Newsletter

The Post-Text Pivot We talked recently about how the "Scale is All You Need" dogma—the Silicon Valley belief that you just need vastly more compute to process vastly more data—is running headfirst into the laws of physics. It turns out that even if you have

Programming note: We've just released our thematic report: Mapping the Neocloud Landscape. It’s a 25-page analysis deconstructing the dynamic between hyperscalers and neoclouds, the capital flows, and the financial risks. Access a free copy here. Is a Cat Smarter Than ChatGPT? It is probably poor career

The "Boring" Memory Chip Just a few months ago, the story of the AI memory market was simple: SK Hynix was the new king, and Samsung, the long-reigning monarch, had been humbled. Having masterfully aligned itself with Nvidia, SK Hynix became the dominant supplier of High Bandwidth

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

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 The initial, abstract fear that a robot might one day take your job has been replaced by a much more immediate and tangible one: your boss might fire you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&

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,