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The Quantum 2012 Moment

Programming note: ARPU will be off this week, back on Monday. Shovels for the Next Gold Rush If you are a global bank, you sometimes find it useful to tell your shareholders that you are on the cutting edge of technology. You want to suggest that you are using the
The Quantum 2012 Moment

Construction Firms with Software Valuations

Macrohard is Very Hard The ultimate goal for many Silicon Valley startups is to eventually become a software company. Software is a great business model because its second copy costs the same to produce as its billionth: essentially nothing. It escapes the physical economics of the factory floor, promising high
Construction Firms with Software Valuations

Physical AI's Convergence Play

Autonomous Cars Have Grown Legs Two massive, parallel industries have long spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to solve one very specific, shared problem: how to navigate the messy, unpredictable physical world without hitting anything. The first industry was self-driving cars. The second was industrial robotics. The goal
Physical AI's Convergence Play

The Nuclear Scrapyard

Bomb-Grade Data Centers If you want to build a nuclear power plant in the United States, your primary obstacle is not the laws of physics. It is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC is the world's most meticulous gatekeeper, overseeing a civilian licensing process so thorough, so

Brookfield Enters the Cloud

Your Landlord Wants Your Margin The hierarchy of the cloud has always been well-defined. At the top sit the "hyperscalers"—companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—who write the software, manage the customers, and capture the massive margins. At the bottom sit the infrastructure providers: the companies
Brookfield Enters the Cloud

The Yield Tax

Beijing's Procurement Rule If you manage a multi-billion dollar semiconductor fab, your professional life is governed by an unforgiving metric: yield. Yield is the percentage of chips on a silicon wafer that actually work. In the world of advanced processors, the difference between a 90% yield and

Google's Power Play

The Energy Carve-Out The story of the AI build-out is simple: you need more chips, which need more data centers, which need more power. An almost comical amount of power. The obvious solution, if you have infinite money, is to just go out and buy a power company.
Google's Power Play

Memory Oligopoly's Payday

Programming note: ARPU will be off next week, back on Dec 29. The Seventh DRAM Cycle If you have tried to buy computer memory recently, you may have noticed something strange. Prices have gone haywire. A kit of G.Skill 32GB DDR5 RAM that cost $125 in September is now
Memory Oligopoly's Payday

The AI Handholding Economy

Adoption-Impact Gap We can think of enterprise AI adoption like a nationwide gym membership drive. In 2025, every company signed up. Executives touted their commitment to fitness on earnings calls. Employees logged into the app. Everyone has the membership card. The only problem is, almost nobody is getting stronger.

The Logic of the AI Stack

Financing Jensen's Cake Nvidia's Jensen Huang has offered a clean, orderly way to think about the AI economy. At a recent conference, he described the industry as a "five-layer cake." At the bottom, you have Energy. Then comes Chips, Infrastructure, AI Models, and
The Logic of the AI Stack