We read an en­tire scroll — with­out ever open­ing it

PHerc. 1667, sealed since the erup­tion of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been vir­tu­ally un­wrapped and read from be­gin­ning to end.

June 25th, 2026

Read the preprint: Complete vir­tual un­wrap­ping and read­ing of a rolled Herculaneum pa­pyrus (PDF). The data is openly avail­able at scroll­prize.org/​data, and the code on GitHub.

For al­most 2,000 years, the car­bonized li­brary of Herculaneum has kept a cruel bar­gain: its scrolls sur­vived the erup­tion of Mount Vesuvius, but only by be­com­ing too frag­ile to open. To read one was to de­stroy it. Hundreds of rolls have there­fore re­mained sealed, their con­tents pre­served yet un­reach­able.

Today that changes. We have com­pletely vir­tu­ally un­wrapped and read PHerc. 1667 — the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge com­mu­nity knows as Scroll 4 — with­out ever touch­ing its pages. It is the first Herculaneum pa­pyrus to be dig­i­tally un­rolled and read in full, end to end, and made avail­able for sus­tained schol­arly study.

From a sealed lump to a read­able book​

PHerc. 1667 be­gan as a black­ened, rolled mass of car­bonized pa­pyrus. To read it, we never un­rolled it phys­i­cally. Instead, we scanned it with high-res­o­lu­tion X-rays, re­con­structed the wound sheet in­side the vol­ume, flat­tened it into a read­able sur­face, and used ma­chine learn­ing to bring out the faint traces of an­cient ink.

The work reaches be­yond a sin­gle scroll. Alongside the com­plete read­ing of PHerc. 1667, the re­search es­tab­lishes a method that holds up un­der in­de­pen­dent checks and scales to other rolls.

PHerc. 1667 — read in full​

PHerc. 1667 is what sur­vives of a larger roll: ear­lier at­tempts to open it by hand — in the nine­teenth cen­tury, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — de­stroyed its outer lay­ers and left only the com­pact in­ner core, about 8 cm of an orig­i­nal height of 19 – 24 cm. From that sur­viv­ing por­tion we have now re­cov­ered and read the text in full — the lower parts of some twenty-two columns, tran­scribed and re­viewed by pa­py­rol­o­gists. It is the first time the pre­served text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll has been read con­tin­u­ously, end to end, rather than in iso­lated words or patches.

The re­cov­ered text is a philo­soph­i­cal trea­tise on ethics, and the ev­i­dence points to a Stoic work: it turns on hu­man na­ture, im­pulse, and the moral progress of hu­man be­ings, and its fi­nal pre­served col­umn names Aristocreon — nephew and dis­ci­ple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, to­gether with the lan­guage and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic con­text and dates it to the 2nd cen­tury BC.

Because the pa­pyrus is dam­aged, the read­ings are frag­men­tary, with gaps where the sur­face is lost. Even so, sev­eral pas­sages can be read clearly for the first time in two thou­sand years:

“…we will in­quire into some­thing, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we de­part from our­selves and from our own na­ture…”

“Having…strained our­selves to the ut­most through re­search and learn­ing…pos­sess­ing the same prac­ti­cal wis­dom…”

“…such be­ing the goods for us, even from the op­po­site evils there will be nei­ther any­thing good — let alone beau­ti­ful — nor any­thing bad — let alone ugly — nor hap­pi­ness…”

Translated from the Greek; the full col­umn-by-col­umn tran­scrip­tion is in the preprint.

PHerc. Paris 4 — ink made vis­i­ble by higher res­o­lu­tion​

In a sec­ond scroll — PHerc. Paris 4, the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge com­mu­nity knows as Scroll 1 — a higher-res­o­lu­tion imag­ing tech­nique makes the ink di­rectly vis­i­ble in­side the scroll it­self, in the three-di­men­sional X-ray data, for the first time. Segmented in 3D and pro­jected back onto the un­wrapped page, that ink matches the text read in the 2023 Grand Prize one-to-one — an in­de­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion, from bet­ter data, that the read­ing is real.

PHerc. 139 — a ti­tle, and an au­thor​

In a third scroll, PHerc. 139, we re­cover the scrol­l’s ti­tle and au­thor at­tri­bu­tion: the work is iden­ti­fied as Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 — a trea­tise by the Epicurean philoso­pher whose works fill so much of this li­brary. Reading the ti­tle of a closed scroll tells schol­ars what a roll con­tains be­fore a sin­gle col­umn of its body is stud­ied.

How it was done​

The scans were ac­quired with high-res­o­lu­tion phase-con­trast X-ray mi­cro­to­mog­ra­phy on the BM18 beam­line at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble — an in­stru­ment able to re­solve the wafer-thin, densely packed lay­ers of a Herculaneum roll. The work was car­ried out in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the National Library of Naples “Vittorio Emanuele III”, which safe­guards the Herculaneum pa­pyri. From those vol­umes, the team re­con­structed the scrol­l’s geom­e­try, traced and flat­tened its sur­face into a read­able sheet, and trained ma­chine-learn­ing mod­els to de­tect ink that is al­most in­dis­tin­guish­able from the car­bonized pa­pyrus be­neath it. Each read­ing was then ex­am­ined and tran­scribed by pa­py­rol­o­gists.

Crucially, all of this is open. The to­mo­graphic data, re­con­structed sur­faces and tran­scrip­tions are re­leased un­der a Creative Commons li­cence at scroll­prize.org/​data and archived at the ESRF, and the code is on GitHub. Anyone can check the work, build on it, and ap­ply it to the scrolls that re­main.

A vic­tory for open, global sci­ence​

This is what open sci­ence makes pos­si­ble. The vir­tual un­wrap­ping of the Herculaneum scrolls was pi­o­neered at EduceLab by its prin­ci­pal in­ves­ti­ga­tor, Professor Brent Seales. In 2023 Seales opened his lab’s imag­ing and soft­ware tech­nol­ogy to the Vesuvius Challenge — a pub­lic, do­na­tion-funded ef­fort he co-founded with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to read the scrolls in the open — and from there a global com­mu­nity took up the prob­lem. The first let­ters and the 2023 Grand Prize were won by con­tes­tants from across the world.

What is less widely known is what hap­pened next. Most of the Vesuvius Challenge re­search team first ar­rived as con­tes­tants. They en­tered the open com­pe­ti­tion, won prizes for the break­throughs they made, and were then re­cruited onto the team that has now read an en­tire scroll. The peo­ple be­hind this break­through are, in large part, the global com­mu­nity the Challenge it­self cre­ated.

What’s next​

PHerc. 1667 is one scroll. Hundreds more re­main sealed — an en­tire li­brary of phi­los­o­phy, po­etry and prose wait­ing to be read for the first time since an­tiq­uity. The method shown here is built to scale, and every­thing needed to ap­ply it is open.

If you want to help read the rest of the li­brary:

Read the sci­ence: the preprint (PDF).

Get the data and code: scroll­prize.org/​data and GitHub.

Join the ef­fort: get started and be­come part of the com­mu­nity read­ing the scrolls.

The thoughts of the an­cient world, sealed in dark­ness for two mil­len­nia, are com­ing back into the light — a whole scroll at a time.

If you want to share some­thing that does­n’t fit in a com­ment, please drop a link to it.

If you want to share some­thing that does­n’t fit in a com­ment, please drop a link to it.

My con­do­lences to fam­ily and friends. I’ve been read­ing Om’s blog for years and al­ways en­joyed his in­sight, and es­pe­cially his in­ter­weaved cre­ative en­deav­ors. His pho­tog­ra­phy has al­ways been strik­ing. He’ll be missed.

Om was such a force around in­no­va­tion through­out the early 2000s.. I re­lied on his writ­ing and coun­cil as a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist with Orange Ventures any nu­mer­ous ar­ti­cles on the work we did through­out the early days of Android. He had a tal­ent for hon­ing it on and dis­till­ing lead­ing tech­nolo­gies help oth­ers un­der­stand their po­ten­tial. and for the past decade or more it’s been fun to see the world through his lens and his pho­tog­ra­phy posts. May his mem­ory be a bless­ing.

My con­do­lences to fam­ily and friends. I’ve been read­ing Om’s blog for years and al­ways en­joyed his in­sight, and es­pe­cially his in­ter­weaved cre­ative en­deav­ors. His pho­tog­ra­phy has al­ways been strik­ing. He’ll be missed.

Om was such a force around in­no­va­tion through­out the early 2000s.. I re­lied on his writ­ing and coun­cil as a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist with Orange Ventures any nu­mer­ous ar­ti­cles on the work we did through­out the early days of Android. He had a tal­ent for hon­ing it on and dis­till­ing lead­ing tech­nolo­gies help oth­ers un­der­stand their po­ten­tial. and for the past decade or more it’s been fun to see the world through his lens and his pho­tog­ra­phy posts. May his mem­ory be a bless­ing.

Om was such a force around in­no­va­tion through­out the early 2000s.. I re­lied on his writ­ing and coun­cil as a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist with Orange Ventures any nu­mer­ous ar­ti­cles on the work we did through­out the early days of Android. He had a tal­ent for hon­ing it on and dis­till­ing lead­ing tech­nolo­gies help oth­ers un­der­stand their po­ten­tial. and for the past decade or more it’s been fun to see the world through his lens and his pho­tog­ra­phy posts. May his mem­ory be a bless­ing.

I did­n’t know Om well, but I sa­vored my en­coun­ters with him, the last of which was a year ago at WWDC. He had been do­ing the best writ­ing of his life in re­cent months on this site, and in his ab­sence, we will all un­der­stand the tech in­dus­try a lit­tle less well. I’m so very sorry.

