Sign in Subscribe

Is Nvidia Buying Its Own Revenue?

Circular AI A fun trick from the dot-com era was circular financing, where a company would invest in a startup, and that startup would then use the money to buy the first company's products, creating the magical illusion of revenue growth. It is a little weird to
Is Nvidia Buying Its Own Revenue?

The Hard Drive's Revenge

The Data Landfill The basic story of the AI boom is that it is a glorious, high-tech affair, driven by futuristic chips from Nvidia and god-like models from OpenAI and Anthropic. It is a story of brains. But it turns out that the AI boom is also a
The Hard Drive's Revenge

Nvidia and Intel, Together at Last?

The Great Unbundling There are two ways to build a chip empire. On one side is vertical integration, the old-guard model where a company like Intel designs and manufactures its own silicon. On the other is specialization, the modern approach where a "fabless" company like Nvidia designs
Nvidia and Intel, Together at Last?

Nvidia's Impossible Bind

The Made-For-China Chip One way to think about the US-China tech war is as a grand strategic chess match. Another, it seems, is as a farce. Last month, the story was that China was rejecting Nvidia’s made-for-China H20 chip because its homegrown alternative from
Nvidia's Impossible Bind

Europe's AI Playbook

The Capital Efficiency Bet The rationale behind ASML's €1.3 billion investment in French AI startup Mistral, as we explored last week, is one of sound corporate strategy. The Dutch company that makes the world's most critical chip-making machines wants to embed AI into its
Europe's AI Playbook

Oracle's Over-Engineered Cloud

The $455 Billion IOU Ordinarily, if you are a giant, publicly traded company and you miss your quarterly earnings, your stock goes down. Oracle's stock, apparently, did not get the memo. The company reported revenue and profit that fell short of expectations, and in response, its stock soared
Oracle's Over-Engineered Cloud

Meta Deep Dive

Section 1: Company Overview Meta's stated mission is to build technology that helps people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. The company's operations are centered around its Family of Apps (FoA), which includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads. These platforms are offered to users at
Meta Deep Dive

ASML Makes Its Move

The Chipmaker's AI Ordinarily, the company that makes the printing presses does not buy a stake in the author. In the neat, layered world of technology, hardware companies make the physical stuff, and software companies make the virtual stuff that runs on it. This week, that tidy separation

OpenAI's Landlord Problem

The $115 Billion Burn The artificial intelligence business continues to be a story of landlords and tenants. The landlords—Microsoft, Amazon, Google—own the vast, expensive data centers. The tenants—AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic—rent immense amounts of computing power to train and run their models. For a
OpenAI's Landlord Problem

The Software Seat-Eater

The Per-Seat Problem Salesforce, a titan of the cloud software era, has become one of the worst-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year. The stock has plunged 23%, a dramatic reversal for a company that had soared over 150% in the preceding two years. The
The Software Seat-Eater