Newsletter

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

Circular AI A fun trick from the dot-com era was circular financing, where a company would invest in a startup, and that startup would then use the money to buy the first company's products, creating the magical illusion of revenue growth. It is a little weird to see

The Data Landfill The basic story of the AI boom is that it is a glorious, high-tech affair, driven by futuristic chips from Nvidia and god-like models from OpenAI and Anthropic. It is a story of brains. But it turns out that the AI boom is also a story of

The Great Unbundling There are two ways to build a chip empire. On one side is vertical integration, the old-guard model where a company like Intel designs and manufactures its own silicon. On the other is specialization, the modern approach where a "fabless" company like Nvidia designs the

The Made-For-China Chip One way to think about the US-China tech war is as a grand strategic chess match. Another, it seems, is as a farce. Last month, the story was that China was rejecting Nvidia’s made-for-China H20 chip because its homegrown alternative from Huawei was somewhat competitive. This

The Capital Efficiency Bet The rationale behind ASML's €1.3 billion investment in French AI startup Mistral, as we explored last week, is one of sound corporate strategy. The Dutch company that makes the world's most critical chip-making machines wants to embed AI into its own

The $455 Billion IOU Ordinarily, if you are a giant, publicly traded company and you miss your quarterly earnings, your stock goes down. Oracle's stock, apparently, did not get the memo. The company reported revenue and profit that fell short of expectations, and in response, its stock soared

The $115 Billion Burn The artificial intelligence business continues to be a story of landlords and tenants. The landlords—Microsoft, Amazon, Google—own the vast, expensive data centers. The tenants—AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic—rent immense amounts of computing power to train and run their models. For a

The Per-Seat Problem Salesforce, a titan of the cloud software era, has become one of the worst-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year. The stock has plunged 23%, a dramatic reversal for a company that had soared over 150% in the preceding two years. The slump stands