2025-11-30 07:33:13
There I was with a dinner to eat and a couple hours to kill. Oh look, Flight Risk freshly available on HBO Max. I hadn't heard great things – I hadn't heard much of anything. But Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery, and Topher Grace directed by Mel Gibson, how bad can it possibly be?
Bad.
I honestly can't think of a worse movie I've seen in recent memory. Granted, I tend to avoid overtly bad movies and had I just looked at the Metacritic score ahead of time, I probably would have avoided this one. Instead, I just went for it. My god.
The premise is fine, I guess. The person who is the reason for the flight is a flight risk, but also the flight itself turns into the risk. Get it? And I sort of like the notion of having a small group of actors naturally contained in one space for an entire movie. And I even like all of the actors involved here individually!
But put together, they just don't work. Part of it is the accents – more Dockery's American accent than Wahlberg's faux redneck one (because it was part of the plot) – but a bigger part was Wahlberg's hair situation. I mean, did he insist on shaving his head so there would be stubble so people wouldn't dare think he's actually bald or something? It just looks ridiculous.
From there, it only gets worse. Topher Grace tries to do Topher Grace stuff but it doesn't work here. Comically obvious plot points are revealed with zero subtlety – "how did you know we were going to Seattle?" The whole fear-of-flying angle, which is actually the one thing that might make sense for the plot, quickly flies out the window, though sadly no one else does until the end. I quite enjoyed how the autopilot on the tiny prop plane flying over mountains in Alaska was super smooth and flew perfect for most of the flight, but when the pilots were in control, that's when the shit hit the fan.
I also loved the warning not to fire the gun in the plane lest it take the whole thing down, followed by endless firing in the plane, including of a flare gun.
I'm sorry, but nothing can possibly top when the nice man over the radio helping the person who has never flown before (yet keeps reading off altitude measurements as if she's an experienced pilot?) tells her that she should do a trial run at the landing, knowing she's running out of fuel – and not to mention that one of the characters is dying from blood loss. They only don't because she refuses and sure enough, when she goes to do the actual landing, there's no more fuel. In other words, had she done the trial run of the landing, they'd all be dead. This is never addressed.
Oh look, a perfectly prepared syringe of morphine!
But at least they addressed the fact that the flight risk guy knew one random payment he helped orchestrate for the mob or whomever was going to a specific area of New York where, as it turns out, the head of the FBI or whomever also happens to live, as he discloses while telling his agent to make sure to call him at home, and very specifically says to call him at his home in that very specific area of New York. What a twist!
The same FBI director or whomever takes about five seconds to admit to murdering his subordinates when the accusation is made. Oh yes, and then he's of course on the phone with the would-be assassin at the (mercifully short) end.1 AND I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN AWAY FOR IT TOO, IF IT WEREN'T FOR YOU PESKY KIDS.
Honestly, I'm embarrassed for everyone involved in this movie. I'm also embarrassed that anyone would give this film a rating above zero. Mel Gibson, for all his faults, has directed some great movies. Some truly great ones, even. What the fuck was this?
