Ben Thompson on Big Tech, China, and the AI Boom Running Out of Money - [Invest Like the Best, EP.487]
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'ShaughnessyShow Notes
My guest today is Ben Thompson, the founder and author of Stratechery. Ben is one of my favorite business thinkers and I love talking to him about everything happening in markets and technology.
We go through every important company, including OpenAI, Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. We also discuss why he thinks it would be dangerous for the United States to win the AI race outright, what container shipping and the railroads of the 1870s tell us about the buildout, and why the binding constraint on all of this may be capital rather than compute.
Please enjoy my conversation with Ben Thompson.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best
(00:02:16) Winning the AI Race With China
(00:08:28) Timing, Capital, and the Railroads
(00:11:34) Berkshire, Google, and Absolute Profits
(00:14:23) Verifiable and Unverifiable Domains
(00:20:20) Aggregation Theory in the AI Era
(00:22:06) The Real Cost of Inference
(00:25:40) Why Consumer AI Needs Advertising
(00:30:08) Compute Shortages and Commodity Markets
(00:35:46) Memory Cycles and Boom Bust Dynamics
(00:42:08) TSMC, Intel, and Where Risk Goes
(00:44:51) The Best Setups in Big Tech
(00:52:14) The Frontier Model Contenders
(00:54:27) Microsoft's IBM Playbook
(01:00:45) Meta, Attention, and Advertising
(01:07:29) NVIDIA, Commodities, and Power
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