A sad day when we lose one of the most sup­port­ive and bright­est. He was a fa­ther and men­tor to the en­tire Gigaom fam­ily, help­ing us be­come bet­ter writ­ers, and hu­mans, than we thought we could be. I will miss you, Om. Peace to you and yours.

I did­n’t know Om well, but I sa­vored my en­coun­ters with him, the last of which was a year ago at WWDC. He had been do­ing the best writ­ing of his life in re­cent months on this site, and in his ab­sence, we will all un­der­stand the tech in­dus­try a lit­tle less well. I’m so very sorry.

A sad day when we lose one of the most sup­port­ive and bright­est. He was a fa­ther and men­tor to the en­tire Gigaom fam­ily, help­ing us be­come bet­ter writ­ers, and hu­mans, than we thought we could be. I will miss you, Om. Peace to you and yours.

A sad day when we lose one of the most sup­port­ive and bright­est. He was a fa­ther and men­tor to the en­tire Gigaom fam­ily, help­ing us be­come bet­ter writ­ers, and hu­mans, than we thought we could be. I will miss you, Om. Peace to you and yours.

The best.

The best.

We never met, never even talked re­ally- just a cou­ple of brief pleas­antries ex­changed here and there over shared in­ter­ests… yet this news is like a gut punch. Om was an in­sight­ful, steady­ing voice through­out my time as­so­ci­ated with the tech­nol­ogy in­dus­try- his ex­pe­ri­ence calmed choppy wa­ters, and was of­ten a much needed dose of per­spec­tive in a world in­creas­ingly happy to fo­cus on style over sub­stance. His es­says felt like a throw­back in the best pos­si­ble way, and his pas­sion for el­e­gance and crafts­man­ship was in­fec­tious. I thank him for the gift of his knowl­edge, and his un­err­ing pas­sion for the in­ter­est­ing. I hope his legacy brings com­fort to his fam­ily and loved ones.

Om was a pi­o­neer, al­ways cu­ri­ous, in­tel­lec­tual depth, an as­tute chron­i­cler of our time and fore­most a good per­son

We never met, never even talked re­ally- just a cou­ple of brief pleas­antries ex­changed here and there over shared in­ter­ests… yet this news is like a gut punch.

Om was an in­sight­ful, steady­ing voice through­out my time as­so­ci­ated with the tech­nol­ogy in­dus­try- his ex­pe­ri­ence calmed choppy wa­ters, and was of­ten a much needed dose of per­spec­tive in a world in­creas­ingly happy to fo­cus on style over sub­stance. His es­says felt like a throw­back in the best pos­si­ble way, and his pas­sion for el­e­gance and crafts­man­ship was in­fec­tious.

I thank him for the gift of his knowl­edge, and his un­err­ing pas­sion for the in­ter­est­ing. I hope his legacy brings com­fort to his fam­ily and loved ones.

Om was a pi­o­neer, al­ways cu­ri­ous, in­tel­lec­tual depth, an as­tute chron­i­cler of our time and fore­most a good per­son

Om was a pi­o­neer, al­ways cu­ri­ous, in­tel­lec­tual depth, an as­tute chron­i­cler of our time and fore­most a good per­son

A great man. What a ter­ri­ble loss for the SF com­mu­nity.

OM was a pi­o­neer. I have been deeply shaped and in­flu­enced by his writ­ings, learn­ings that he shared via his blogs, newslet­ter, talks etc. Very sad to hear of his pass­ing. Shall pray for his peace. Condolences to his fam­ily and friends.

A great man. What a ter­ri­ble loss for the SF com­mu­nity.

OM was a pi­o­neer. I have been deeply shaped and in­flu­enced by his writ­ings, learn­ings that he shared via his blogs, newslet­ter, talks etc. Very sad to hear of his pass­ing. Shall pray for his peace. Condolences to his fam­ily and friends.

OM was a pi­o­neer. I have been deeply shaped and in­flu­enced by his writ­ings, learn­ings that he shared via his blogs, newslet­ter, talks etc.

Very sad to hear of his pass­ing. Shall pray for his peace.

Condolences to his fam­ily and friends.

This is ter­ri­ble news … so so sad i have never met him in real life only fol­lowed through on­line blogs and also on his site …life is frag­ile, may his soul rest in peace …all we have got is to­day and thats re­al­ity 🙁 We will learn some amaz­ing things he taught us via his writ­ing and some ob­ser­va­tions… Words , emo­tions, in­ter­ac­tion via com­ments re­ally have mean­ing … Thank you Om …May you rest in peace and strength to fam­ily

This is ter­ri­ble news … so so sad i have never met him in real life only fol­lowed through on­line blogs and also on his site …life is frag­ile, may his soul rest in peace …all we have got is to­day and thats re­al­ity 🙁 We will learn some amaz­ing things he taught us via his writ­ing and some ob­ser­va­tions… Words , emo­tions, in­ter­ac­tion via com­ments re­ally have mean­ing … Thank you Om …May you rest in peace and strength to fam­ily

Om was al­ways thought­ful and smart, with his unique per­spec­tive on tech, pens, health, pho­tog­ra­phy and so many other things. We first met when he was an Advisor to about.me, where I worked. He re­sponded any­where. My con­do­lences to his fam­ily and loved ones.

Om was al­ways thought­ful and smart, with his unique per­spec­tive on tech, pens, health, pho­tog­ra­phy and so many other things. We first met when he was an Advisor to about.me, where I worked. He re­sponded any­where. My con­do­lences to his fam­ily and loved ones.

My con­do­lences to Om’s fam­ily and friends. I have been a long-time reader of his work for so many years. Rest in peace, and let’s all take care of and ap­pre­ci­ate each other while we can.

My con­do­lences to Om’s fam­ily and friends. I have been a long-time reader of his work for so many years. Rest in peace, and let’s all take care of and ap­pre­ci­ate each other while we can.

This is hor­ri­ble news. I’m so sorry to hear. I met Om once for cof­fee and we emailed each other with talk of cam­eras and set­tings and all that good stuff. He will be thought of of­ten and missed im­mensely. — Matt

This is hor­ri­ble news. I’m so sorry to hear. I met Om once for cof­fee and we emailed each other with talk of cam­eras and set­tings and all that good stuff. He will be thought of of­ten and missed im­mensely. — Matt

I met Om al­most 13 years ago via Matt Mullenweg. Om was so gen­er­ous with his time, ad­vice, and great at mak­ing a founder feel like a friend. I still re­mem­ber our meet­ing and time spent. My con­do­lences, he will be missed and very much re­mem­bered.

I met Om al­most 13 years ago via Matt Mullenweg. Om was so gen­er­ous with his time, ad­vice, and great at mak­ing a founder feel like a friend. I still re­mem­ber our meet­ing and time spent. My con­do­lences, he will be missed and very much re­mem­bered.

I’m so sad to hear this — I never met a kinder en­tre­pre­neur. I only met Om a hand­ful of times, but he shared two last­ing lessons with me. The first was when he was run­ning GigaOm and I was a cub tech re­porter at the SF Chronicle. He was skep­ti­cal about hir­ing me, he said, be­cause news­pa­per writ­ers were gen­er­ally too slow and did­n’t un­der­stand web-era pub­lish­ing. He was right, and it pushed me to leave news­pa­pers as quickly as I could to prove that I could evolve. The sec­ond was many years later, when I was hav­ing a drink with him and some other re­porters. We asked him what ad­vice he had for us, and he said: never name your blog af­ter your­self. I’m happy to have known him even a lit­tle, and my con­do­lences to his friends and fam­ily.

I’m so sad to hear this — I never met a kinder en­tre­pre­neur.

I only met Om a hand­ful of times, but he shared two last­ing lessons with me.

The first was when he was run­ning GigaOm and I was a cub tech re­porter at the SF Chronicle. He was skep­ti­cal about hir­ing me, he said, be­cause news­pa­per writ­ers were gen­er­ally too slow and did­n’t un­der­stand web-era pub­lish­ing. He was right, and it pushed me to leave news­pa­pers as quickly as I could to prove that I could evolve.

The sec­ond was many years later, when I was hav­ing a drink with him and some other re­porters. We asked him what ad­vice he had for us, and he said: never name your blog af­ter your­self.

I’m happy to have known him even a lit­tle, and my con­do­lences to his friends and fam­ily.

Om was one of the greats. A ter­rific jour­nal­ist, a fix­ture of Silicon Valley, and a good friend. He was al­ways bru­tally hon­est and usu­ally right. He will be missed.

Om was one of the greats. A ter­rific jour­nal­ist, a fix­ture of Silicon Valley, and a good friend. He was al­ways bru­tally hon­est and usu­ally right.

He will be missed.

I’m so very sorry. Om was a good per­son, To sort care­fully about every­thing from friends to fam­ily, I will miss him. My con­do­lences.

I’m so very sorry. Om was a good per­son, To sort care­fully about every­thing from friends to fam­ily, I will miss him. My con­do­lences.

Om, I’m so glad we made time to meetup at the SF Pen Ahow last fall. Pens, pa­per, writ­ing, friend­ships. Your happy place. You were run­ning late be­cause you were vol­un­teer­ing and help­ing the show for a com­mu­nity you loved so much. Thank you my sweet, sweet friend.

Om, I’m so glad we made time to meetup at the SF Pen Ahow last fall. Pens, pa­per, writ­ing, friend­ships. Your happy place. You were run­ning late be­cause you were vol­un­teer­ing and help­ing the show for a com­mu­nity you loved so much.

Thank you my sweet, sweet friend.

My con­do­lences. Om’s writ­ing was a calm space in the whirling dervish that is the in­ter­net. I’ll miss read­ing his mis­sives and wit­ness­ing more of his pho­tog­ra­phy.