2025-11-28 22:23:20
Happy belated Thanksgiving to those in the US (though we celebrated here in London as well). Catching up the day after with a lot packed in below. While also, of course, gearing up for The Game tomorrow. Five in a row? Seems improbable though certainly not impossible... #GoBlue 〽️
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
🗣️ Ilya Sutskever on Dwarkesh Podcast – There's a lot in here, and yes, some great memes. A few main takeaways include his notion that Safe Superintelligence can compete with his former colleagues at OpenAI (and elsewhere) despite having less capital in the bank because those guys are bogged down in the "rat race" – not only having models and products out there in the world, but also solely (or mainly) focused on LLMs (where "scaling has sucked the oxygen out of the room" when it comes to new ideas). SSI has "returned to research", trying to come up with other models and methods but at the same time, he's backing off the notion of going straight for Superintelligence and hinting they might get some work out there sooner ("gradual roll out"). Because the work might actually be around "a mind that can learn" rather than be pre-loaded with everything – which isn't natural. As always, Sutskever loves going back to human evolution and that's clearly guiding him here. Will it work? No one knows, and he's pretty honest about that – which also may be why his co-founder Daniel Gross bailed for Meta when Zuck came with a "Godfather" offer (which Sutskever directly addressed too – he didn't want to sell, but Gross clearly did). He thinks we're still 5 to 20 years away from what we would consider AGI/Superintelligence/Whatever. And perhaps more notably, that the LLM-focused folks may "stall out" on their progress, perhaps in the next couple of years. That doesn't mean some won't be good businesses, but they'll be even more squarely competing in that "rat race". That's, um, something to watch! [Dwarkesh]
😮 OpenAI's First "Jaw-Droppingly Good" Prototype – While it has long felt like you could almost triangulate what they've been working towards, the news here is that they finally have a prototype they're excited about. From what Sam Altman and Jony Ive are saying, it's not clear even if the device is actually working yet – all we have is the "beautiful cabin by the lake, and in the mountains" vibe reveal from Altman – or if they're just pleased with the form factor they've landed upon. But it's apparently less than two years away, per Ive. "I hope when people see it, they say 'that's it," says Altman. To which Ive quickly jumps in, "Yeah, they will." His short laugh appended to the end of that gives one a lot of hope. He clearly likes whatever they have! Now for the fun part: figuring out how to manufacturer it at scale. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that OpenAI is ramping up their poaching from Apple's hardware teams... [Emerson Collective]
🎞️ Could Netflix Win Warner Bros? – This report would sure like us to believe it's a two-horse race between the streaming giant and Paramount (with Comcast seemingly in a distant third). The playbook seems to be all about convincing WBD that a deal with them would go through regulatory easier because streaming is a more dynamic and competitive market than traditional Hollywood. But Paramount has their trump card, literally, so it's just hard to see how they don't win this. Unless the WBD board feels like they really should just sell the studio + streamer and let the networks spin-out in to their own entity to be sold at a later point – i.e. can Netflix make a partial deal that's better than what Paramount is offering for the whole company right now? The fact that Netflix's own investors don't seem to love the prospects of this deal is interesting too... Updated "sweetened" bids are due on Monday. [New York Post]
📺 Warner Bros Discovery Wants to Make HBO, HBO Again – Speaking of, after years of trying (and failing) to turn HBO into Netflix – doing basically everything to destroy the brand in the process (to be fair, this was mostly AT&T), including burying it in the most MAXimum way possible, WBD now seems set on reverting everything, from the branding on down. Of course, the world is quite different than when HBO rose to power – least of which because Apple and others have stepped in to fill some of the HBO-shaped hole – and it's not just streaming, but the fact that movies themselves play a different role with the brand (i.e. HBO is no longer the place you go to see movies at home first after theatrical runs and video store rentals). "Prestige TV", which HBO more or less started, has now mainly subsumed everything. All of this sounds good – including using "Max Originals" for the more regular cadence shows – but it's sort of humorous that it's happening just as someone new is going to buy the brand yet again. Will they monkey with that swing? Probably! Will it ironically be Netflix? Maybe! [THR]
📲 The iOS 'Snow Leopard' Moment – Mark Gurman says the next iteration of iOS – iOS 27 – will be more about cleaning up and streamlining the OS, just as Apple has done from time to time with macOS in the past. Feels like a good thing, but also a necessary thing as operating systems age and naturally gather cruft. It also should give Apple a way to refocus around AI, as many such features and work will presumably be under-the-hood as well (and will start rolling out with iOS 26.4 in the Spring). And though it's not mentioned, one presumes Apple also has to do some interesting work to get the OS ready for the forthcoming 'iPhone Fold'. No one is really talking about the software, but presumably it will run "straight up" iOS on the front screen and some sort of new, expanded version when unfolded. Or could it unfold into iPadOS? Would that be too jarring for people? One more thing: Gurman also refutes the FT report that Tim Cook could retire in the first half of next year. We'll see. I still think it was a trial balloon floated by someone. [Bloomberg 🔒]
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
"Let’s be very clear: What Sam does, I cannot do. There’s so much to do just on my scope that I think I have a decade or more of things that I can do just right there. And I’m telling you, we need all of us. We need Sam so badly. We need me."
