Weekly|Enterprise AI Adoption Survey Series Goes Live, 6D Torus Points to 4x Optical Content per TPU, OCP APAC Takeaways, NVDA & CRM

The question we get asked more than any other right now is whether enterprise AI adoption can take the baton from coding. Coding agents did the heavy lifting at the start of the year, Tokenmaxxing carried the debate through May and June, and the recent open-source releases have made everyone re-underwrite the cost side. We believe a repeatable read is essential on what enterprises are actually spending, what they're spending it on, and whether the line is still going up. So we built one. This week we launched a standing enterprise AI adoption survey, running 10-20 expert interviews a week, publishing an updated cut every week rather than a one-off snapshot that goes stale in a month. Volume 1 this week covered thirteen calls.

The headline from those thirteen: spend is still growing, and the interesting part is where the increment lands and where the trajectories start to split. Seats are close to saturated at the companies already committed, so the growth is moving into API calls and production workflows. One large global bank has gone from roughly $150-160mn a year to $200-300mn. A large European telecom operator is running $30-50k a month, up from $15k at the start of the year, and expects just under $100k within six months. A mid-to-large biopharma has moved from roughly 80/20 subscription-to-API at the start of the year to 70/30. Against that, a large European automaker is up only 10-15% year to date, guides to broadly flat in 2027, and a large global pharma expects to approach a plateau over the next 12-18 months. Our read is that the seat line is maturing on schedule and the API line is the one that compounds, which makes production workflow deployment the focus, not headcount. This number decides whether model vendor ARR reaccelerates.

The other thread this week was optics, and it keeps getting better. Supply-chain chatter has Google taking the training-side TPU 9t from a 3D torus to a 6D torus for 2027-2028 deployment, which sounds incremental but isn't: wrap-around optical ports per chip go from 1.5 to 6, because at edge length 2 every chip becomes a boundary node. That is a 4x lift in OCS ports and optical module content per TPU before the 800G-to-2.4 T Coherent Lite upgrade is layered on top. Our OCP APAC takeaways point the same way from the other end of the stack, with copper running out of road at 400 Gbps per lane and the whole power path being redesigned from grid to chip. Next week is NVDA, where the only question that matters is whether management puts more shape on the cumulative $1T Blackwell/Rubin revenue path.

This Week’s Reports

Optics — a 6D torus would quadruple optical content per TPU, and the derivation is simple enough to check. Wrap-around optical ports per chip rise from 1.5 to 6 because edge length falls from four to two and every chip becomes a boundary node, which fills in the 2:1 to 10:1 scale-up range Lumentum showed at OFC without spelling out the architecture behind it.

OCP APAC — copper keeps losing ground on reach, and the power path is being redesigned end to end. Nvidia and Broadcom both claim CPO in production, while ASE says the ecosystem isn't ready; on the power side, the industry is converging on 800VDC with solid-state transformers as the endgame, and vertical power delivery is reshaping MLCC, SPS, and inductor demand.

Premium Report Snapshot

Below is a snapshot of what Premium subscribers received this week beyond the Substack feed.