My con­do­lences. Om’s writ­ing was a calm space in the whirling dervish that is the in­ter­net. I’ll miss read­ing his mis­sives and wit­ness­ing more of his pho­tog­ra­phy.

I’m so sad. Om was a true pi­o­neer and a role model. My great­est sym­pa­thy to his fam­ily. I’m truly shaken by this news.

I’m so sad. Om was a true pi­o­neer and a role model. My great­est sym­pa­thy to his fam­ily. I’m truly shaken by this news.

Deepest con­do­lences. This is crush­ing for the Malik Family, and his mas­sive fan­dom. When one read his note about tak­ing a short break, lit­tle did we know that would be his last mis­sive. Au Revoir, Om. Your words will con­tinue to in­spire.

Deepest con­do­lences. This is crush­ing for the Malik Family, and his mas­sive fan­dom.

When one read his note about tak­ing a short break, lit­tle did we know that would be his last mis­sive.

Au Revoir, Om. Your words will con­tinue to in­spire.

Thoughtful, Wise and Sincere. Responsive to com­ments. I learned so much read­ing and re­flect­ing on his writ­ing.

Thoughtful, Wise and Sincere. Responsive to com­ments. I learned so much read­ing and re­flect­ing on his writ­ing.

I too was a ca­sual friend (more ca­sual than I wish I had been) but I re­call fondly every in­ter­ac­tion we had over the years, when I moved to the Bay Area back in 2006, Om was one of the friend­liest and also best folks to know in the tech scene here. I re­mem­ber great dis­cus­sions at var­i­ous events over the years and as Harry notes his writ­ing in re­cent months has been fan­tas­tic. May his mem­ory be a bless­ing.

I too was a ca­sual friend (more ca­sual than I wish I had been) but I re­call fondly every in­ter­ac­tion we had over the years, when I moved to the Bay Area back in 2006, Om was one of the friend­liest and also best folks to know in the tech scene here. I re­mem­ber great dis­cus­sions at var­i­ous events over the years and as Harry notes his writ­ing in re­cent months has been fan­tas­tic. May his mem­ory be a bless­ing.

I will miss “On my Om” and I’m sure I won’t be alone in that. Rest in peace, Om, and con­do­lences to fam­ily and friends.

I will miss “On my Om” and I’m sure I won’t be alone in that. Rest in peace, Om, and con­do­lences to fam­ily and friends.

My heart­felt con­do­lences. We’ve ex­changed thought­ful com­ments on this blog and con­nected a few times on so­cial me­dia, but I will truly miss his end­less cu­rios­ity about the world. His pas­sion ex­tended be­yond tech­nol­ogy; he had a re­mark­able abil­ity to cap­ture the mo­ments he ex­pe­ri­enced through the lens of a cam­era. He did­n’t just trans­port you to those scenes; he also made you aware of why they mat­tered and why you should care. There are very few newslet­ters I ea­gerly an­tic­i­pate, de­spite sub­scrib­ing to nu­mer­ous ones. His was one of the four that I looked for­ward to with gen­uine en­thu­si­asm. Om will be deeply missed by many, as his writ­ing ac­com­plished some­thing few oth­ers achieve to­day: it in­spired us to strive to be bet­ter hu­man be­ings. R.I.P.

My heart­felt con­do­lences. We’ve ex­changed thought­ful com­ments on this blog and con­nected a few times on so­cial me­dia, but I will truly miss his end­less cu­rios­ity about the world. His pas­sion ex­tended be­yond tech­nol­ogy; he had a re­mark­able abil­ity to cap­ture the mo­ments he ex­pe­ri­enced through the lens of a cam­era. He did­n’t just trans­port you to those scenes; he also made you aware of why they mat­tered and why you should care.

There are very few newslet­ters I ea­gerly an­tic­i­pate, de­spite sub­scrib­ing to nu­mer­ous ones. His was one of the four that I looked for­ward to with gen­uine en­thu­si­asm. Om will be deeply missed by many, as his writ­ing ac­com­plished some­thing few oth­ers achieve to­day: it in­spired us to strive to be bet­ter hu­man be­ings. R.I.P.

Om was one of my first bosses in jour­nal­ism, and the lessons he taught me have been a part of my daily life ever since. Following him through blogs and so­cial me­dia in the time since, I al­ways ad­mired how kind and cu­ri­ous he al­ways was, in ad­di­tion to be­ing one of the sharpest minds about tech out there. Shocked and sad­dened by the news, and deep­est sym­pa­thies to his friends and fam­ily.

Om was one of my first bosses in jour­nal­ism, and the lessons he taught me have been a part of my daily life ever since. Following him through blogs and so­cial me­dia in the time since, I al­ways ad­mired how kind and cu­ri­ous he al­ways was, in ad­di­tion to be­ing one of the sharpest minds about tech out there. Shocked and sad­dened by the news, and deep­est sym­pa­thies to his friends and fam­ily.

When I first started spend­ing time on the web and read­ing a lot about tech news, GigaOm was one of the best web­sites I reg­u­larly vis­ited. When I joined Twitter, Om was among the first per­sons I fol­lowed. When I started lis­ten­ing to pod­casts, Om was one of the voices I liked the most (I be­lieve he was a reg­u­lar on Twit dot TV). When I fi­nally got to work in the in­dus­try my­self, I had the chance to meet him and tell him in per­son, in Paris, at the Le Web event, while shak­ing his hand, that I was a big fan. I re­mem­ber this mo­ment very clearly (it was in the me­dia break room) as I felt so lucky to meet one of my web he­roes. I was very shy, and I could have (should have) told him that he was one of my in­spi­ra­tions. Ever since that mo­ment, Om kept on prov­ing he was one of the best ob­servers and com­men­ta­tors of the in­dus­try, and one of the best writ­ers. His blog is so good. This feels so sud­den, too soon. My thoughts are with his loved ones. I’m so sorry. His words, his writ­ing, his thoughts, his im­pec­ca­ble taste will be missed.

When I first started spend­ing time on the web and read­ing a lot about tech news, GigaOm was one of the best web­sites I reg­u­larly vis­ited. When I joined Twitter, Om was among the first per­sons I fol­lowed. When I started lis­ten­ing to pod­casts, Om was one of the voices I liked the most (I be­lieve he was a reg­u­lar on Twit dot TV). When I fi­nally got to work in the in­dus­try my­self, I had the chance to meet him and tell him in per­son, in Paris, at the Le Web event, while shak­ing his hand, that I was a big fan. I re­mem­ber this mo­ment very clearly (it was in the me­dia break room) as I felt so lucky to meet one of my web he­roes. I was very shy, and I could have (should have) told him that he was one of my in­spi­ra­tions. Ever since that mo­ment, Om kept on prov­ing he was one of the best ob­servers and com­men­ta­tors of the in­dus­try, and one of the best writ­ers. His blog is so good. This feels so sud­den, too soon. My thoughts are with his loved ones. I’m so sorry. His words, his writ­ing, his thoughts, his im­pec­ca­ble taste will be missed.

Sad to hear of Om’s pass­ing. We kept in loose touch over nearly two decades. I was for­tu­nate to have a few meals with him and trea­sured our con­ver­sa­tions and his com­pany. Outstanding writer, kind hearted, warm spir­ited, and very in­sight­ful. Loved talk­ing watches with him as well. He was al­ways open to in­ter­est­ing ideas, no mat­ter where they came from. A won­der­ful hu­man, a gift to know. ❤️

Sad to hear of Om’s pass­ing. We kept in loose touch over nearly two decades. I was for­tu­nate to have a few meals with him and trea­sured our con­ver­sa­tions and his com­pany. Outstanding writer, kind hearted, warm spir­ited, and very in­sight­ful. Loved talk­ing watches with him as well. He was al­ways open to in­ter­est­ing ideas, no mat­ter where they came from. A won­der­ful hu­man, a gift to know. ❤️

I ad­mired Om as a pi­o­neer in tech jour­nal­ism, but also as a man with a kind heart and soul. At the height of his pow­ers, he was a gi­ant, but a gi­ant with a con­science. His loss leaves us all a lit­tle poorer at a time when we need a mind and a con­science like his more than ever. May his mem­ory be a bless­ing.

I ad­mired Om as a pi­o­neer in tech jour­nal­ism, but also as a man with a kind heart and soul. At the height of his pow­ers, he was a gi­ant, but a gi­ant with a con­science. His loss leaves us all a lit­tle poorer at a time when we need a mind and a con­science like his more than ever. May his mem­ory be a bless­ing.

Inna lil­lahi wa inna ilayhi ra­jioon (RIP). I am in shock. I knew Om from when he was still an ac­tive jour­nal­ist, be­fore even GigaOm, and re­mem­ber fondly our geeky con­ver­sa­tions on how to free jour­nal­ism from its Big Tech shack­les us­ing RSS. He was not much older than me, and I kept bump­ing into him at ran­dom when I still lived in San Francisco. My sin­cere con­do­lences to his fam­ily and friends.

Inna lil­lahi wa inna ilayhi ra­jioon (RIP).

I am in shock. I knew Om from when he was still an ac­tive jour­nal­ist, be­fore even GigaOm, and re­mem­ber fondly our geeky con­ver­sa­tions on how to free jour­nal­ism from its Big Tech shack­les us­ing RSS. He was not much older than me, and I kept bump­ing into him at ran­dom when I still lived in San Francisco.

My sin­cere con­do­lences to his fam­ily and friends.

I met Om a few times, talked on the phone with him a cou­ple times, but I wish I’d known him bet­ter. He was a gi­ant in our busi­ness, and even though he’s gone, his in­flu­ence con­tin­ues on.

