Newsletter

The Unwanted Chip The Trump administration just engineered a controversial deal to let Nvidia resume selling its less powerful AI chips to China, complete with a novel 15% tax for the US Treasury. For a brief moment, it looked like a transactional win-win: Nvidia would regain access to a

The Impossible Job One way to get fired as the CEO of a major American corporation is to run the company into the ground. Another, more modern way is to have the President of the US demand your resignation on social media. This week, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan found

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

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

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

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

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

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

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