– Fidji Simo, when asked directly by Zoë Schiffer for a Wired profile if she would ever "consider becoming CEO of the whole company?" It's a good answer, in that I believe it to be true and sincere. As has been proven time and again, no one can cut deals and raise money quite like Sam Altman. But it's also not a "no."
My suspicion, from the get go, is that this remains the long-term plan. If and when OpenAI goes public, who is CEO of the company?
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
While OpenAI itself may not carry a ton of debt (they just have a relatively small credit line, which they haven't drawn), everyone is well aware that their partners are loading up to the hilt. Why? To build data centers for OpenAI.
As we've discussed, as a (highly) unprofitable startup, OpenAI would have trouble getting access to such debt – certainly not with the ease that Amazon and Meta and Google can – so they're leveraging their partners, coming up with "new ideas" for financing. That includes, by the way, the data centers OpenAI intends to operate themselves. Who is paying for that? Likely NVIDIA.
Humorously, this likely came together to combat Google, but also to prevent OpenAI from going down the TPU path with them...
Anyway, it's rather remarkable to see the partners' debt for OpenAI data centers so cleanly laid out in visual form. As is this:
The $100bn of bonds, bank loans and private credit deals tied to OpenAI are equivalent to the net debt directly held by the six largest corporate borrowers in the world — including carmakers Volkswagen and Toyota and telecoms groups AT&T and Comcast — according to a 2024 report by asset manager Janus Henderson.
Private Credit. SPVs. The race is on to get this all working – at least somewhat economically – before the inevitable burst... Also to just get them working, period. The shortages – from power on down – are starting to mount. As such, so is the pressure.
2025-11-27 23:46:52
While today is Thanksgiving in America, I'm not in America, so I thought it might be a good day to write about a topic where I am: the UK. Since my family moved here about two and a half years ago, I've slowly but surely been getting up to speed on the local things that one must – or at the very least, one can't avoid: taxes and politics. Both were in the spotlight yesterday with the announcement of the budget.
And there's a tech angle here, I swear.
First and foremost, I find it completely ridiculous that the country sets and then resets this key aspect so often. And I know I'm not alone there. It's a problem for me just as it is for anyone living and working here because it's whiplash-inducing. Tax rates and rules seemingly set in stone are anything but depending on the wants and needs of those in power. This is true basically everywhere to some extent, of course, but it's the speed at which things can – and do – change here. Literally the only thing constant and consistent is change. And this makes it basically impossible to plan for anything long-term.
And while that's an issue for individuals, imagine the nightmare it is for businesses trying to operate here. No policy is safe, including those previously promised in campaign speeches. It's complete and utter chaos.
Which is sort of funny to write because the overall mood around business in the country is almost the opposite. Things are so stagnant that they feel more or less dead. Forget being set in stone, everything here, business-wise, feels trapped in mud. Calling growth "anemic" is an insult to anemia.
Every politician – in every party – promises a return to growth. And then every single policy they enact enables the opposite. And they blame everyone but themselves – their predecessors, the pandemic, Brexit, etc. All of that can be true to some extent, but it's oddly never mentioned on those campaign trails. Because this will be the government to bring change! All you must do is vote for us to act!
Labour swept into power on a landslide outcome after such comical bungling of basically everything by the Tories that it makes the Trump administration look downright competent and efficient by comparison – well, the second administration, at least. And what did Labour do with such a mandate? Well, a whole lot of nothing, so far.
Certainly nothing when it comes to growth. The prince that is always promised. But, but, but the Ukraine situation and tariffs! Again, all of that can be true but the reality is that there will always – always – be excuses. You either figure out a way to grow or you don't and you slowly fade away.
From the outside, that long looked to be the story of the UK. From the inside, it looks even worse.