I met Om a few times, talked on the phone with him a cou­ple times, but I wish I’d known him bet­ter. He was a gi­ant in our busi­ness, and even though he’s gone, his in­flu­ence con­tin­ues on.

I am shocked, he was a close friend, we are the same age and grew up in New Delhi, first met him in the 90’s when he in­ter­viewed me, and af­ter that we shared our love for tech­nol­ogy and pho­tog­ra­phy… I dont even know what else to say, I wanted to show him what I was work­ing on these days, and he had not re­sponded was strange… he leaves a huge gap in the world, there was only one OM

I am shocked, he was a close friend, we are the same age and grew up in New Delhi, first met him in the 90’s when he in­ter­viewed me, and af­ter that we shared our love for tech­nol­ogy and pho­tog­ra­phy… I dont even know what else to say, I wanted to show him what I was work­ing on these days, and he had not re­sponded was strange… he leaves a huge gap in the world, there was only one OM

When some­thing in­ter­est­ing is hap­pen­ing, es­pe­cially when it’s tech­nol­ogy re­lated, and es­pe­cially when I’ve been stew­ing on it and had a hard time so­lid­i­fy­ing my own un­der­stand­ing, some­times I think, “I won­der what Om’s take is.” There have only ever been a hand­ful of voices worth turn­ing to like that, be­cause the kind of care Om put into his thoughts and his abil­ity to turn his thoughts into words is rare. So sorry for this world to lose him. Condolences to his fam­ily, friends, and com­mu­nity.

When some­thing in­ter­est­ing is hap­pen­ing, es­pe­cially when it’s tech­nol­ogy re­lated, and es­pe­cially when I’ve been stew­ing on it and had a hard time so­lid­i­fy­ing my own un­der­stand­ing, some­times I think, “I won­der what Om’s take is.” There have only ever been a hand­ful of voices worth turn­ing to like that, be­cause the kind of care Om put into his thoughts and his abil­ity to turn his thoughts into words is rare. So sorry for this world to lose him. Condolences to his fam­ily, friends, and com­mu­nity.

Om, I un­for­tu­nately never met you in per­son but your writ­ing al­ways hit the spot. You’ll be missed. ♥️ My heart goes out to your fam­ily and friends.

Om, I un­for­tu­nately never met you in per­son but your writ­ing al­ways hit the spot. You’ll be missed. ♥️

My heart goes out to your fam­ily and friends.

Om’s uniquely in­formed per­spec­tive re­sulted in writ­ing that con­tained equal mea­sures of kind­ness and can­dor about two fields that of­ten clash, news and tech. He was as warm and thought­ful in per­son as on the page and had given me some great ca­reer ad­vice early on in mine. Deepest sym­pa­thies to those who knew and loved the man.

Om’s uniquely in­formed per­spec­tive re­sulted in writ­ing that con­tained equal mea­sures of kind­ness and can­dor about two fields that of­ten clash, news and tech. He was as warm and thought­ful in per­son as on the page and had given me some great ca­reer ad­vice early on in mine. Deepest sym­pa­thies to those who knew and loved the man.

I’m heart­bro­ken to read this! Sending my con­do­lences to Om’s fam­ily and friends– I never got to know him in per­son, but al­ways cher­ished our few on­line in­ter­ac­tions and have long ad­mired both his writ­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy. He’ll be long re­mem­bered and missed by so many!

I’m heart­bro­ken to read this! Sending my con­do­lences to Om’s fam­ily and friends– I never got to know him in per­son, but al­ways cher­ished our few on­line in­ter­ac­tions and have long ad­mired both his writ­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy. He’ll be long re­mem­bered and missed by so many!

I’ll re­mem­ber him, not only from his writ­ing, but also from his ex­pres­sion of his sen­si­bil­i­ties through his pho­tog­ra­phy. RIP

I’ll re­mem­ber him, not only from his writ­ing, but also from his ex­pres­sion of his sen­si­bil­i­ties through his pho­tog­ra­phy. RIP

I never met Om, but greatly ap­pre­ci­ated his pro­found in­sights on the com­plex­i­ties & im­pli­ca­tions of tech­nol­ogy as well as his pho­to­graphic artistry & love of foun­tain pens & inks. I al­ways in­tended to send him a note, which I re­gret I never did. My con­do­lences to his fam­ily & friends.

I never met Om, but greatly ap­pre­ci­ated his pro­found in­sights on the com­plex­i­ties & im­pli­ca­tions of tech­nol­ogy as well as his pho­to­graphic artistry & love of foun­tain pens & inks. I al­ways in­tended to send him a note, which I re­gret I never did. My con­do­lences to his fam­ily & friends.

I was Om’s Uber dri­ver one time and I knew who he was from fol­low­ing his writ­ings in the years prior. I dropped him off in the Mission District of SF. We had a warm ex­change and I re­call him of­fer­ing to be help­ful to me at the end of the ride. This was back in ~2017. May he rest in eter­nal peace and may his fam­ily and loved ones be for­ever com­forted by his many con­tri­bu­tions.

I was Om’s Uber dri­ver one time and I knew who he was from fol­low­ing his writ­ings in the years prior. I dropped him off in the Mission District of SF. We had a warm ex­change and I re­call him of­fer­ing to be help­ful to me at the end of the ride. This was back in ~2017. May he rest in eter­nal peace and may his fam­ily and loved ones be for­ever com­forted by his many con­tri­bu­tions.

Imagine your fa­vorite team just scored an in­cred­i­ble, last-sec­ond goal at the World Cup. So you log on­line to cel­e­brate with other fans. But, us­ing data it’s al­ready col­lected on you, the so­cial me­dia plat­form you like to post on wrongly guesses that you’re un­der 16 so it forces you to go to a third-party ver­i­fi­ca­tion app and pro­vide im­ages of your face or your gov­ern­ment-is­sued ID. You don’t re­ally know much about the ver­i­fi­ca­tion app, what coun­try it’s based out of, what hap­pens with your in­for­ma­tion, and whether you’re pro­tected from hack­ers or data breaches. You’re not happy about it, but you hand over a photo of your pass­port and hope it does­n’t come back to haunt you.

Now imag­ine that in­stead of post­ing about sports, you’re crit­i­ciz­ing a pow­er­ful politi­cian, or talk­ing about your ex­pe­ri­ences with abuse or ad­dic­tion, or dis­cussing em­bar­rass­ing med­ical is­sues you’re fac­ing. Suddenly this “papers, please” ap­proach to the in­ter­net sounds even more in­va­sive, right? Unfortunately, that’s the di­rec­tion we’re all headed — even here in the United States — and we have good rea­son to be wary of the global rush to sac­ri­fice user pri­vacy on the al­tar of age ver­i­fi­ca­tion.

Australia’s so­cial me­dia ban for un­der-16s went into ef­fect in December 2025 and set a land­mark stan­dard many other na­tions now look to when craft­ing their own such reg­u­la­tions. As a pre­lim­i­nary mat­ter: This law is not work­ing as in­tended. The gov­ern­men­t’s own re­search found that months af­ter the in­sti­tu­tion of the ban, roughly seven out of 10 kids still were us­ing so­cial me­dia. And a study just re­leased in the British Medical Journal found “little ev­i­dence was found of im­me­di­ate sub­stan­tive re­duc­tions in re­ported so­cial me­dia use by ado­les­cents un­der 16 years.” Secondly, phones are al­ready banned in Australian schools, so this ban is in­tended to ad­dress what kids do on the in­ter­net in their own free time, not dur­ing class time.

So, what ex­actly does this law — one that is ren­dered ir­rel­e­vant dur­ing the school day, and is­n’t even work­ing prop­erly out­side it any­way — ac­tu­ally man­date? Well, pretty much what was in the hy­po­thet­i­cal de­scribed ear­lier in this piece, ex­cept it’s not at all a hy­po­thet­i­cal any­more.

Essays

Cassius Marcellus Clay brought can­nons to a free press fight

·

Jun 25

In June 1845, Cassius Marcellus Clay launched an anti-slav­ery news­pa­per in Lexington, Kentucky, one block from one of the largest slave mar­kets in the United States. He called it The True American. Published by William L. Neale and edited by Clay, the pa­per openly chal­lenged Kentucky’s slave­hold­ing es­tab­lish­ment. Its ed­i­tor was a son o…

Australia’s law man­dates that so­cial me­dia com­pa­nies, at risk of mas­sive fines, col­lect ei­ther bio­met­ric info, gov­ern­ment-is­sued IDs, or other data from users be­cause they now have a duty to take suf­fi­cient steps to en­sure users un­der 16 are kept logged out. In some cases, plat­forms can use ex­ist­ing data they have on users to ver­ify age, like if an ac­count has been open for a suf­fi­cient num­ber of years, but will in many sce­nar­ios need to ver­ify in­de­pen­dently by gath­er­ing more user data. This is where third-party ver­i­fi­ca­tion tools come in.

Look at Snapchat, for ex­am­ple. Snapchat uses k-ID, a com­pany based in Singapore, and al­lows ver­i­fi­ca­tion through a bank­ing con­nec­tion, gov­ern­ment ID scan, or selfie the com­pany uses to pro­vide an age range. This re­quires quite an in­vest­ment of trust on the user’s end. How do third-party com­pa­nies like this re­tain and pro­tect data? What kind of laws gov­ern these com­pa­nies abroad? Is such a com­pany in an­other coun­try more sus­cep­ti­ble to cen­so­r­ial re­quests from lo­cal or for­eign gov­ern­ments?

