Newsletter

The Great Unbundling There are two ways to build a chip empire. On one side is vertical integration, the old-guard model where a company like Intel designs and manufactures its own silicon. On the other is specialization, the modern approach where a "fabless" company like Nvidia designs the

The Made-For-China Chip One way to think about the US-China tech war is as a grand strategic chess match. Another, it seems, is as a farce. Last month, the story was that China was rejecting Nvidia’s made-for-China H20 chip because its homegrown alternative from Huawei was somewhat competitive. This

The Capital Efficiency Bet The rationale behind ASML's €1.3 billion investment in French AI startup Mistral, as we explored last week, is one of sound corporate strategy. The Dutch company that makes the world's most critical chip-making machines wants to embed AI into its own

The $455 Billion IOU Ordinarily, if you are a giant, publicly traded company and you miss your quarterly earnings, your stock goes down. Oracle's stock, apparently, did not get the memo. The company reported revenue and profit that fell short of expectations, and in response, its stock soared

The $115 Billion Burn The artificial intelligence business continues to be a story of landlords and tenants. The landlords—Microsoft, Amazon, Google—own the vast, expensive data centers. The tenants—AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic—rent immense amounts of computing power to train and run their models. For a

The Per-Seat Problem Salesforce, a titan of the cloud software era, has become one of the worst-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year. The stock has plunged 23%, a dramatic reversal for a company that had soared over 150% in the preceding two years. The slump stands

The Market Moves Faster Than the Law The funny thing about being found guilty of running an illegal monopoly is that it might be the best news your shareholders get all year. After a five-year legal battle, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday that while Google did indeed maintain an

Cybersecurity's Kafka Problem Modern cybersecurity has entered a truly Kafka-esque state of affairs. The problem, it seems, is artificial intelligence. The solution, it turns out, is also artificial intelligence. Last week, identity management platform Okta and cybersecurity company SentinelOne provided a financial snapshot of just how profitable this

Nvidia’s New Normal One way to think about being a $4 trillion company is that even your spectacular successes can start to look like a slowdown. This, in essence, was the story of Nvidia's latest earnings report. The company posted another quarter of record revenue, with sales