Yesterday's budget, from everything I been able to glean, was all about saving face and asses. Both the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and his Chancellor of the Exchequer (the one tasked with said budget), Rachel Reeves, are historically disliked in opinion polls. Again, just months after they swept in on a massive mandate. Why? Everyone will have different reasons, but the highest level is a good place to start: they seem completely ineffectual at doing much of anything. And these budgets exemplify that. Forget growth, this is stagnation-as-a-service.
Again, there are a million excuses as to why, but clearly the main reasons for all the piecemeal decisions is to try to placate the right groups – in particular within their own Labour Party – to avoid being ousted next year. Coup'd by someone else within the party. This will probably happen because guess what? Growth will not happen. Instead, the policies announced yesterday – many of which won't go into effect for years and are instead just window dressing to cover up budget holes – will do nothing to change the trajectory and the mood.
Call it a "death spiral" call it a "doom loop", pick your poison. It's where the country so clearly is because no one will actually do anything to break free from it.
Obviously, it's easier said than done, but no one really even seems to be trying. Sure, there's lip service paid to "exciting" new initiatives and mandates, but they all just sort of sound like re-heated leftovers. Things the UK sees perhaps working elsewhere – namely, America, of course – and says "we can do that too!"
The problem – well, there are many – but at the highest level, the UK isn't America because they don't control the dollar and as such, their own fate when it comes to debt and other obvious levers to get growth going in a major way, fast. That ship sailed long ago, perhaps literally when the ships stopped sailing and America took over as the world power. How's that for an excuse?
Regardless, it seems to me that there are things the UK can do to get back to growth, but they have to act far more boldly than they've been willing to, to date. Many will read "boldly" as "risky" and that's part of the problem, I suspect. While not as bad as the rest of Europe (aside from a few pockets), the UK is far, far, far more risk-averse than the US. And this mentality seems to permeate everything. And that travels all the way down to startups, which are obviously a key engine of growth in any economy.
I first lived in London a dozen years ago, moving over on a visa with Google to help establish a European base for the venture fund Google Ventures (now GV). While I only stayed for a year, there were signs of promise, but it was obviously early. No one was expecting it to become Silicon Valley overnight, but while there's been some good progress over the past decade, it's not nearly as much as it should be. And again, to me, that mostly comes down to policies and incentives.
In other words, it seems to me that there's been some level of success in the startup scene in the UK, but any such success has been had in spite of the government.
The most obvious example of this is the collapse of the London Stock Exchange. It's not just that no companies are choosing to list here anymore, it's that every week you get a story about companies pulling out and heading to greener pastures in the US or Asia. It's sad, but also a total self-own. And it epitomizes the startup situation here. Every company is born with the dream of becoming the next Google or Apple or Amazon or Meta. And if lightning strikes at the right place at the right time, they can achieve such dreams.
In America.
To me, the single best example of this is probably the best example in the entire world right now. DeepMind.
The company was started in London in 2010 by English entrepreneurs (well, technically one Kiwi who lived here). They weren't just early in AI, they were arguably first, at least in terms of the technology we all know and use today. In a world where OpenAI is valued at $500B and Anthropic is valued at $350B, you could certainly make a case that DeepMind would be valued even higher than either of those right now were it a stand-alone company.
But it's not a stand-alone company. Because, of course, they sold themselves to Google over a decade ago. For $650M. Ouch.
To be fair to everyone, it was incredible insight by Google to swoop in and do that deal in 2014 – that was three years before the seminal "Attention is All You Need" paper (written by a different group of Googlers). Still, there were signs that DeepMind was on to something, including the fact that they convinced Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to seed invest. Within a couple of years, Meta (then Facebook) was trying to buy the company. But it was Google that convinced them to sell – something which Musk apparently tried to stop. And this directly led to the creation of yes, OpenAI.
Anyway, point is that DeepMind, one of the – if not the – most important company in the AI revolution we're currently living through was started right here in the UK. By three people who were the product of an English education at English universities (University College London and Oxford). And they came together not in Silicon Valley to start their insanely ambitious startup, but instead in London.
You can ding them for selling early, but you can also make the case that it was the best possible decision for DeepMind. Without Google's resources, it's not clear they would have become what they've become. And I would argue they almost certainly would not have because all of the various UK roadblocks and general lack of ambition and policies for growth would have ground them into the English soil.