Australia does or­der that per­sonal in­for­ma­tion col­lected for age ver­i­fi­ca­tion “must be de­stroyed once all pur­poses have been met.” But those pur­poses in­clude chal­lenges and com­plaints, so it’s un­clear ex­actly how long data will be re­tained on users who ob­ject to wrong age clas­si­fi­ca­tions. Worryingly, in re­search con­ducted be­fore the ban went into ef­fect, Australia’s Age Assurance Technology Trial “found some con­cern­ing ev­i­dence that in the ab­sence of spe­cific guid­ance, ser­vice providers were ap­par­ently over-an­tic­i­pat­ing the even­tual needs of reg­u­la­tors about pro­vid­ing per­sonal in­for­ma­tion for fu­ture in­ves­ti­ga­tion…which could lead to in­creased risk of pri­vacy breaches due to un­nec­es­sary and dis­pro­por­tion­ate col­lec­tion and re­ten­tion of data.”

The longer that in­for­ma­tion is re­tained, and the more that is col­lected for ver­i­fi­ca­tion, in­creases the risk of breaches or hacks that threaten a user’s pri­vacy. Now mul­ti­ply that in­di­vid­ual risk by mil­lions.

We don’t even need to imag­ine the hy­po­thet­i­cal here, be­cause it hap­pened to nearly 70,000 Australians just weeks be­fore the un­der-16 ban went into ef­fect. A breach of a third-party cus­tomer ser­vice app Discord used “mainly to deal with” — guess what — “complaints re­lat­ing to the plat­for­m’s age as­sur­ance processes” was hacked, lead­ing to the re­lease of “government ID im­ages, names, user­names, email ad­dresses, and some lim­ited billing in­for­ma­tion.”

Expect more such at­tacks in the fu­ture.

In ad­di­tion to in­tro­duc­ing new risks from data breaches and hacks, the Australian gov­ern­ment ad­mits that man­dated age ver­i­fi­ca­tion in­tro­duces new risks for phish­ing at­tempts by scam­mers seek­ing to take ad­van­tage of con­fu­sion sur­round­ing the ban. But the gov­ern­ment puts much of the onus on so­cial me­dia plat­forms to en­sure users un­der­stand the ver­i­fi­ca­tion process and on users to read up to make sure they aren’t be­ing scammed.

We have, quite rea­son­ably, spent much of the 21st cen­tury de­bat­ing what should be our re­la­tion­ship to tech com­pa­nies and what amount of our per­sonal lives and de­tails we are com­fort­able hand­ing over, know­ingly or not. Governments have even been haul­ing tech CEOs in to ques­tion them about their in­take of in­di­vid­u­als’ data. Yet now coun­tries like Australia are man­dat­ing that they col­lect it or face con­se­quences.

As the Australian Human Rights Commission ex­plains, even if some user ac­counts ul­ti­mately evade age checks, this sig­nals a broader shift in how peo­ple use the in­ter­net:

The eSafety Commissioner’s guid­ance tries to re­as­sure us: ‘No, not every ac­count holder will go through an age check process if the plat­form has other ac­cu­rate data.’ But that does­n’t ac­tu­ally mean you es­cape scrutiny. It just means that plat­forms will use what they al­ready know about you to make the call. That’s the real shift that is hap­pen­ing here. We’re mov­ing to a world where the law re­quires you to be pro­filed in or­der to par­tic­i­pate.

The eSafety Commissioner’s guid­ance tries to re­as­sure us: ‘No, not every ac­count holder will go through an age check process if the plat­form has other ac­cu­rate data.’ But that does­n’t ac­tu­ally mean you es­cape scrutiny. It just means that plat­forms will use what they al­ready know about you to make the call. That’s the real shift that is hap­pen­ing here. We’re mov­ing to a world where the law re­quires you to be pro­filed in or­der to par­tic­i­pate.

The on­line world we’re mov­ing to­ward is a “papers, please” one, where vi­tal venues of pub­lic dis­cus­sion might now only be open to those who are will­ing to trust tech com­pa­nies and the third party ver­i­fi­ca­tion apps they use with in­for­ma­tion that can elim­i­nate their anonymity on­line, and the gov­ern­ments re­spon­si­ble for man­dat­ing the col­lec­tion of that in­for­ma­tion.

Many users will very likely pro­vide the in­for­ma­tion they need to log on and con­tinue com­mu­ni­cat­ing with their friends and fam­i­lies. But maybe they’ll think twice about what they say and do. This new era of the in­ter­net is un­likely to be sig­nif­i­cantly safer for chil­dren. But it will be much less free for every­one.

You’ve likely heard by now that the UK (along with France, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Malaysia, Greece, Denmark, Norway, and the European Union) is pur­su­ing its own un­der-16 ban.

The ban will hap­pen even though the ex­act de­tails for its en­force­ment and ver­i­fi­ca­tion meth­ods are not yet pub­lic — but the UK in­tends to avoid Australia’s fail­ures. That’s why Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised this month that the British ver­sion will be “Australia-plus,” as the UK will “learn the lessons from Australia’s ex­pe­ri­ence” and “make it far harder for chil­dren to by­pass safe­guards.” (Starmer has since re­signed as prime min­is­ter but there is cur­rently no in­di­ca­tion that the gov­ern­men­t’s plans for the pol­icy will change.)

UK cit­i­zens have rea­son to worry. Australia’s en­force­ment of its un­der-16 ban comes with a wealth of risks to user pri­vacy, so to see gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials sig­nal that they in­tend more se­vere en­force­ment sug­gests the po­ten­tial for even greater pri­vacy threats.

Perhaps even most alarm­ing is of­fi­cials’ open in­ter­est in tar­get­ing vir­tual pri­vate net­works to crack down on ver­i­fi­ca­tion eva­sion. VPN use rose last year af­ter the roll­out of the UK’s sim­i­larly messy Online Safety Act, when in­ter­net users sought to avoid road­blocks from the gov­ern­ment against on­line “harms.” After the Online Safety Act was im­ple­mented, UK of­fi­cials said they were “gather[ing] in­for­ma­tion on VPN us­age.” And as I ex­plained at Persuasion last week:

One prob­lem fac­ing ad­vo­cates of in­ter­net re­stric­tions is the avail­abil­ity of vir­tual pri­vate net­works (VPNs), which reroute traf­fic and al­low users to ac­cess banned con­tent or sites from be­hind fire­walls or blocks. The UK gov­ern­ment is well aware of the chal­lenge VPNs may pose to its un­der-16 ban, and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall an­nounced this week that the gov­ern­ment “will make fur­ther state­ments in July about VPNs.” Children’s Minister Josh MacAlister has said there are “options there about whether we could age-gate VPN use, which would be re­ally wel­come.”

One prob­lem fac­ing ad­vo­cates of in­ter­net re­stric­tions is the avail­abil­ity of vir­tual pri­vate net­works (VPNs), which reroute traf­fic and al­low users to ac­cess banned con­tent or sites from be­hind fire­walls or blocks. The UK gov­ern­ment is well aware of the chal­lenge VPNs may pose to its un­der-16 ban, and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall an­nounced this week that the gov­ern­ment “will make fur­ther state­ments in July about VPNs.” Children’s Minister Josh MacAlister has said there are “options there about whether we could age-gate VPN use, which would be re­ally wel­come.”

Many UK cit­i­zens no doubt have valid and rea­son­able con­cerns about the way their chil­dren ex­pe­ri­ence the in­ter­net and so­cial me­dia. But they may be shocked and sur­prised by the amount of power and con­trol UK of­fi­cials claim they need to solve the prob­lem. Should UK of­fi­cials travel down the path of tar­get­ing VPN us­age, they may find them­selves more in line with coun­tries like China, Iran, and Russia. It’s not good com­pany.

Alarmingly, yes. The home of the First Amendment is on course to em­brace the “papers, please” era of the in­ter­net and has been slink­ing to­wards it for years now.

A num­ber of states have been de­vel­op­ing and pass­ing bills, many of which are fac­ing chal­lenges, that pose many of the same con­cerns we’ve raised in the in­ter­na­tional con­text. At least 19 states have passed leg­is­la­tion ad­dress­ing mi­nors’ ac­cess to so­cial me­dia or “addictive” feeds, but some are en­force­able, some en­joined, and some not yet ef­fec­tive. And more than 20 states have en­acted age-ver­i­fi­ca­tion laws for adult-con­tent web­sites, many of which be­came more se­cure af­ter the Supreme Court’s de­ci­sion in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in 2025. Separately, app-store age-as­sur­ance laws are be­ing lit­i­gated in states such as Texas and Utah.

While this takes place among the states, at the fed­eral level we’re see­ing a num­ber of pro­pos­als be­ing con­sid­ered, in­clud­ing the so-called “Kids Online Safety Act,” or KOSA, which was in­cor­po­rated in the House’s broader KIDS Act pack­age and has been the sub­ject of ne­go­ti­a­tions be­tween the Senate and the White House. The House and Senate have slightly dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the bill, but both would im­pose reg­u­la­tions that would ef­fec­tively force so­cial me­dia web­sites and other plat­forms to con­duct age ver­i­fi­ca­tion of their users. And since it’s a fed­eral bill, states that wanted to main­tain a free and open in­ter­net would be over­rid­den. The en­tire coun­try would be forced to re­veal their iden­tity and data be­fore they could speak on­line.

Tech

How does the First Amendment ap­ply to AI?

·

Jun 24

This is the sec­ond ar­ti­cle in a weekly se­ries on AI and Free Speech. You can read the first ar­ti­cle ex­plain­ing why the First Amendment is so im­por­tant in the age of AI here.

