Microsoft is shipping a real silicon chip — and it runs AI workloads

Microsoft just shipped Project Silica — a glass disc that stores data using femtosecond laser pulses, and it's not some lab curiosity. The thing actually works. Read data with polarized light, write with lasers, and it lasts for millennia without power. This is the company that built the cloud doing hardware for once, and they're making it open source so anyone can use it.

Why this matters for us: the cloud is a real place with real limits — power, heat, bandwidth — and the companies building it are finally making parts to fix those limits instead of just renting other people's.