AI Infrastructure Economics, Custom Silicon, and Financing Face Validation Pressure

AI infrastructure is shifting toward custom inference silicon, photonic and heterogeneous memory systems, orbital compute experiments, and new financing structures. Amazon's reported $8 billion NVIDIA leaseback, Volantis's $88 million funding, Google's orbital TPU test, and OpenAI's reported Jalapeño project are notable signals, but commercial value, production scale, benchmarks, software compatibility, and balance-sheet risk remain unverified.