What this means for the American peo­ple is that both the state and fed­eral gov­ern­ment could be man­dat­ing col­lec­tion of in­for­ma­tion about you at every step you en­gage with the in­ter­net. Soon, every­thing you do on­line could have an el­e­ment of age as­sur­ance or ver­i­fi­ca­tion, from down­load­ing an app in the app store to mak­ing an ac­count to post­ing a photo, whether you’re a 14-year-old try­ing to game or a 40-year-old post­ing about recipes. The de­bate is rapidly ex­pand­ing to in­clude video games and AI chat­bots as well.

And that cre­ates a lot of risks for data breaches, overly broad data col­lec­tion and re­ten­tion, cen­so­r­ial le­gal de­mands for col­lected data, cor­po­rate and gov­ern­men­tal malfea­sance, pres­sure to self-cen­sor, and per­haps bla­tant First Amendment vi­o­la­tions. Every new layer and every new man­date brings more po­ten­tial for risk. As we’ve un­for­tu­nately seen many times over the years, peo­ple in­clud­ing high-level gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials will ma­li­ciously seek to root out the iden­ti­ties of their crit­ics, so the more lay­ers of anonymity we can pre­serve in on­line speech, the bet­ter.

Americans can take se­ri­ously the need to pro­tect kids on­line while still rec­og­niz­ing that many of the pol­icy and leg­isla­tive so­lu­tions of­fered to­day are cre­at­ing in­tol­er­a­ble bur­dens on our abil­ity to speak freely and anony­mously on the in­ter­net. The re­al­ity is that age ver­i­fi­ca­tion to a large ex­tent re­quires us to con­firm iden­tity, and we will come to re­gret so closely ty­ing our ex­pres­sive ac­tiv­ity on­line to gov­ern­ment-man­dated age and iden­tity ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Once we cre­ate this leg­isla­tive in­fra­struc­ture of sur­veil­lance we may find it very dif­fi­cult to tear down.

Please en­able JS and dis­able any ad blocker

Apple has raised prices across the board for many of its prod­ucts to­day. MacBook Neo now starts at $699 (up from $599), while MacBook Air now starts at $1299 (up from $1099). Other im­pacted prod­ucts in­clude MacBook Pro, iPad, iPad Air, and many more.

iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods pric­ing is un­changed.

Why is Apple in­creas­ing prices?

Apple CEO Tim Cook con­firmed the com­pany would in­crease prod­uct prices in an in­ter­view last week. Cook ex­plained that price in­creases had sim­ply be­come “unavoidable” amid sky­rock­et­ing com­po­nent costs af­fect­ing things like mem­ory and stor­age. While Apple tried to weather the storm it­self, the sit­u­a­tion was ul­ti­mately “unsustainable.”

“We’re do­ing our best to mit­i­gate the huge in­creases that are be­ing passed to us, and we’ve been try­ing to shield our cus­tomers from the in­creases, but the sit­u­a­tion has be­come un­sus­tain­able,” Cook said in the in­ter­view.

Cook specif­i­cally called out the in­creas­ing amount of mem­ory go­ing to high-band­width mem­ory used for AI servers. “There’s less sup­ply at a time when con­sumers want de­vices and the mem­ory guys are pass­ing along huge price in­creases,” he said.

In a state­ment to Reuters to­day, Apple said:

“We have never ​seen a com­po­nent price in­crease this much, this quickly. We have shielded our cus­tomers ⁠from these in­creases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to be­gin rais­ing prices on a num­ber of prod­ucts, in­clud­ing ​today’s in­creases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not wel­come news, and we are work­ing tire­lessly to find so­lu­tions.”

“We have never ​seen a com­po­nent price in­crease this much, this quickly. We have shielded our cus­tomers ⁠from these in­creases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to be­gin rais­ing prices on a num­ber of prod­ucts, in­clud­ing ​today’s in­creases for iPad and Mac. We know this is not wel­come news, and we are work­ing tire­lessly to find so­lu­tions.”

How much is Apple in­creas­ing prices?

Today’s price in­creases af­fect a ton of dif­fer­ent Apple prod­ucts, in­clud­ing the base start­ing price on things like MacBook Air, MacBook Neo, and more.

Macs

MacBook Neo: $699 (up from $599)

13-inch MacBook Air: $1,299 (up from $1,099)

15-inch MacBook Air: $1,499 (up from $1,299)

M5 MacBook Pro: $1,999 (up from $1,699)

M5 Pro MacBook Pro: $2,499 (up from $2,199)

M5 Max MacBook Pro: $4,099 (up from $3,599)

iMac: $1,499 (up from $1,299)

M4 Max Mac Studio: $2,499 (up from $1,999)

M3 Ultra Mac Studio: $5,299 (up from $3,999)

iPads

iPad: $449 (up from $349)

11-inch iPad Air: $749 (up from $599)

13-inch iPad Air: $949 (up from $749)

11-inch iPad Pro: $1,199 (up from $999)

13-inch iPad Pro: $1,499 (up from $1,299)

iPad mini: $599 (up from $499)

More prod­ucts:

Apple TV 4K: $199 (up from $129)

HomePod: $349 (up from $299)

HomePod mini: $129 (up from $99)

Vision Pro: $3,699 (up from $3,499)

What do you think of these price in­creases from Apple? Are you sur­prised? Let us know down in the com­ments.

Amazon pric­ing on Apple prod­ucts

The price in­creases haven’t yet hit some of Apple’s prod­ucts be­ing sold on Amazon — many of which were al­ready dis­counted for Prime Day. This in­cludes:

MacBook Neo: $589

13-inch MacBook Air: $949

15-inch MacBook Air: $1,149

M5 MacBook Pro: $1,549

iPad Air: $519

iPad Pro: $899

iPad: $299

More to come …Here’s a com­plete look at Prime Day pric­ing be­fore the price hikes hit Amazon:

Here’s a com­plete look at the Prime Day deals still live at Amazon ahead of of­fi­cial price in­creases:

MacBook Neo

MacBook Neo Citrus 256GB $590 (Now Reg. $699)

MacBook Neo Citrus 512GB $690 (Now Reg. $799)

MacBook Neo Silver 256GB $590 (Now Reg. $699)

MacBook Neo Silver 512GB $690 (Now Reg. $799)

MacBook Neo Indigo 256GB $590 (Now Reg. $699)

MacBook Neo Indigo 512GB $690 (Now Reg. $799)

MacBook Neo Blush 256GB $590 (Now Reg. $699)

MacBook Neo Blush 512GB $690 (Now Reg. $799)

M5 MacBook Air

13-inch M5 MacBook Air 16GB/512GB from $949 (Now Reg. $1,299)

13-inch M5 MacBook Air 16GB/1TB from $1,149 (Now Reg. $1,499)

13-inch M5 MacBook Air 24GB/1TB from $1,349 (Now Reg. $1,699)

15-inch M5 MacBook Air 16GB/512GB from $1,149 (Now Reg. $1,499)

15-inch M5 MacBook Air 16GB/1TB from $1,349 (Now Reg. $1,699)

15-inch M5 MacBook Air 24GB/1TB from $1,549 (Now Reg. $1,899)

M5 MacBook Pro

14-inch M5 MacBook Pro 16GB/1TB $1,549 (Now Reg. $1,999)

Or $1,529 at B&H with bonus $20 coupon

14-inch M5 MacBook Pro 24GB/1TB $1,749 (Now Reg. $2,199)

14-inch M5 MacBook Pro 32GB/1TB $1,944 (Now Reg. $2,399)

M5 Pro MacBook Pro

14-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro 24GB/1TB $2,034 (Now Reg. $2,499)

Or $2,000 over at B&H with bonus $40 coupon

14-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro 24GB/2TB 15-Core $2,399 (Now Reg. $2,899)

14-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro 24GB/2TB 18-Core $2,583 (Reg. $2,799)

16-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro 24GB/1TB $2,494 (Now Reg. $2,999)

16-inch M5 Pro MacBook Pro 48GB/1TB $2,857 (Now Reg. $3,399)

14-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro 36GB/2TB $3,300 (Now Reg. $4,099)

16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro 36GB/2TB $3,649 (Now Reg. $4,399)

16-inch M5 Max MacBook Pro 48GB/2TB $4,149 (Now Reg. $4,999)

M4 iPad Air

11-inch M4 iPad Air 128GB $519 (Now Reg. $749) – Matching all-time low

11-inch M4 iPad Air 256GB $610 (Now Reg. $849) – Matching all-time low

11-inch M4 iPad Air 512GB $839 (Now Reg. $1,049)

11-inch M4 iPad Air 1TB $1,019 (Now Reg. $1,249)

13-inch M4 iPad Air 128GB $700 (Now Reg. $949) – Matching all-time low

13-inch M4 iPad Air 256GB $790 (Now Reg. $1,049) – Matching all-time low

13-inch M4 iPad Air 512GB $999 (Now Reg. $1,249)

13-inch M4 iPad Air 1TB $1,199 (Now Reg. $1,449)

iPad 11

iPad 11 128GB $299 (Now Reg. $449)

iPad 11 256GB $399 (Now Reg. $549)

iPad 11 256GB $597 (Now Reg. $749)

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Hacker Trends - see how any topic, tool, or per­son trended across 18 years of Hacker News

Charts how of­ten any topic, tool, or per­son has come up on Hacker News. Overlay a few terms to watch their trac­tion rise and fall. Each line is a live date-his­togram over 45M posts and com­ments, built on Upstash Redis Search. Below the chart sit the ac­tual sto­ries and com­ments be­hind the lines, fil­ter­able by term. How Hacker Trends works

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The de­ploy-plat­form ri­valry: Cloudflare car­ries the CDN/edge con­ver­sa­tion for years, then Vercel surges on the Next.js wave and the two trade blows as both push into edge func­tions and full-stack host­ing.

