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Google's Power Play

The Energy Carve-Out The story of the AI build-out is simple: you need more chips, which need more data centers, which need more power. An almost comical amount of power. The obvious solution, if you have infinite money, is to just go out and buy a power company. And so,
Google's Power Play

Memory Oligopoly's Payday

Programming note: ARPU will be off next week, back on Dec 29. The Seventh DRAM Cycle If you have tried to buy computer memory recently, you may have noticed something strange. Prices have gone haywire. A kit of G.Skill 32GB DDR5 RAM that cost $125 in September is now
Memory Oligopoly's Payday

The AI Handholding Economy

Adoption-Impact Gap We can think of enterprise AI adoption like a nationwide gym membership drive. In 2025, every company signed up. Executives touted their commitment to fitness on earnings calls. Employees logged into the app. Everyone has the membership card. The only problem is, almost nobody is getting stronger. And

The Logic of the AI Stack

Financing Jensen's Cake Nvidia's Jensen Huang has offered a clean, orderly way to think about the AI economy. At a recent conference, he described the industry as a "five-layer cake." At the bottom, you have Energy. Then comes Chips, Infrastructure, AI Models, and finally,
The Logic of the AI Stack

When AI Revenue Eats Your Margins

The Price of AI There is a simple model for how tech companies are supposed to work: you build a new product, demand spikes, and as you scale up, your margins expand. Operating leverage kicks in, and each new dollar of revenue boosts profits more than the last. The past

AI's Unit Math Problem

$800 Billion Interest Payment The unit math of AI is usually presented in terms of compute: teraflops, parameters, and tokens. But occasionally, someone does the math in terms of dollars, and the result is enough to make a CFO faint. Last week, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna provided one of the
AI's Unit Math Problem