Newsletter

AI Compute Meets the Speed of Concrete

Programming note: ARPU returns this Friday with a look at the AI boom's most improbable winners—including a century-old toilet manufacturer and the creator of MSG. Ticket Scalpers for Copper Wire The most absurd economic indicator in the AI boom right now is not a valuation multiple or
AI Compute Meets the Speed of Concrete

Berkshire's LLM Is Not What You Think

Programming note: ARPU will return next Tuesday with a look at the AI supply crunch. AI Trading Bots If you want to know whether AI is actually ready to take over Wall Street, the easiest way to find out is to give it a brokerage account. For the last two
Berkshire's LLM Is Not What You Think

The 3:1 Math of Memory Scarcity

Programming note: ARPU will return this Friday with a look at how Berkshire Hathaway thinks about AI. Vendor Financing in Reverse Normally, when a company wants to buy a component, it issues a purchase order. When it really wants to buy a component, it signs a long-term agreement. When it
The 3:1 Math of Memory Scarcity

Hyperscaler vs. Hyperscaler

Programming note: ARPU will return next Wednesday with some observations on the memory supply situation. Meta's AI Bill It is earnings season, which means it is time for the world's largest technology companies to announce how many hundreds of billions of dollars they are spending on
Hyperscaler vs. Hyperscaler

China Hacks the AI Math

Programming note: ARPU will return next Friday with some thoughts on the hyperscalers' latest results. Better Math for Worse Computers In the software industry, you sometimes delay a product launch because you are trying to make it run better on the fastest computers in the world. DeepSeek just spent
China Hacks the AI Math

Oracle is an OpenAI Credit Story

Programming note: We've just released our thematic report: The Inference Economy: Where AI Margins Actually Come From in 2026. It's a deep-dive into the cost-per-token collapse, who's actually capturing margin across the AI stack, and why inference efficiency is emerging as the industry'
Oracle is an OpenAI Credit Story

The Wrong Nvidia Moat

Programming note: we will return next Friday with some thoughts on Oracle. Electrons In, Tokens Out In a podcast interview this week, Jensen Huang described his company in terms somewhere between engineering and philosophy: "The input is electrons, the output is tokens, and in the middle is Nvidia."
The Wrong Nvidia Moat

Microsoft's AI Problem Is Not Demand. It's Regret.

A note before we start: we published "Two Clocks, One Stock" — a systematic framework for reading the gap between software valuations and operational reality. It scores every software name on two dimensions: where its trailing PE sits in its own three-year history, and where its operations do. The
Microsoft's AI Problem Is Not Demand. It's Regret.

Google Just Sorted the Memory Trade

Programming note: we will return on Friday and take a look at Microsoft. The Two-Class Memory Market One of the peculiar features of an AI bubble is that investors eventually start buying nouns. "Compute" works. "Power" works. "Memory" definitely works. Never mind that memory
Google Just Sorted the Memory Trade

Oil Shock and the Cost of Intelligence

Programming note: our next issue lands 6 April, where we will take a look at the memory crunch. How to Fund AI with $100 Oil During the past few years, the Federal Reserve has been trying to pull off a soft landing—bringing inflation down without crashing the economy—something
Oil Shock and the Cost of Intelligence