David vs Goliath of the lab era: OpenAI’s re­peated tow­ers lead from 2023, un­til a sud­den 2026 Anthropic surge pulls level and the lead changes hands.

The sil­i­con ba­ton pass: AMD leads 2017 – 20 on the Ryzen/Zen come­back, then Nvidia over­takes with the 2020 – 23 GPU-and-AI surge.

A three-way re­lay across the JVM/mobile era: Scala is the hot lan­guage ~2011, Swift grabs the ba­ton with iOS mid-decade, then Kotlin over­takes both as Android goes Kotlin-first.

Frontend’s gen­er­a­tions in a line: Angular leads the frame­work wars ~2013 – 14, Vue rises 2016 – 19, then Svelte takes the new­comer crown 2020 – 22.

The data­base lead-swap: MySQL owns the con­ver­sa­tion around 2009 – 11, then goes quiet as Postgres climbs to over­take it by 2017 – 20.

ML frame­works, gen­er­a­tion by gen­er­a­tion: TensorFlow launches the deep-learn­ing gold rush 2015 – 16, PyTorch over­takes re­search 2019 – 21, then JAX be­comes the cut­ting-edge fa­vorite 2021 – 23.

Bundler chang­ing of the guard: Webpack owns the build step 2015 – 20, then Vite ar­rives and over­takes it from 2022 on.

Crypto-exchange lead-swap: Coinbase is the ex­change peo­ple talk about through 2013 – 21, then Binance takes over the head­lines in 2022 – 23.

The ed­i­tor wars, old guard vs new: Vim and Emacs trade the modal-vs-ex­ten­si­ble ar­gu­ment year af­ter year, then Zed bursts in and spikes hard across 2024 – 26.

The Twitter-alternative re­lay: Mastodon spikes with the 2022 ac­qui­si­tion ex­o­dus, then Bluesky over­takes it as the des­ti­na­tion in 2024 – 25.

Node-alternative race: Deno is the buzzy re­place­ment 2020 – 22, then Bun grabs the spot­light from 2023 on­ward.

A text­book chang­ing of the guard: Flash burns hot across 2010 – 11, then HTML5 climbs past it into 2014 – 15, the open web eat­ing the plu­gin alive.

Containerization hand­off: Docker erupts 2014 – 15 as the new hot­ness, then Kubernetes in­her­its the spot­light from 2016 as or­ches­tra­tion be­comes the story.

Succession within a dy­nasty: vim leads through the 2010s, then its own fork neovim ig­nites 2021 – 23 and takes the lead as the com­mu­nity mi­grates.

Two AI shock­waves, off­set: ChatGPT’s late-2022 launch wall, then DeepSeek’s lone Jan-2025 tower, the “Sputnik mo­ment” years later.

JS-superset suc­ces­sion: CoffeeScript’s 2011 – 14 hype cools, then TypeScript’s 2019+ rise shows which ab­strac­tion ac­tu­ally won.

The 2022 text-to-im­age ex­plo­sion, month by month: DALL-E 2 opens the era in spring, Stable Diffusion’s open-source re­lease det­o­nates in late sum­mer, then Midjourney be­comes the house­hold name into 2023.

A CPU-architecture shift: x86 dom­i­nates chip talk around 2020 – 23, then ARM surges with Apple Silicon and data-cen­ter ARM into 2024 – 26.

The text-ed­i­tor crown, passed hand to hand: Sublime Text is the beloved ed­i­tor of 2012 – 14, GitHub’s Atom takes over 2014 – 15, then VS Code eats the world from 2018 on.

Video call­ing, dy­nasty to dy­nasty: Skype owns the 2010s, then Zoom spikes hard in the sin­gle March-2020 lock­down month while Microsoft Teams rides the same re­mote-work wave on Office’s coat­tails.

CI chang­ing of the guard: Jenkins is the CI tool of the mid-2010s, then GitHub Actions takes over from 2021 on.

The AI-coding-tool re­lay: Cursor is the ed­i­tor every­one talks about in late-2024, Claude Code spikes hard across mid-2025, then OpenAI’s Codex takes its turn into early-2026.

The con­fig-man­age­ment wars: Chef leads the au­to­mate-your-servers era ~2011 – 12, Puppet trades blows through 2013, then Ansible’s agent­less ap­proach pulls ahead 2014 – 15.

The func­tional lan­guage HN could­n’t stop talk­ing about: Clojure’s Lisp-on-the-JVM mo­ment ~2009 – 11, Haskell’s pu­rity de­bates ~2012, then Elixir rides the Erlang re­vival 2016 – 18.

API de­sign, era by era: REST be­comes the we­b’s de­fault 2012 – 15, then the post-REST gen­er­a­tion splits: gRPC for ser­vice-to-ser­vice from 2016, GraphQL for the client from 2017.

Web servers across the decades: Apache rules the 2010 – 12 con­ver­sa­tion, ng­inx over­takes it for the high-traf­fic era 2011 – 13, then Caddy ar­rives with au­to­matic-HTTPS 2017 – 22.

The front-end MVC wars: Backbone.js is the first to give the browser struc­ture ~2011, then Ember and Angular es­ca­late to full frame­works 2013 – 14, the fight that set up React.

A decade of face-com­puter hype, one tower each: Google Glass in 2013, Oculus with the Facebook deal in 2014, then Apple’s Vision Pro in 2024: three spikes, ten years apart.

The full-stack web frame­work ba­ton: Django and Rails de­fine the 2009 – 15 ‘MVC frame­work’ era, trad­ing the spot­light, then Laravel in­her­its it for the PHP world and surges 2019 – 21.

The JS build pipeline, three gen­er­a­tions: Grunt’s task-run­ner era 2013 – 14, Gulp’s stream­ing rewrite 2014 – 15, then Webpack ab­sorbs the whole job as bundling be­comes the story from 2016 on.

The ‘just de­ploy it’ plat­form, rein­vented each era: Heroku de­fines push-to-de­ploy in the early 2010s (and spikes again at its 2022 free-tier sun­set), Netlify owns the JAMstack 2018 – 20, then Vercel takes the Next.js era from 2023.

The NoSQL boom in or­der: CouchDB rides the early doc­u­ment-store wave ~2009, Cassandra car­ries the scale-out story 2010 – 12, then MongoDB be­comes the er­a’s de­fault 2011 – 13.

Browser test au­toma­tion, three gen­er­a­tions: Selenium is the way to drive a browser through the 2010s, Cypress rein­vents it for the mod­ern front-end ~2020, then Playwright pulls ahead and surges into 2025 – 26.

Cross-platform mo­bile, ba­ton by ba­ton: Xamarin car­ries the write-once dream ~2016, React Native takes over for the JS crowd 2017 – 18, then Flutter over­takes both and peaks into 2024.

The hy­brid-app lin­eage, re­named each era: PhoneGap wraps web apps in a na­tive shell ~2011, its open-source suc­ces­sor Cordova car­ries it 2014 – 15, then Capacitor in­her­its the job and spikes in 2024.

The post-Web­pack bundler scram­ble: Parcel’s zero-con­fig pitch lands ~2019, es­build’s Go-speed rewrite grabs at­ten­tion 2021, then Rollup re-en­ters as the li­brary bundler of choice into 2022.

The ob­serv­abil­ity stack, layer by layer: Prometheus owns met­rics col­lec­tion ~2020, Grafana takes the dash­boards spot­light 2021, then Datadog rises as the all-in-one SaaS into 2023.

The cloud data-plat­form re­lay: Redshift de­fines the cloud ware­house ~2017, Databricks rides the lake­house pitch into 2021, then Snowflake be­comes the er­a’s de­fault name by 2024.

Open-weight LLMs, re­lease by re­lease: Llama opens the flood­gates in early 2023, Mistral’s European chal­lenger surges late 2023, then Qwen car­ries the open-model crown into 2026.

Voice as­sis­tants across the decade: Siri ar­rives first with the iPhone 4S in 2011, Google Assistant takes a turn ~2018, then Alexa peaks into 2022: three spikes, years apart.

Altcoin gen­er­a­tions: Litecoin is bit­coin’s sil­ver in the 2013 boom, Dogecoin spikes as the joke-coin of that same era, then Solana car­ries the next-gen-chain story into 2022.

Crypto’s se­r­ial ma­nias: the ICO to­ken-sale frenzy peaks in 2017, the NFT gold rush det­o­nates in 2021, then DeFi car­ries the yield-farm­ing hype into 2022.

Three game en­gines, one shared earth­quake: all three spike to­gether in the Sept-2023 Unity run­time-fee fi­asco - Unity’s self-in­flicted blow-up, with Unreal and Godot surg­ing the same month as de­vel­op­ers threat­ened to jump ship.

The eter­nal hard­ware trio: CPU and RAM are the sta­ples HN has ar­gued about since 2007, while GPU climbs out of the pack through the crypto-min­ing and deep-learn­ing booms.

People

Founders, hack­ers and fig­ures whose news mo­ments spike the time­line.

AI & LLMs

The launch-by-launch stair­case of the gen­er­a­tive-AI era.

Products & hard­ware

Launch-day spikes for the chips and gad­gets HN could­n’t stop de­bat­ing.

Languages & dev tools

Languages, run­times and ed­i­tors ris­ing on re­lease-dri­ven spikes.

JS frame­works

How JavaScript frame­works come and go: each er­a’s dar­ling, in or­der.

Startups & com­pa­nies

Launches, ac­qui­si­tions, li­cense blow-ups and the oc­ca­sional im­plo­sion.