Even if they were able to access the capital required to build an AI company – which obviously would have required going to America, which they already did, in part, for their initial funding – were they going to go public in London one day? Come on.
So yes, the UK should be both incredibly proud that such a company can be started here, and completely embarrassed that there's basically no way that such a company could have reached their full potential and ambitions here were they not under the wing of an American technology giant.
This isn't a controversial stance. While there are no shortage of English tech champions and boosters, all of them will acknowledge these realities. The tech ecosystem is growing here but again, it's happening against the wind coming out of the political blowhards. The natural diasporas forming from (smaller) success stories are trying to turn London into a startup haven, but there aren't the incentives in place to help them.
To be fair, the same is true throughout most of Europe – something which entrepreneur and investor Ian Hogarth wrote about in an op-ed for the FT a year ago. But at least a few of those countries have given us companies that were able to break-out and go public in recent years. Though none of them match the scale or scope of DeepMind. And none, of course, hold a candle to the biggest companies – and even current crop of startups – born in Silicon Valley.
For some reason my mind is drawn to another part of California: Hollywood. For most of the past century if you had said that the center of film production could happen anywhere else, you'd be laughed out of the room. But that has happened to the point where Los Angeles is now actually struggling when it comes to work within their most famous industry. And that's largely because government incentives in other parts of the world have eaten into that base. And that includes in the UK!
Granted, the movie business is far smaller than tech, but still. What's the line from Field of Dreams? "If you give them incentives, they will come." That's it, right?
There's always talk about such incentives, just as there's always talk about reinvigorating the public listings in London – including, by the way, in this budget, with nebulous talk of removing stamp duties (this changes everything, lol). Anything and everything talked about to date needs to be about 1,000x bolder.
Building more nuclear power is a good start, but that will take years, if not decades. And obviously – obviously – it's going to be bogged down in bureaucracy and cost concerns along the way. There need to be short-term solutions to become a meaningful part of the infrastructure build out happening right now.
Yes, I'm talking about AI. But I have to because it's not clear that Labour realizes it exists yet based off of this budget. Even if you're not a believer in the technology changing everything, there's almost no way it won't upend several aspects of the economy in ways (probably good and bad!) that will drastically alter future budgets (because they're so predicated around these silly future forecasts).
So yeah, that seems like an obvious problem (and opportunity) going forward.
But wait, isn't AI a bubble? Yes it is. But it's also not so black and white. This is the type of bubble that the powers that be are leveraging to build while they can. That's risky for individual companies doing this with potentially problematic forms of debt. It's less risky for a government to do this, if done smartly. Governments have many more levers to pull. For example, incentivizing Big Tech to build – infrastructure, software, all of it – here.
"But they don't need government hand-outs", many will be quick to note. Of course they don't! But it's not about that. It's about what the UK needs. Which is growth.
Gestures to buy British chip tech is nice and all, but £100M is so comically small that it certainly doesn't do anything to change the concerns here. This is simply not thinking big enough. A sovereign AI investment group is better, but we're still talking about smaller amounts than some seed rounds for the best and brightest companies in the US. Maybe those are ridiculous, maybe not. Regardless, they're big swings in the right area to be taking them at the moment.
And while the UK has committed to doing some larger infrastructure build-outs, again, going back to the beginning, everything here is always subject to change with these regular budget reviews. Once the current buffer Rachel Reeves has just bolstered collapses again, the first things cut will be the growth initiatives. And why will the buffer have collapsed? A lack of growth. The vicious cycle continues.
Look, this is clearly oversimplified, but just to make a straightforward point: the UK needs to shift from a position of caution to a position of ambition. Otherwise, what are we doing here? And it can't just be political lip service, but actual action. It will be uncomfortable, but it beats being comfortably numb.
Growth. Growth. Growth. At any cost.1 The only way out is up.
104 days until that Spring budget!
