Newsletter

Anthropic's Hedge It's an interesting time to be Amazon. You're the undisputed king of cloud computing. You identify the hottest AI startup on the planet, Anthropic, and make a massive bet, committing $8 billion to become its single largest shareholder and flagship AI partner.

The $185 Billion Lease Agreement Ordinarily, when a very large company holds a big meeting and announces a plan to more than triple its revenue in five years, its stock goes up. It is a sign of confidence, a vision of explosive growth. It is the kind of thing that

The AI Sandwich One of the more popular pastimes in financial markets these days is worrying about the AI bubble. The specter of 2000 hangs over every conversation. The valuations are dizzying, the revenue is often speculative, and the whole thing can feel a bit ephemeral. Are we just bidding

Nvidia Has Some Competition One of the fundamental laws of the modern tech economy is that all AI-related capex eventually flow to Nvidia. It is a force of financial gravity, pulling in tens of billions of dollars from every hyperscaler and sovereign wealth fund with an AI dream. If you

Is Google a Monopoly or an Underdog? It is a little weird to be in a position where you must simultaneously convince one group of powerful people that your business is an unstoppable juggernaut, and another group of powerful people that your business is on the verge of collapse. But

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 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

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