Newsletter

The Ticking Clock The numbers coming out of the "neocloud" space this week were, as is typical these days, completely dizzying. CoreWeave, the publicly-traded bellwether for this new category of AI infrastructure providers, saw its revenue more than double to $1.36 billion for the quarter. Its rival,

The AI Mandate There is a new, slightly menacing message echoing through the halls of corporate America: use AI, or else. The initial, abstract fear that a robot might one day take your job has been replaced by a much more immediate and tangible one: your boss might fire you

Programming note: ARPU will be off the rest of the week, back next Monday. Amazon's 20% Problem For the first time in a long time, Wall Street was genuinely relieved that Amazon Web Services had a good quarter. The company's stock soared more than 11% after

The Robotaxi-in-a-Box Building a self-driving car, for the longest time, was a bit like trying to build a spaceship in your garage. It was a bespoke, incredibly expensive, vertically integrated science project. You needed an army of PhDs, a fleet of custom vehicles, and a decade's worth of

The Phone Chip Gambit One of the more interesting side effects of the AI gold rush is that it's forcing companies to get innovative. The demand for compute is so extreme, and the dominance of Nvidia is so absolute, that challengers are having to make counterintuitive bets to

Amazon's Bad Week For the longest time, the cloud computing business was mainly a two-horse race between Amazon and Microsoft, and everyone else was just fighting for scraps. Amazon Web Services, the division that literally invented the industry, was the undisputed king—the default choice for startups, the

The Wrong Kind of Good News In the AI-obsessed market of 2025, there are apparently two kinds of good news. There is "good news," where a company beats earnings estimates and raises its forecast. And then there is "AI-cloud-hyper-growth good news," which is the only kind

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