Gilder’s Guideposts Newsletters
AI Boom or Bust?
Earnings seasons announcements are beginning to sound awfully repetitive. The hyperscalers are spending tens of billions on AI infrastructure. Data center construction is accelerating. Power demand forecasts are rising. NVIDIA’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) valuation implies demand outstripping supply of GPUs (graphical processing units) for years to come. Naturally, everyone wants to know if this is sustainable […]
No, You Can’t Just ‘Bring the Platforms Home’
After we wrote about Israel’s progress from Start-Up Nation to “platform nation,” a reader asked a perfectly reasonable question: If platform companies are so important, why don’t we just bring them home? Why not subsidize them, relocate them, and require them to operate in the United States? As a reminder, a platform is an enabling […]
Thank You, Amazon
I love Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). I have felt this way for a long time but ever so much more since I have become effectively (and I hope temporarily) disabled. I walk on a cane—very slowly. I no longer drive. Shopping is a horror. And every day I am grateful that AMZN is so darn big, […]
Israel Grows Up
All the world knows Israel as a “Start-Up Nation,” the world’s most prolific source of innovative technology companies. But in mainstream sectors such as banking, telecom, and even retail, Israel for many decades stifled competition—and with it, innovation. That began to change in the mid-2000s. A combination of regulatory reform and the market forces those […]
The Smart Money Was Always on David
Children hear the story David vs. Goliath as a great, and surprising, victory for the underdog. The truth is that David was the odds-on favorite from the outset. David could be sure of launching a stone at Goliath before the giant ever got within sword’s length. Even more important, if David missed, he could shoot […]
The Supply Chain ‘Ain’t’ What It Used to Be
The big goal of industrial policy advocates these days is to “reshore” the supply chain, for instance, by moving semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States. What the industrial policy-types miss is that in our economy, in which all wealth is knowledge and all growth is learning, the real supply chain is equally immaterial. Today […]
Factories Are Easy; Learning Is Hard—Why Industrial Policy Keeps Funding the Wrong Layer
Never think about “protectionism versus free trade.” What we call protectionism is simply industrial policy by another name. The decision to protect certain industries is simply a decision to shift intellectual and material capital towards that industry. The CHIPS act subsidizing the building of new semiconductor “fabs” (manufacturing sites) capacity is all about tariffs and […]
When Does Investment in AI Data Centers Stop Paying Off?
However relentless the demand for more and bigger data centers that use ever more power may seem, they are not exempt from basic economics. To be sure, competition among hyperscalers to build the biggest and most impressive models is ferocious. That does not mean that adding the next data center will always make economic sense. […]
Apple Outside Looking In?
For more than a decade, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) sat at the center of the global technology supply chain. Its sheer scale allowed it to dictate pricing, secure early access to advanced process nodes, and influence capacity planning across suppliers. Being Apple’s primary supplier meant predictable volumes and long production runs. That era is gone. The […]
From Start-Up Nation to Platform Nation: Israel’s Real Power in the Global Economy
Antisemitic ignoramus Tucker Carlson has been carrying on about how the United States gives so much to Israel and gets so little back. He dismisses it as “a completely insignificant country” with “no resources,” and demands to know, “what are we getting out of this?” In the Free Press, Michael Doran responded ably that crucial […]