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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

Why Are AI Giants Renting Computers? The current situation in the AI infrastructure boom is that you spend tens of billions of dollars building your own data centers. And also you spend tens of billions of dollars renting data centers from someone else. The someone else, it turns out, is

The Factory, Not the Chip Ordinarily, when you have a corporate breakup, you don't look back. In 2020, Apple very publicly dumped Intel—a move that foreshadowed Intel's eventual decline—by ditching its processors to build its own superior M-series chips. And yet, this week brought

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