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Is AI Actually Bad for Business? A Look at Duolingo's Margins

Shares of Duolingo soared this week after the popular education app raised its annual sales forecast, signaling strong demand for its subscription services. But buried beneath the bullish revenue outlook is a more complicated and cautionary tale about the real-world economics of artificial intelligence. Even as sales grew, the company&
Is AI Actually Bad for Business? A Look at Duolingo's Margins

Softbank's New Playbook

The AI Assembler It is a little strange when the world's most famous venture gambler starts acting like a blue-chip portfolio manager. And yet, here is Masayoshi Son, the man who lost more money than anyone in history during the dot-com bust and then poured billions into WeWork,
Softbank's New Playbook

Can Zuckerberg Buy AI Talent?

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,
Can Zuckerberg Buy AI Talent?

China's Nvidia Reversal

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.
China's Nvidia Reversal

Did Tesla Just Save Samsung?

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
Did Tesla Just Save Samsung?

Who's Paying for America's Fabs?

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
Who's Paying for America's Fabs?

Why Is Japan Paying for Taiwan to Build Chip Fabs in America?

In a twist following a high-stakes trade negotiation, Japan revealed that its massive $550 billion U.S. investment package—agreed to in exchange for avoiding steep tariffs—could be used to finance a Taiwanese company building semiconductor plants in the United States. The announcement by Japan's top trade
Why Is Japan Paying for Taiwan to Build Chip Fabs in America?

Google's Three-Front War

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
Google's Three-Front War

The Price of AI Reasoning

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 Price of AI Reasoning

The TSMC Bottleneck

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 TSMC Bottleneck