The global supply chain is a complex, interdependent, and shifting organism. In the past few years, pandemics, tariffs, wars, natural disasters, and transportation chaos have tested it like never before, revealing that fragility is expensive. The companies that survive do so not through luck but through resiliency. For decades, companies built sourcing strategies around the illusion of stability—one supplier, region, and price. It worked until a port closed, a single supplier went down, or a production line froze.

Mike Bixenman, president of Magnalytix, and his colleagues Vladimir Sitko, founder of PBT Works, and Adam Klett, PhD, director of science at KYZEN, discussed how cleaning can affect reliability in a Professional Development Course at APEX EXPO 2026. We spoke to Mike after the session to better understand the context for the current activity in cleaning technology.

Artificial Intelligence is often framed as a software story focused on algorithms and models. But beneath that narrative lies a more fundamental shift rooted in hardware. AI is not just changing what technology can do; it’s changing how the physical components behind it are produced, allocated, and priced. One of the clearest examples of this shift is now emerging in the global memory market.