Cloud & host­ing

The plat­forms we de­ploy on: hy­per­scalers, PaaS dar­lings and in­die hosts, each with its own out­age-and-launch rhythm.

Security in­ci­dents

The sharp, dat­a­ble spikes of the bugs and breaches that ru­ined a week­end.

Crypto & hype cy­cles

Bull runs, blow-ups and the fads that came and went.

Internet & cul­ture

Platform ex­o­duses, fed­er­ated pro­to­cols and mod­er­a­tion flash­points.

Dev cul­ture

The peren­nial HN ar­gu­ments that resur­face in waves, year af­ter year.

Industry zeit­geist

Common words that crest in waves with the mood of the tech in­dus­try.

Science & fron­tier tech

Lab break­throughs and moon­shots: the spikes that briefly made HN a physics fo­rum.

Open-source li­cense wars

Relicensings, rug-pulls and the forks they spawned: each one a dat­a­ble tower of out­rage.

Gaming

Launch-day ma­nia, GPU-scalping rage and the oc­ca­sional li­cens­ing re­volt.

Health & longevity

The bio­hack­ing, GLP-1 and sleep-op­ti­miza­tion waves HN can’t stop re­lit­i­gat­ing.

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Built with rev­o­lu­tion­ary “nanostack” 3D chip ar­chi­tec­ture, IBM’s sub-1 nm chip to pro­pel semi­con­duc­tor in­dus­try for­ward for the next decade

Jun 25, 2026

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY, June 25, 2026 — IBM (NYSE: IBM) to­day un­veiled a ma­jor semi­con­duc­tor break­through with the in­tro­duc­tion of the world’s first sub-1 nanome­ter (nm) chip tech­nol­ogy, fea­tur­ing a rev­o­lu­tion­ary tran­sis­tor ar­chi­tec­ture at the 0.7 nm, or 7 angstrom node. The achieve­ment marks a land­mark mo­ment for an in­dus­try fac­ing the phys­i­cal lim­its of tra­di­tional chip scal­ing. Semiconductors play crit­i­cal roles in every­thing from com­put­ing, to ap­pli­ances, to com­mu­ni­ca­tion de­vices, trans­porta­tion sys­tems, and crit­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture.

IBM’s new sub-1 nm chip packs nearly 100 bil­lion tran­sis­tors onto a chip the size of a fin­ger­nail, nearly twice the den­sity of IBM’s 2 nm chip, un­veiled in 2021. Enabled by a se­ries of struc­tural and ma­te­r­ial in­no­va­tions, in­clud­ing IBM’s ground­break­ing three-di­men­sional nanos­tack ar­chi­tec­ture, the tech­nol­ogy demon­strates how con­tin­ued gains in per­for­mance and ef­fi­ciency re­main pos­si­ble even as chip fea­tures ap­proach atomic di­men­sions.

Published tech­ni­cal re­sults re­port the new chip is pro­jected to of­fer a sub­stan­tial leap in ca­pa­bil­ity—up to 50 per­cent more per­for­mance, or 70 per­cent greater en­ergy ef­fi­ciency than IBM’s 2 nm node chips[1]—su­per­charg­ing com­pute for ap­pli­ca­tions rang­ing from gen­er­a­tive AI and cloud in­fra­struc­ture to next-gen­er­a­tion elec­tronic de­vices.

IBM’s lat­est chip break­through marks a land­mark mo­ment in com­put­ing, push­ing tech­nol­ogy be­yond the nanome­ter era to the scale of atoms. With our new nanos­tack ar­chi­tec­ture, we’re not just mak­ing smaller tran­sis­tors, we’re rein­vent­ing how chips are built to de­liver dra­mat­i­cally more power and en­ergy ef­fi­ciency,” said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow. “This in­dus­try-first in­no­va­tion con­tin­ues IBM’s legacy of lead­ing in next-gen­er­a­tion tech­nolo­gies and sets the foun­da­tion for the next era of com­put­ing.

Nanostack, an Industry Breakthrough in Chip Design

To pro­duce this chip, IBM re­searchers de­vel­oped an en­tirely new tran­sis­tor ar­chi­tec­ture, called “nanostack,” the in­dus­try’s first known three-di­men­sional, nanosheet-based de­sign. Nanostack rep­re­sents a ma­jor ad­vance be­yond nanosheet tech­nol­ogy, the in­dus­try’s cur­rent lead­ing-edge ar­chi­tec­ture, in­vented by IBM. The nanos­tack de­sign ver­ti­cally stacks and stag­gers tran­sis­tors, tak­ing ad­van­tage of 3D se­quen­tial in­te­gra­tion to pack more tran­sis­tors onto a chip. The de­sign also un­locks the use of dif­fer­ent ma­te­r­ial com­bi­na­tions within each stacked layer, op­ti­miz­ing per­for­mance and power ef­fi­ciency of each tran­sis­tor in­de­pen­dent of the other.

IBM’s nanos­tack ar­chi­tec­ture was ex­per­i­men­tally val­i­dated through ul­tra-thin di­elec­tric bond­ing in CMOS in­te­gra­tion, demon­stra­tion of dual-chan­nel en­gi­neer­ing ca­pa­bil­ity, and func­tional CMOS in­verter op­er­a­tion with ex­pected switch­ing per­for­mance. Together, these re­sults con­firm the nanos­tack tech­nol­ogy can be phys­i­cally built and sup­ports real com­pu­ta­tion.

Additionally, in new re­search pre­sented at VLSI 2026, IBM re­searchers demon­strated that the nanos­tack ar­chi­tec­ture pro­vides 40 per­cent scal­ing in SRAM,[2] un­lock­ing the abil­ity of chip de­sign­ers to cre­ate much more ef­fi­cient chips while also sup­port­ing the high-band­width data de­mands of ad­vanced AI work­loads.

With this ground­break­ing struc­ture, logic tech­nol­ogy can ex­tend for the first time be­low the 1 nm node, ad­vanc­ing the era of angstrom-level scal­ing, where di­men­sions ap­proach the size of in­di­vid­ual atoms. While tran­sis­tor nodes now re­fer to a gen­er­a­tion of man­u­fac­tur­ing tech­nol­ogy ver­sus an ex­act phys­i­cal di­men­sion, IBM’s 0.7 nm tech­nol­ogy—also re­ferred to as 7 angstroms—demon­strates how con­tin­ued scal­ing re­mains pos­si­ble. With the new nanos­tack ar­chi­tec­ture, IBM’s semi­con­duc­tor roadmap pro­jects at least a decade of fu­ture scal­ing.

Building on Decades of Leadership in Semiconductor Innovation

This break­through is the lat­est tes­ta­ment to IBM as a leader in semi­con­duc­tor R&D. IBM has led the world in de­vel­op­ing the chips that power com­put­ing sys­tems for decades, from early semi­con­duc­tors in the 1960s to the world’s first 2 nm node chip. IBM con­tin­ues to in­no­vate at the cut­ting edge of sil­i­con, AI hard­ware, logic, and quan­tum proces­sors de­vel­oped to power the fu­ture of com­put­ing.

IBM and its part­ners con­duct this work at a lead­ing semi­con­duc­tor re­search fa­cil­ity in Albany, New York, which will soon be home to a High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet (High NA EUV) lith­o­g­ra­phy tool, es­sen­tial for the fu­ture of logic scal­ing. Developed by ASML, this tech­nol­ogy en­ables ul­tra‑pre­cise cir­cuit print­ing, sup­port­ing the cre­ation of smaller, more pow­er­ful chips. IBM and part­ners in­clud­ing Lam Research Corp. (Nasdaq: LRCX), Tokyo Electron (TEL), and SCREEN Semiconductor Solutions, Ltd. have been work­ing to­gether to de­velop new High NA EUV processes and tools that have al­ready yielded work­ing de­vices.

IBM also re­cently an­nounced a plan to form Anderon, the world’s first pure-play quan­tum foundry. Anderon, a stand­alone IBM com­pany, will draw on IBM’s in­dus­try-lead­ing quan­tum com­put­ing and semi­con­duc­tor ex­per­tise to help po­si­tion the United States to man­u­fac­ture most of the world’s quan­tum wafers.

With the ex­pec­ta­tion of the ear­li­est adop­tion of nanos­tack tech­nol­ogy at the sub-1 nm node, IBM sees a path to pro­duc­tion in as early as the next 5 years.

About IBM

IBM is a lead­ing provider of global hy­brid cloud and AI, and con­sult­ing ex­per­tise. We help clients in more than 175 coun­tries cap­i­tal­ize on in­sights from their data, stream­line busi­ness processes, re­duce costs and gain the com­pet­i­tive edge in their in­dus­tries. More than 4,000 gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate en­ti­ties in crit­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture ar­eas such as fi­nan­cial ser­vices, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and health­care rely on IBM’s hy­brid cloud plat­form and Red Hat OpenShift to af­fect their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions quickly, ef­fi­ciently and se­curely. IBM’s break­through in­no­va­tions in AI, quan­tum com­put­ing, in­dus­try-spe­cific cloud so­lu­tions and con­sult­ing de­liver open and flex­i­ble op­tions to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-stand­ing com­mit­ment to trust, trans­parency, re­spon­si­bil­ity, in­clu­siv­ity and ser­vice. Visit www.ibm.com for more in­for­ma­tion.

[1] S. Reboh et al “NanoStack Transistor Architecture for CMOS 7A Node and Beyond” VLSI 2025

[2] Chen Zhang et al “Area and Performance of Staggered-Channel Nanostack SRAM Bitcells” VLSI 2026

Media con­tacts:

Willa Hahn IBM Communications willa.hahn@ibm.com

Brittany Forgione IBM Communications brit­tany.for­gione@ibm.com

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