1 Fine, I guess not at the cost Liz Truss was willing to pay... But even that was seemingly just as much about inept execution and sheer stupidity. ↩
2025-11-26 22:17:05
You know how I know that NVIDIA is concerned about Google's encroachment on their market? They won't shut up about how they're not concerned about it. As relayed by Kif Leswing of CNBC:
Nvidia on Tuesday said its tech remains a generation ahead of the industry, in response to Wall Street’s concerns that the company’s dominance of AI infrastructure could be threatened by Google’s AI chips.
“We’re delighted by Google’s success — they’ve made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google,” Nvidia said in a post on X. “NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry — it’s the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done.”
I feel like a psychoanalyst could work wonders on that statement – including the fact that it's seemingly meant to be the royal "we", as it was sent from the corporate account, but it sure feels like it was written by or for one person who happens to be in charge of said company. Anyway, I don't know Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung, but I'm pretty sure my friend ChatGPT does, so I asked them to analyze the statement:
That has a passive-aggressive flavor, even though it's wrapped in corporate PR language. Here’s why:
💬 What the message says (on the surface)
• “We’re delighted by Google’s success.”
• “We continue to supply to Google.”
• “We’re the only platform that runs every AI model.”
All of that is framed as positive, collaborative, upbeat.
😏 What the message implies (between the lines)
• “Congrats to Google… but remember, they still rely on us.”
• “Google is succeeding thanks in part to our hardware.”
• “Whatever Google built, we’re still a generation ahead.”
• “They’re great… but we’re better, and essential.”
That contrast — praising someone while subtly asserting superiority — is a classic form of corporate passive-aggression.
Why it reads passive-aggressive
• The praise feels performative, not genuine.
• The second sentence immediately pivots to asserting dominance (“NVIDIA is a generation ahead…”).
• The phrasing implies: “Let’s be clear: Google’s success doesn’t undermine us. In fact, it shows how central we are.”
Yeah, that's roughly my read. And the read of more or less everyone on the internet. And thus marks the second day in a row that NVIDIA has sort of stepped in it with an overly aggressive (even if passive) self-own.
If the first two rules of Bubble Club are not to talk about Enron, the third rule is probably not to so overtly betray your fears in public under the thin veneer of competitive praise.
Look, we get it. After a stock run the likes of which has never been seen at this scale, culminating in not just NVIDIA becoming the most valuable company in the world, but being the first stock to surpass both a $4T and a $5T market cap, the past couple of weeks have been rough. But "rough" is also relative, NVIDIA is still a $4.3T company, and still the most valuable company in the world. But yes, Apple and... Google are quickly catching up as NVIDIA falls. It's a CEO's job to worry about such things, but it must be especially worrying when your best mechanism to combat this – and by far the hardest to pull off – crushing your earnings expectations, didn't really work to combat the drop.1
And that's a problem because it suggests the market is shifting from exuberance – be it rational or irrational – to irrational fear. And if that takes hold... watch out below. Not just NVIDIA, but everyone. But especially NVIDIA.
So that's clearly why we're getting a response to the concerns by short-sellers and now to the market's reaction to Google's recent success. This is Jensen Huang trying to reassure everyone that everything is all good and quite rational. But especially NVIDIA.
And he might not be wrong! Back to Leswing:
In its post, Nvidia said its chips are more flexible and powerful compared with so-called ASIC chips — such as Google’s TPUs — which are designed for a single company or function. Nvidia’s latest generation of chips are known as Blackwell.
“NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs,” Nvidia said in its post.
There is certainly a world in which the flexibility that NVIDIA's GPUs offer over Google's TPUs ends up mattering. And perhaps a lot – especially if we're on the cusp of moving beyond, or even just extending from, being mainly focused on LLMs and instead are about to veer off into other types of AI models, such as "World Models".
(Though it's also clear that Demis Hassibas is himself focused on such models and as such, undoubtedly has Google's chips focused on how to train them as well.)
