Mike Frantzen

AI Great Powers Part 6: Eight Stacks Per Chip, the Arithmetic That Caps China’s AI Hardware
Not wafers, not packaging, not tools: China’s AI output reduces to how many good HBM stacks it can build, divided by eight.
 • Mike Frantzen
AI Great Powers Part 5: The Trench Coat: Who Actually Pays for China’s Chip Push (It Isn’t Beijing)
Local governments out-spend Beijing’s famous Big Fund 1.39:1 (as equity, not grants) while the data-center boom runs on a different subsidy entirely…
 • Mike Frantzen
AI Great Powers Part 4 The Bear Hunt: Finding China’s Hidden Fabs with Nine Boring Databases and One Satellite
I went hunting for chip fabs that officially don’t exist. The method that found them (filings → substations → satellites) matters more than any single…
 • Mike Frantzen
AI Great Powers, Parts 4-10 of 2: Finding China's Hidden AI Fabs. Then I Counted What They Can Build. Then I Measured the Distance to…
A two-part series, now seven parts deeper: the hidden fabs, who subsidizes, the eight-stack arithmetic, the empty data center halls, the 2033 clock, the…
 • Mike Frantzen
AI Great Powers Part 三 of 2: The Chinese Filings Exposed the Machine
English filings showed the liability story. Chinese filings exposed the operating model: state-shaped demand, subsidy bloodstream, accounting perimeter…
 • Mike Frantzen
AI Didn’t Replace Engineers. It Replaced the Excuse to Hire.
Covid gave tech companies permission to hire ahead. AI is giving them permission to stop backfilling.
 • Mike Frantzen
AI Great Powers Part 2: Chinese Model Builders
China can still build under sanctions. What it can’t yet match is America’s private hyperscaler capex light-money-on-fire hose.
 • Mike Frantzen
AI Great Powers Part 1: Chinese AI Hardware
Not Blocked. Bottlenecked. Huawei’s financials show China is building an indigenous AI-hardware stack, but memory still gates the scale.
 • Mike Frantzen
What CEOs Should Learn From an Expensive Market
When public markets pay extreme prices for future growth, private-company boards start making assumptions dangerous to a durable business.
 • Mike Frantzen
The IPO Lawsuit Trap Is Real. The Quiet Period Isn’t the Trap.
I went looking for nuisance lawsuits during the SEC quiet period. The data pointed to a broader public-company litigation tax.
 • Mike Frantzen

May 2026

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