Silicon Futures for April 2026 – The AI CPU craze, Qualcomm’s custom AI, Google TPU 8 explained!

Silicon Futures is a neXt Curve reThink Podcast series on AI and semiconductor tech and the industry topics that matter.

This month shall be dubbed the month of specialization as the tide of AI compute make a hard turn toward inference and agentic AI. What is all this all this madness about CPUs about? The Silicon Futures Trio unpacks the mystery of the month.

In this episode, Leonard, Karl and Jim talk about some of the top headlines from April of 2026.

➡️ What’s up with the CPU mania in AI? (2:21)
➡️ Why is everyone going custom, specialized AI systems? (7:30)
➡️ The diverse velocities of AI change & digestion. (9:45)
➡️ The many roles of CPU in an agentic AI system. (12:22)
➡️ Cloud demand driven by AI system complexity and speed. (17:40)
➡️ The AI narrative has graduated from the “chip”. (19:50)
➡️ Is the AI boom sustainable? (23:36)
➡️ Clarifying the Google TPU 8 Enigma. (29:20)
➡️ How will AI system specialization and general purpose play out? (31:53)
➡️ The hyperscale red flag for NVIDIA. (35:44)
➡️ Where are the AI business model transformations? (37: 50)
➡️ A quick thought on Terafab by Intel & Elon. (42:12)
➡️ Impressions on Qualcomm’s custom AI silicon & systems. (43:26)