SemiAnalysis

Dylan Patel founded SemiAnalysis in 2020, initially writing semiconductor analysis alone before building a multidisciplinary team. Its official account describes research connecting technical detail, supply chains and business decisions.⁠[1][2]

On March 27, 2026, SemiAnalysis sued former employee Wei Zhou over contract and trade-secret claims. Zhou subsequently alleged improper confidential-data use and dismissal; the company denied his account in its complaint. These are contested allegations, not judicial findings.⁠[3][4]

Andrew MegalaaAndrew MegalaaAndrew Megalaa is an author contributing to SemiAnalysis research on AI subscription costs. He co-authored its October 2026 subscription-value report with Max Kan and Dylan Patel and discussed the testing on SemiAnalysis Weekly.Open the full entry, Max KanMax KanMax Kan is a SemiAnalysis analyst and co-lead of its Tokenomics team. He studies AI token demand and inference economics, holds a computer-science degree from Williams College, previously worked in Strategy and Product at Jane Street and co-founded reinforcement-learning environment startup Habitat.Open the full entry and Dylan Patel reported that, for their contemporary mid-tier model and workload comparison, a $200 Claude plan supplied roughly five times the API-equivalent value of OpenAI’s equally priced plan. This measures tokens valued at API prices, not model capability or productivity.⁠[5]

Coverage spans semiconductor equipment and materials, fabrication, packaging, memory, networking and datacenters, alongside AI training, inference and software. Its public newsletter is separate from institutional research and consulting products.⁠[6]

Its models include Accelerator & HBM, Datacenter Industry and AI Cloud TCO. Research relates chip shipments and manufacturing capacity to datacenter demand, using industry interviews, technical conferences and bottom-up estimates. Model outputs are research estimates rather than corporate financial disclosures.⁠[7][2]

Here, Tokenomics concerns the supply, demand and economics of AI tokens. The model estimates inference throughput from installed accelerators, architectures and workloads, then connects it to application demand, revenue and future compute purchases. Institutional access combines Excel models, dashboards and analyst discussions.⁠[8]

InferenceX, formerly InferenceMAX, measures inference throughput, latency, cost and energy on real accelerators, with public configurations, execution records and results. Fixed-sequence tests and AgentX multi-turn coding represent different workloads. Tests rerun after configuration changes and retain historical data.⁠[9]

Its tools include ClusterMAX for GPU cloud services, a fab map and a die-yield calculator. It also operates STEEL, a teardown laboratory in Oregon, extending its work into chip and process analysis.⁠[7][4][10]

The study isolated input, output, cache-write and cache-read usage, then valued a specified workload mix. Plan limits and model choices change the result; API-equivalent amounts are not cash subsidies. The associated institutional dashboard is separate from an ordinary newsletter subscription.⁠[5]

Website: https://semianalysis.com/ (opens in a new window). Newsletter: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/ (opens in a new window). X: https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_ (opens in a new window). LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: https://www.linkedin.com/company/semianalysis/ (opens in a new window). YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: https://www.youtube.com/@SemiAnalysis (opens in a new window).⁠[7][11][12][13]