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Weekly Debrief: AMD's Big Bet, Intel's "Prove It" Moment (Sample)

The AI arms race broadened this week, as the market's insatiable demand for compute forced a new wave of strategic partnerships and product-level execution. The central theme was the tangible move to diversify the AI supply chain, highlighted by OpenAI's massive, multi-billion dollar deal with AMD,

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