Gilder’s Guideposts Newsletters
Chinese Semiconductor Maker’s Latest Triumph Over U.S. Sanctions
The U.S. forbids ASML (NASDAQ: ASML), the Dutch company whose equipment has been considered necessary to make the most advanced microchips, from exporting its most advanced machines to China. Result: China keeps proving the consensus wrong, and the sanctions counterproductive by making elite chips anyway. Okay, gird your loins, technical discussion incoming: […]
Did Jensen Huang ‘Dis’ Quantum Computing Because He Wants to Own It… Cheaply?
(Article Written By Dr. Robert Castellano, Contributing Editor) In December 2024, quantum computing stocks surged following a series of high-profile announcements, including Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Willow chip and Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Quantum Embark program. Then in January 2025, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang declared that useful quantum computers were likely “decades away,” triggering a […]
Silicon Suicide Or, Tariffs and the Deep State
The populists like to say tariffs are just like taxes, only better because foreigners pay them. That’s dangerously wrong. Tariffs are not taxes, they are regulatory instruments, meant not to maximize revenue but to control economic outcomes. Like all regulations they presume that a politician or a bureaucrat knows best, and that neither has been […]
Populists Shouldn’t Be Pessimists
“Realism” is often used as a synonym for “pessimism.” Foreign policy realists are credited with facing up to “grim realities.” In economics, one gets to be a realist by saying we must choose between a roaring economy and inflation, except the realists don’t say “roaring” they say “overheated.” Pessimism is not realistic. It is the […]
Mr. Market Has the Taiwan Jitters, Trump Should Give Him a Chill Pill
Why is Mr. Market selling Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM), one of the most important and valuable companies on earth, for what appears to be at least a 50% discount? And that’s not just since the recent tech pullback. TSM is always underpriced. It reigns supreme in the manufacturing end of the semiconductor business. It is currently […]
Quantum Hype Keeps Missing the Real Big Bang
The quantum computing hype just keeps on coming. Only briefly deflating the hypesters were the wise words of Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia (which is running a well-funded quantum computing research project of its own), who explained it would be 20 or 30 years before quantum computing becomes significant. That is the way technologists say, […]
Semiconductors as a Conservative Investment
We don’t do a lot of macroeconomics at the Gilder’s Technology Report but we do listen to people who do it well. This small group includes our Eagle colleague Mark Skousen, PhD, arguably the world’s greatest living economist and the creator of “GO” or Gross Output, a measure of economic activity that has proven far […]
Monsieur Say Lays Down the Law: DeepSeek Is Great for Nvidia
Everyone’s heard of Moore’s Law of semiconductors, but the law that has truly governed the semiconductor industry since the beginning was laid down by Jean Baptiste Say more than 200 years before the first transistor: “Supply creates its own demand.” A useful product produced in increasing abundance at lower costs will find ever more uses. […]
President Trump and Mr. Musk: Peace Through Robots?
Assuming it gets back on track, Trump’s three-way deal on rare earths from Ukraine and Russia might be the key to peace. And the idea appears to have Elon’s fingerprints all over it. We do not blame anybody but Putin and Russia for the intolerable cruelty and destruction of that war. Attempts to go beyond […]
Who Will Disrupt the Magnificent Seven
While the U.S. government alternates between subsidizing big tech and threatening to bust up the best companies in America, under the radar fly hundreds of small companies with potentially disruptive technologies that might become the big tech of the future. As Trump advisor Stephen Moore quipped in an excellent recent piece at Hot Air, “raise […]