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The AI Money-Go-Round

The Circular Boom Last month, we talked about cybersecurity's Kafka-esque problem: the only way to fend off AI-powered hackers is with AI-powered defenders, creating an absurd, self-feeding growth cycle for cybersecurity companies. It turns out, the same circular logic is now propping up the financial foundations of the
The AI Money-Go-Round

Why Is Qualcomm Buying a Company That Sells $50 Circuit Boards?

Qualcomm just announced its acquisition of Arduino, an Italian company beloved by hobbyists, students, and robotics labs for its inexpensive, open-source circuit boards. On the surface, the deal seems bizarre—a multi-billion dollar corporation buying a company whose products are famous for prototyping and tinkering. But this move is far

How OpenAI Paid for Its AMD Chips

The Kingmaker Ordinarily, when you buy a product, you pay for it with money. OpenAI, it seems, has found a way to pay for its AI chips with something more ephemeral: hype. This week, the AI startup announced a landmark deal to purchase tens of billions of dollars' worth
How OpenAI Paid for Its AMD Chips

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
AI's Real Estate Boom

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
Your AI Chats Are Now the Product

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
The Rise of the Neocloud

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
Intel and Apple's Un-Breakup

Google Inside Meta

The Humbling of Meta The story of the AI boom so far is that every tech giant is spending tens of billions of dollars to build its own world-beating intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg has been on a particularly aggressive campaign, poaching top talent for a secret "Superintelligence Lab" with
Google Inside Meta