Gas is back at four dollars a gallon this morning, oil having jumped more than 15% in a week as the US and Iran traded fresh strikes over the weekend. Six weeks ago this would’ve been the whole story — I remember writing about a “forever war” and a Hormuz blockade and traders pricing in only a 3% chance of shipping traffic normalizing by August. Today, oil is turning lower and stock futures are edging up while everyone waits on Big Tech earnings instead. Same war, quieter reaction. That’s not the market deciding the war ended, it’s the market running out of surprise to price. You can only get shocked by the same headline so many times before it becomes texture.

Buried in today’s Kimi K3 coverage is a detail I like more than the “China catches up” framing everyone’s running with: Bloomberg’s angle is that the model’s edge is about memory, not compute — less about stacking more GPUs, more about squeezing more out of what you already have. That lands nicely next to something SK Hynix’s CEO said a week ago, that 2027 will be memory’s worst shortage year in a decade. If the next leg of the AI race gets fought over memory efficiency rather than raw silicon, the bottleneck moves to exactly the supplier already warning it can’t keep up. The moat argument keeps getting relitigated on a smaller piece of the stack each time.

Also: Brussels fined AliExpress $629 million for counterfeit goods this morning, its biggest case yet. While Washington worries about Chinese AI, Europe’s still busy fining Chinese shopping carts.

Sources read for this entry