Google's TPUs look great right now because they seem to be rivaling what NVIDIA's GPUs can do in terms of model outputs – based solely on the latest versions of Gemini. And even if NVIDIA is "a generation ahead", the TPUs are likely quite a bit more efficient by their nature of being purpose-built. Another fear (and eye-opening moment) in this news cycle for NVIDIA is probably the references to the notion that Google may have cracked something new in pre-training whereas the other models seem sort of "stuck" on their current trajectories in that regard. And that could imply there's something about the TPUs that helped with that breakthrough, whatever it may be. Or it may not imply that at all! Nobody knows.
Well, someone does. But they're not talking. So the rest of us are left guessing. (Or are they talking in the form of passive aggressive tweeting? Just asking...)
NVIDIA, of course, has absolutely owned the pre-training portion of AI to date – so much so that the other would-be competitors are mainly focused on other parts of the build-out, such as inference. So much so that they have become a $5T company! And while Google is believed to have been using TPUs to train Gemini for at least a couple of generations now, the fact that they still are one of the largest buyers of NVIDIA chips suggests there's still something they felt the need to use GPUs for as well – as NVIDIA implies in their statement!
Though that's a bit gray as well since a lot of Google's NVIDIA bill is undoubtedly to be able to host their chips on Google Cloud for others to use...
“We are experiencing accelerating demand for both our custom TPUs and Nvidia GPUs,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We are committed to supporting both, as we have for years.”
That's an interesting and seemingly very specific phrasing and framing of a PR statement in response to NVIDIA's own PR statement! Such wording seems to suggest that Google's need for NVIDIA's chips are not for their own purposes but rather for their customers (of Google Cloud). But again, it's sort of gray! Undoubtedly on purpose!
Anyway, the reports that not only is Meta potentially partnering with Google to use TPUs, but is said to want to acquire them to use them for training of new models... well, it certainly makes you at least think about NVIDIA's ongoing dominance there.
Unlike Nvidia, Google doesn’t sell its TPU chips to other companies, but it uses them for internal tasks and allows companies to rent them through Google Cloud.
But they're clearly about to... And we're quickly going to learn and hear a lot about price, performance, power consumption, etc. Any of which could be bad news for NVIDIA. And any combination of which could be even worse news.2 For the first time, there could be real competition in the market. Imagine that.
And you can probably just follow NVIDIA's actions here to get a sense of how they actually feel about Google entering the market. From The Information report by Amir Efrati, Erin Woo, and Anissa Gardizy:
Whether Google succeeds in its TPU efforts, the mere specter of a powerful alternative to Nvidia may have already yielded benefits for big Nvidia customers like Anthropic and OpenAI that don’t want to rely on a single AI chip provider.
Last month, following a Google deal to provide up to 1 million TPUs to Anthropic, Huang announced another deal to invest billions of dollars into Anthropic. He also got a commitment from the AI startup to use Nvidia GPUs.
Similarly, after it became publicly known OpenAI was planning to rent TPUs from Google Cloud, Huang struck a tentative deal to invest up to $100 billion in the ChatGPT maker so it could develop its own data centers, and has discussed leasing out Nvidia GPUs to the company.
Yeah, we're totally about to see some sort of massive NVIDIA/Meta deal, aren't we?
At the same time, the fact that the entire AI chip market is still supply constrained suggests NVIDIA's business probably doesn't have too much to worry about; certainly not in the short term. And if Google's pre-training breakthrough isn't something specific to their TPUs, it also suggests that LLM scaling, as we've known it to date, will likely continue for a while yet. And that's good news for the status quo, which is naturally good news for NVIDIA.
Even if Google is able to start selling TPUs to third-parties, it will undoubtedly take a long time to ramp such production – probably years.3 And in this market, no one can afford to wait, quite literally.
But all of the above is nuanced and hard to um, grok – certainly for most mom & pop investors, but even some Wall Street analysts, it seems. So NVIDIA is going down their own defensive path here. Which is misguided, but you get why they're doing it. The market has some jitters and the company atop the market is doing their best to try to calm those to keep the good times rolling.
