More Than LeBron The market for elite AI talent has officially detached from the normal laws of corporate physics. Consider this: LeBron James, arguably the basketball GOAT, will earn roughly half a billion dollars in on-court salary over his entire NBA career. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offered a single AI researcher,

The Kill Switch The brief détente in the US-China chip war lasted about two weeks. After months of tension, the US made a significant concession, allowing Nvidia to resume sales of its H20 AI processor to Chinese customers. This was viewed as a major step toward stabilizing a volatile relationship.

Samsung's Lifeline One way to think about Samsung getting a $16.5 billion chip deal from Tesla is that it's just big companies doing big business. A more interesting way to think about it is as a desperate, perfectly-timed rescue. For months, Samsung's foundry

Chip Alliance The basic contours of modern trade deals are becoming familiar. One country threatens another with tariffs, and in exchange for avoiding those tariffs, the second country agrees to buy more goods or, increasingly, to invest vast sums of money in the first country. That pattern was on full

Google vs. Everybody Alphabet's latest earnings call was, on its face, a victory lap. The company posted strong double-digit growth in its core Search business, its Cloud division is accelerating, and CEO Sundar Pichai touted "breakthroughs in performance" from its new Gemini AI model. But the

Who Can Afford to Think? For a while now, a nagging question has lurked behind the AI infrastructure boom. The logic for spending hundreds of billions on Nvidia GPUs for training new models was clear. But what happened after that? The general assumption was that inference—the actual use of

The Empty Shelf One way to think about the US-China chip war is that it is a contest of government decrees. The US Department of Commerce says “you can’t sell that chip,” and so Nvidia can’t sell that chip. Then, after some high-level meetings and a change of

The Roblox Roll-Up We were talking the other day about the bizarrely active market for mergers and acquisitions on Roblox, which raises the obvious question: Why? Why would a professional studio pay a teenager millions of dollars for a game that might be forgotten in six months? The answer is

SpaceX's Side Hustle Here is a fun corporate governance story. Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, is investing $2 billion in his artificial intelligence company, xAI. This is part of a larger funding round for xAI, which is a private company. SpaceX is also a private company, but