Refresh and rumor protocol

The corpus is a dated snapshot, not a timeless market map. Refresh it without turning search snippets or copied leaks into facts.

Cadence

• Weekly: frontier-lab/hyperscaler releases, major funding, acquisitions, cancellations, incidents, export controls, and material rumors.
• Monthly: startup status, serving/runtime releases, capacity/site announcements, power, cooling, network, HBM/packaging, and construction signals.
• Quarterly: public-company filings, capex/lease/purchase obligations, revenue/losses, backlog, customer concentration, installed capacity, and delivery schedules.
• On new production-trace research: extract population, window, fields, fitted distributions, quantiles, drift, anonymization, and limitations immediately.

Search ledger

For each refresh, record the exact date and search families used. Minimum families:

1. entity + infrastructure, cluster, GPU, TPU, Trainium, datacenter, power;
2. entity + inference, batching, KV cache, prefill decode, routing, SLO;
3. LLM production trace, workload characterization, token distribution, prefix reuse, tenant skew, Zipf, burst, seasonality, agent trace;
4. AI datacenter + grid, water, cooling, permitting, opposition, delay, canceled, turbine, transformer, optics, HBM, CoWoS;
5. company/project + funding, debt, bankruptcy, shutdown, acquisition, license, partnership, release, generally available;
6. company/project + rumor, reportedly, sources say, leak, followed by a search for the earliest origin and independent corroboration.

Search snippets are discovery aids only. Open the source and record the exact publication and event dates before adding an entry.

Rumor lifecycle

A rumor entry requires:

• earliest known origin and whether it had direct sourcing;
• every claimed independent corroborator, with copied/syndicated reports collapsed;
• concrete proposition and expected resolution date;
• confidence and reasons, not just a label;
• expiry or next-review date;
• later state: unresolved, partially_confirmed, confirmed, refuted, or expired;
• official confirmation/refutation source when one appears.

Rumor entries never support an unqualified architecture or roadmap fact. They can justify watching a seam, preparing a reversible experiment, or assigning probability in a scenario.

Contradiction handling

Do not overwrite the older entry when a later source disagrees. Add the new source and record:

• whether the boundary changed (global vs U.S., IT vs facility power, physical GPUs vs H100-equivalents, announced vs online);
• whether the date changed the state;
• whether the estimate methodology differs;
• whether one source is a vendor claim and the other a measured observation;
• the remaining unresolved range.

Completion bar for a slice

A slice is complete only when it has:

• an explicit actor/topic roster;
• primary-source queries for every actor where primary sources can exist;
• credible secondary reporting for private facts and rumors;
• dated entries with evidence/confidence classes;
• contradictions and missing measurements;
• implications tied to a fak seam or benchmark assumption;
• a validator pass and a visible next-refresh date.