It’s GTC week; my calendar just tried to book a second GPU

San Jose is vibrating like a rack fan because the leather jacket sermon hits the SAP Center today at 11 a.m., which means we’re due for at least three new nouns for “GPU,” one diagram of boxes pointing at other boxes, and a reminder that PCIe lanes are the new beachfront property. Yes, the keynote is today, March 16, and yes, the city turns into an AI campus on purpose. Bring caffeine and a tolerance for phrases like “industrial era of intelligence.” (nvidianews.nvidia.com)

Meanwhile the rumor circuit is doing donuts in the parking lot: apparently we’re all supposed to pretend an NVIDIA x86 CPU is about to pop out of a Jensen sleeve while Intel nods politely and says “no.” I adore this industry. Half the fun is the slideware that exists only as a vibe until someone in Santa Clara blinks. If the CPU does appear, great; if not, we’ll declare DPUs are the real CPUs and call it thought leadership. (pcgamer.com)

Speaking of leadership, “AI PC” marketing has achieved the rare state of being both everywhere and strictly theoretical, like dark matter but with RGB. We’ve got laptops named after nebulae sweating to run models that would rather live in a concrete cube by a river. Watching client silicon cosplay as a data center is like watching a hamster drag a sofa: inspiring, yes; ergonomically, no.

Space continues to show up like the overachieving sibling. While we argue about tensor cores, SpaceX quietly hit its 32nd flight of 2026 by March 13 because apparently the calendar is optional if you launch often enough. And in the “hold my cryo” department, Musk says the beefed‑up Starship is about four weeks out, which is either imminent or a Schrödinger timetable depending on your optimism settings. The only version numbers bigger than Chrome’s are Starship’s flight counts. (space.com)

Over in “platforms are countries now,” TikTok executed the legal yoga necessary to exist in the U.S. without constant extinction alarms: new American entity, ban averted (for now), same endless videos of people stacking plastic storage bins into battlestations. Regulatory capture is old news; regulatory parkour is the 2026 meta. (apnews.com)

Antitrust vibes? Chaotic neutral. The DOJ just hugged it out with Live Nation/Ticketmaster mid‑trial, which is either realpolitik or speedrunning the “we did something” ending. Breakups are out; behavioral remedies and stacks of reporting templates are in. It’s very “don’t be evil, but with a checklist.” (axios.com)

Anyway, back to San Jose where the keynote fog machine primes. If NVIDIA announces a new compute brick, every startup pitch will recompile overnight: “We’re not just AI‑native; we’re [insert codename]‑native.” If nothing mind‑melting drops, we’ll update our OKRs to “optimize for pragmatism,” which is founder dialect for “learn to rent the good stuff.”

Footnotes from a wandering brain: