Every quarter, I like to do a small update to give our readers a behind-the-scenes look at what is happening. Often, there is a big difference between what folks see publicly and the inner workings of STH, so I like to peel back the layers. This quarter has been a whirlwind with AI continuing to heat up, a new server CPU cycle happening, and some personal challenges.
Previous Updates
If you want to check out how this series has evolved, here are the links to the previous ones:
- STH 2019: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
- STH 2020: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
- STH 2021: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
- STH 2022: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
- STH 2023: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
- STH 2024: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
- STH 2025: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
- STH 2026: Q1 – Q2 – Q3 – Q4
It is amazing how time flies.
STH Q3 2026 Letter A Moving Target
In 2025, I did 98 flights and vowed not to do that again this year. By the end of this quarter, I will have passed 70, so I am not entirely sure how well I am doing at that goal. Earlier in September, when I got back from Seoul, I had just logged 26 flights in 46 days. We did a number of lab tours, and you just saw the first one go live in Inside the Lab, where the Arm AGI CPU is brought to life.
To give you some sense of what the schedule was like, in late August I flew to Ohio for the Micro Center Columbus, Ohio Grand Reopening. Here is the livestream that Jeff Geerling and I did in-store:
The morning after the all-day Micro Center event, I flew to Stanford, and we did three days of Hot Chips, which was so much busier than normal. I think we did something like 29 pieces in 3 days when normally we aim for one piece a day. The Waymo Sensor Fusion Processor at Hot Chips 2026 was one that we had not planned to cover, but decided to just because it was such a cool talk. The day after Hot Chips, when my fingers were hurting, I had breakfast-to-dinner meetings, a lab tour in between, and then flew out that night. A few days later I was off to Seoul.
Tried this for my first time in Seoul yesterday. It fought back. pic.twitter.com/2n44mL7w57
— Patrick J Kennedy (@Patrick1Kennedy) September 2, 2026
Ever since I got out of school, I have worked a lot, but the pace in the industry right now is just something different. That, and then going into a server launch cycle, is always fun. We have been working on AgentSTH V7 for a long time. We have also been profiling some workloads recently that may become an appendix results set before we fold them into AgentSTH V8. You should expect the CPU and server platform work to pick up pace over the next few weeks.
We also have several new local AI workstation platforms that we are testing, so local AI now needs 400GbE, and that means more fun with optics.
Starting this quarter, we finally got to show off Cosm in Los Angeles, which was really neat. Joe, George, and I got to watch the Arizona Cardinals versus Dallas Cowboys game there and then filmed the next day.
That has become a theme over the last few quarters. For example, Sam and I filmed a video about a month ago that I was hoping would go live in early September. It was one of the coolest tours we have done in some time, but now we are hoping it goes live in October. Often, when we do on-site tours, folks only agree if they can ensure there are no confidential elements in the background. That process can take a long time.
Ryan has done some awesome pieces like the AMD Helios architecture deep-dive and his keynote live blogging. Without his work, it would be hard for me to keep this schedule, so I wanted to call that out. I also wanted to call out the fact that we have been doing fewer mini PCs. To be frank, current NAND and DRAM pricing, combined with the fact that companies can sell whatever server CPUs they can make right now, means it is getting harder to be excited about platforms that would have cost less than half as much a year ago. On that same note, given the cost of NAND and DRAM, I think the answer is that if you are going to buy a new system in this environment, it should be for a net-new AI workload. That will make folks upset, but we are using our non-AI systems longer because of rising system prices.
Another major challenge is that the AI side feels very exciting right now. It feels almost like building a PC in the 1990s or early 2000s again, but at a higher pace. Many vendors are releasing hardware at a rapid rate. The models, software, and, more importantly, what you can do get better every few weeks. That ecosystem has so much energy behind it that it is less exciting to review a system that was $500 only twelve months ago, is now $1100, and does not participate in it.
On the personal side, the past few months have been a straight rollercoaster. Earlier this quarter, the team was making plans as I found out that we were expecting in late Q1 2027. When I was in Korea earlier this month, I woke up to find out that we were actually expecting twins, but unfortunately we lost both a few days earlier. That was not the ideal news to wake up to 10,000km away from home.
Earlier this year, I was a bit worried about hiring more folks because of the pace AI has been taking over our industry. I read a lot of articles these days and think, “Wait, did AI just write all of this completely without a human in the loop?” I dislike the slop articles, but part of me is also thinking about what happened with press releases 15+ years ago, when it became pointless to cover them since folks just reposted them at effectively zero cost. Now I am more worried that the trend I have been seeing has jaded me a bit. Perhaps we did need to add more to the team this year than we had planned.
I think we might need to hire someone in the Phoenix area very soon to help with the load. That has become clear over the past two weeks, as I have had to help more at home.
The Axautik Group Update and Substack
In Q1 2025, we rolled out our new analyst arm, the Axautik Group. This is the “Analyst” part of our Analyst-Influencer-Other model. We had quite a few popular pieces this quarter.
The Axautik Group will produce content designed more for the financial and executive communities. Some folks will be upset that AG content will be priced more for those communities. This is not a replacement for STH in any way. Instead, it will be designed to take much of what we learn by doing STH and turn it into formats we can monetize.
There is a question of whether this will be more of a subscription model or selling one-off reports. We started doing a Substack in August 2024. That Substack has been growing really well and is becoming an important revenue source in 2025. It is now running at a clip of over 100K views/ month this quarter, which is not bad.
In 2026, we are going to have a lot more AG Substack content, so get ready for that.
STH Labs: The Shorts Channel Update
As a 2024 project, we have the new STH Labs shorts channel here. That has been in a slow growth mode for the last few quarters.
I am personally not a huge fan of shorts, but on the other hand, we cannot do 15-20 minute videos for everything, and probably should not for smaller topics. Having a second channel is a fun place just to cover things not on the main channel.
Subscribe to the STH’s Newsletter and YouTube
Did you know STH has a free weekly newsletter that comes out on Saturday with curated “Top 5” pieces from the week? We know you cannot visit every day, so we can deliver our picks for weekend reading directly to your inbox. Subscribing to the newsletter is easy. Here is the form.
We are not selling your e-mail addresses, and MailChimp is managing everything at this point, so you can subscribe and unsubscribe from the list as you want.
We are not promoting the newsletter via overlays and pop-ups. Those are very effective, but they are bad for readers. I do not like them, so as long as I have a say, we are not going to have newsletter signup overlays. I run STH as something I would want to visit daily, even if I did not work on it.
Finally, subscribe to our YouTube and check it out here. Since that is a big focus at this point.
Subscribing to STH’s newsletter helps you see my favorite pieces of each week and a preview of the next week. Subscribing to the STH YouTube channel also helps us demonstrate our reach beyond just the website. Sometimes, doing things like showing power consumption or fan noise is easier than writing about it. This has also been something important for STH over the past few months. We have to demonstrate reach, and simple things like subscriber counts help explain reach.
Final Words
Once again, thank you to all of our readers, Substack subscribers, clients, the STH team, and our advertisers for making everything possible.
Also, buckle up for Q4, as it is set to be an absolute doozy for the industry. Perhaps the most exciting part is that we are still a few quarters away from the bets made at the ChatGPT launch turning into shipped products and folks wanting to talk about them. This is on a path to accelerate and get even more exciting over the next few quarters.
