nordic, DASH, MIND, strictly plant-based, and all were linked to slower biological aging. No single diet was superior.

Alex: The detail that got me: more than seventy percent of the biological pathways were identical across all the diets. Cell structure, cell signaling, metabolism. Different diets, same machinery. As one researcher put it, you do not need a perfect diet.

Jordan: Our usual, then: the claim, the evidence, and what is unknown. The claim online this week is carbs make you younger, or scientists prove no diet is best. The evidence is one solid short-term randomized trial, and one large observational study showing all healthy diets slow epigenetic aging through mostly shared pathways.

Alex: What is unknown is a lot. Four weeks is short, one hundred four people is small, and the big study is observational, so association, not causation. Neither overturns the basics that every serious voice in this space, from Dave Asprey to Doctor Mark Hyman, actually agrees on: eat mostly whole foods, plenty of fiber and plants, and go easy on the refined stuff.

Jordan: The diet wars are fought over the last ten percent: the macros, the labels, the tribes. The science keeps pointing at the first ninety percent, which is boring and unmarketable. Nobody is selling a book called it is mostly the same healthy stuff. Question the guru, including us. Especially us.

Alex: That's our show. The chips are leased, maybe. The memory is definitely scarce. And your diet probably does not need a new ideology, just better groceries. Until next time, remember this.

Jordan: Question everything, including us… especially us.