So sure, NVIDIA is "delighted by Google's success" in many ways. But they're also less "delighted" in other ways, naturally. And that relationship is seemingly going to get more complicated going forward...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 One has to wonder if the true "break glass" mechanism NVIDIA tries to use here involves China. If Jensen Huang can somehow convince the powers that be to let him sell there again it will give the stock bulls a new lease and outlook on life. But clearly he's having trouble convincing both the US and China to allow for this, despite some extraordinary concessions... ↩
2 My mind for some reason drifts to when Apple Silicon entered the CPU arena with a purpose-built chip to take on Intel. The incumbent kept touting top-end performance without realizing that the market had shifted to prize efficiency more... I'm not saying this market will play out the same way, but it's certainly interesting to note. ↩
3 And I'm not even getting into NVIDIA's software advantage here thanks to CUDA. Yes, many are trying to bridge that moat – including Google – but it's still a huge advantage their chips have that will take time to shift, if nothing else. ↩
2025-11-26 01:23:32
It is wild how fast stocks can swing – but especially multi-trillion-dollar stocks. Case in point: with NVIDIA's fall from grace the past few sessions (maybe don't bring up Enron in your memos?), Apple is on the verge of overtaking them as the market cap leader once again. Yes, Apple. Not just the AI laggard stock, but the company which spent much of the last year as the AI laughingstock.
As it turns out, perhaps there was some upside in not committing to trillions of dollars in CapEx spend. At least right now.
But it's not just that because it's not just Apple. Google has rocketed higher than the rest of Big Tech over the past several months. Just this past June, under threat of antitrust breakup, I was writing about how badly the market was undervaluing the company.1 That wasn't really even about AI, but everything else they were doing, from Waymo on down. Not only were they a trillion behind Apple at the time, they were about to fall two trillion behind NVIDIA and Microsoft. They were behind Amazon. Hell, they were almost lapped by Meta!
Just a few months later and the tables have turned. Thanks undoubtedly to the notion that not only is Google no longer behind in AI, but they might all of a sudden be ahead, they're also pretty close to overtaking NVIDIA in market cap. And that also puts them close to Apple and thus, close to the crown. Again, in June they were in 4th place in the "race" – and much closer to 5th than 4th, less than $200B ahead of Meta. Now they're $2.3T ahead of Meta.
None of this really matters of course – and these massive swings show just how little all of it matters. (Though don't let these companies tell you they don't care about this at all – of course they do, from Steve Jobs on down, they're all competitive and this is a measuring stick, albeit a sometime arbitrary one.) But it is an interesting gauge to read investor sentiment of these companies over time.
A year ago, Apple was king of the world. After getting passed by not only their old foe Microsoft but also their sometimes foe NVIDIA earlier in the year, they came roaring back. In November 2024, the rankings looked like this:
Six months later, in May 2025, it was a different story:
But by July, just two months later, boom went Microsoft, but even more boom went NVIDIA – both crossed $4T that month, the first companies to ever do so (after Apple had been the first to $1T, $2T, and $3T):
By October, just three months after that, NVIDIA hit the mythical $5T and was running away:
And here we are now, mid-day on November 25, 2025:
In one year, that's NVIDIA gaining $900B in market cap – but also losing about $900B from their peak. Apple gained $500B after losing about $500B at one point. Microsoft gained $400B but are also about $600B off their highs for the year. Amazon gained $300B and has been the most stable of the group. Meta gained $100B and remained in the six spot the entire year after nearly catching Google just a few months ago, as noted.
Google hasn't held the top market cap spot since a couple brief moments in 2016 (I was there!), but it feels inevitable that they'll retake it again soon. That is unless NVIDIA can find a way to stop sending memos mentioning their business in the same breath as Enron. Stop doing that and they may just have another run or two in them...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 FWIW, my math at the time suggested Alphabet, then valued at $2T, should be valued closer to $3.5T, and probably higher, if they were giving all of the other businesses beyond Google more of a fair market value. And well, here we are! ↩
2025-11-25 18:31:29
The first rule of Bubble Club is you do not talk about Enron.
The second rule of Bubble Club is you do not talk about Enron.
NVIDIA, it seems, didn't get the memo, as they sent a memo to Wall Street analysts mentioning the-company-who-shall-not-be-named multiple times...