Yesterday's signals, distilled.

Yesterday's signals, distilled, A look back at March 18.

Engineers leaving FAANG for other FAANG. Others walking away from “dream jobs” to start AI companies with their families. Chinese cities offering free apartments to one-person, AI-leveraged startups.

Samsung committing $73.3B to capex and R&D in a single year. European chip importers paying air freight premiums just to keep lines running. A national security agency telling enterprises how to harden their identity stack.

Underneath all of it: the unit of leverage is changing. Talent is more fluid, smaller, and more capital-efficient. Infrastructure is more capital-intensive, geopolitically exposed, and strategically constrained. The middle, traditional SaaS, mid-market infra, “nice to have” AI pilots, is where the squeeze shows up first.

If your 2026 plan assumes stable talent, abstracted supply chains, and “AI as a feature,” you’re misreading the board. The real game is now: own the operational graph, secure the identity plane, and design for a world where a single operator plus a cluster can do what used to take a team.

BLUF

At Neue Alchemy, we support leaders navigating inflection points, when tech, capital, and policy converge. If your roadmap is already in motion and you're pressure-testing execution, we're open to conversations.

We also reserve capacity for education, SMBs, and mid-market leaders, those starting, mid-flight, or seeking outside perspective before systems harden.

INFRASTRUCTURE / SOVEREIGNTY

Capex is surging while supply chains get narrower and riskier

Samsung plans to spend about $73.3B on capital expenditure and research in 2026, up from roughly $60B in 2025, and pay around $6.5B in regular dividends, per Reuters.

This is a direct statement that the chip and AI hardware race is still in its investment phase, not its harvest phase.

The Bet: Demand for advanced nodes, memory, and AI-adjacent components will justify record capex over the next 3–5 years.

So What? This scale of spend means capacity is coming, but not evenly and not instantly. If you’re a heavy compute or advanced component buyer, your leverage improves if you can underwrite volume and duration. The winners in this cycle will be the ones who pre-commit intelligently, not the ones who “wait for prices to come down.”

The Risk: If macro or AI demand underperforms, overcapacity can whiplash pricing and vendor health. If you’ve over-concentrated on a single supplier or node, you inherit their cycle risk.

Action: • Map your 24–36 month compute and component demand and identify what you can credibly lock in now. • Start conversations on multi-year, take-or-pay style agreements, even at modest scale, to secure priority. • Build