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The Rise of the Neocloud

The Rise of the Neocloud

Why Are AI Giants Renting Computers? The current situation in the AI infrastructure boom is that you spend tens of billions of dollars building your own data centers. And also you spend tens of billions of dollars renting data centers from someone else. The someone else, it turns out, is
Intel and Apple's Un-Breakup

Intel and Apple's Un-Breakup

Google Inside Meta

Google Inside Meta

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Why Is China Telling Its Companies Not to Buy Nvidia's Chips?

One of the stranger moments in the US-China tech war happened this week. After months of intense lobbying and a controversial policy reversal, the Trump administration gave Nvidia the green light to resume selling its H20 artificial intelligence chips to China. For a moment, it looked like a win for

Why Is the US Government Taking a Cut of Nvidia's China Sales?

The US-China chip war has entered a strange and unprecedented new phase. In a highly unusual arrangement, the Trump administration has brokered a deal where American tech giants Nvidia and AMD will pay the US government 15% of their revenue from all advanced AI chip sales to China. The move,
Is AI Actually Bad for Business? A Look at Duolingo's Margins

Is AI Actually Bad for Business? A Look at Duolingo's Margins

Shares of Duolingo soared this week after the popular education app raised its annual sales forecast, signaling strong demand for its subscription services. But buried beneath the bullish revenue outlook is a more complicated and cautionary tale about the real-world economics of artificial intelligence. Even as sales grew, the company&
Why Is Japan Paying for Taiwan to Build Chip Fabs in America?

Why Is Japan Paying for Taiwan to Build Chip Fabs in America?

In a twist following a high-stakes trade negotiation, Japan revealed that its massive $550 billion U.S. investment package—agreed to in exchange for avoiding steep tariffs—could be used to finance a Taiwanese company building semiconductor plants in the United States. The announcement by Japan's top trade

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AI's Real Estate Boom

AI's Real Estate Boom

Pricing the Future The core principle of modern finance is that you pay for a company's current and future earnings. It might seem a little weird, then, that BlackRock is in talks to acquire Aligned Data Centers for $40 billion, when a significant portion of what it is
Your AI Chats Are Now the Product

Your AI Chats Are Now the Product

The Unspoken Bargain of AI The basic bargain of the internet, for two decades, has been a simple one: you get free services, and in exchange, tech companies get to mine your data to sell ads. This week, Meta announced it is officially extending that bargain into the far more
The Rise of the Neocloud

The Rise of the Neocloud

Why Are AI Giants Renting Computers? The current situation in the AI infrastructure boom is that you spend tens of billions of dollars building your own data centers. And also you spend tens of billions of dollars renting data centers from someone else. The someone else, it turns out, is
Intel and Apple's Un-Breakup

Intel and Apple's Un-Breakup

The Factory, Not the Chip Ordinarily, when you have a corporate breakup, you don't look back. In 2020, Apple very publicly dumped Intel—a move that foreshadowed Intel's eventual decline—by ditching its processors to build its own superior M-series chips. And yet, this week brought