Reading List 07/04/26
This reading list covers households lacking homeowners insurance, increased efforts to stop AI chip smuggling, Japan's dual electrical frequency system, and Meta's growing AI compute operations.
Background
- **Construction Physics** is a Substack newsletter by Brian Potter, a writer who analyzes the construction industry, infrastructure, and physical technology from a deeply researched, engineering-focused perspective.
- This is a "Reading List" post, a regular format where Potter curates and briefly annotates interesting links from around the web — it's not original reporting but a roundup of notable recent articles.
- The topics covered range widely: the uninsured homeowners problem (exposure to disaster risk, housing market fragility), AI chip smuggling (efforts to restrict advanced semiconductors to China, particularly Nvidia's products), Japan's dual-frequency grid (a historical legacy where eastern Japan uses 50 Hz and western Japan uses 60 Hz, creating infrastructure headaches), and Meta's AI compute business (the company's massive buildout of data centers and its implications for cloud computing).