The collateral is in a rack
By Viktor Yoshimura – 23th October 2026 Billions are lent against GPUs on the assumption they hold their value. Few have priced what it takes to get them back. The AI build has a credit problem, and most of the argument is about one number: how long a GPU keeps its value. That’s the starting […]
Two trades, one tape
By Viktor Yoshimura – 14th October 2026 Asian buyers in North American e-scrap are usually read as one strategy. There are two, and they’re bidding for the same hardware. Over the past five years, Japanese and Korean industrial groups have taken ownership positions in North American e-scrap and ITAD businesses. Read together, the deals are […]
The paper trail is the target now
By Viktor Yoshimura – 14th October 2026 Southeast Asia’s e-waste crackdown has moved from the container to the declaration, the carrier and the money. The exposure runs back up the chain. Malaysia has re-exported 436 containers of e-waste this year. Another 578 start leaving this month. When I wrote about the export doors closing, the […]
The magnets in the machine
By Viktor Yoshimura – 8th of October 2026 Recovering rare earths from hard drives mostly doesn’t pay. Data-centre drives through ITAD are the one stream where it might, because someone else has already paid for the expensive steps. Rare-earth recycling usually breaks before the chemistry starts: getting the magnet out of the device costs more […]
Destruction is the last thing colos haven’t productised
By Viktor Yoshimura – 6th of October 2026 Colocation has productised almost every service inside the building. Drive destruction is the one it still leaves to a vendor on the loading bay. I think that is a product waiting to be built, and the hard part is not the machine. A tenant in a multi-tenant […]
82% of the Pipeline Is Paper
By Viktor Yoshimura – 1st October 2026 Asia-Pacific announced a record data centre pipeline this year. For anyone downstream, reading it as future volume is the most expensive mistake on the table. Cushman & Wakefield put the Asia-Pacific data centre pipeline at 26,455 MW in its H1 2026 update, a record, up 7,103 MW in […]
Johor: the clearest test case for in-region ITAD
By Viktor Yoshimura – 24th September 2026 The Circularity Brief — independent intelligence on IT asset disposition and the circular economy, Asia-Pacific & Japan. Johor has become one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing data-centre hubs. It’s also inside the country that just shut its border to imported e-waste. Put those two facts next to each other […]
The export doors are closing on APAC’s e-waste
By Viktor Yoshimura – 10th September 2026 The Circularity Brief — independent intelligence on IT asset disposition and the circular economy, Asia-Pacific & Japan. For years, APAC’s ITAD industry had a quiet safety valve: if processing got expensive at home, you could ship the hardware somewhere cheaper. That valve is closing, and most companies scaling […]
The Itochu play: a stake across Japan’s IT lifecycle
By Viktor Yoshimura – 3rd of September 2026 The Circularity Brief — independent intelligence on IT asset disposition and the circular economy, Asia-Pacific & Japan. Two Itochu announcements in one month mostly got read as two separate deals. Read together, they’re something else, and the interesting part isn’t the deals. It’s the structure. Here’s what […]
From tonnes to value density: what AI racks do to ITAD economics
By Viktor Yoshimura – 26th of August 2026 The Circularity Brief — independent intelligence on IT asset disposition and the circular economy, Asia-Pacific & Japan. For most of its history, the ITAD business has been measured in tonnes. Trucks, dock space, shredder throughput, weight processed — the whole operation was scaled on mass. AI is […]