Gilder’s Guideposts Newsletters
Amazon’s AI Advantage
As artificial intelligence (AI) spending accelerates, investor attention often gravitates toward chip performance, capital expenditure announcements, and the scale of new data center construction. What matters more to long-term returns, however, is how efficiently hyperscalers convert fixed infrastructure into revenue-generating AI services. Amazon Web Services is frequently described as having a “power-efficient” AI strategy. But […]
CXMT Is Eating Micron’s Lunch in China
American China Hawks love to believe that we can beat China by withholding superior American technology. What they have missed repeatedly is how well China can do with “good enough” tech made in China. The latest painful example is how ChangXin Memory Technologies is eating Micron’s (NASDAQ: MU) noodles. In 2023, Micron derived 14% of […]
Elon the Entertainer
Elon Musk is likely the greatest entrepreneur of all time. As a philosopher, like many of his colleagues in the world of apocalyptic artificial intelligence (AI), he is increasingly delusional. His latest delusion is that Optimus, his humanoid robot, possibly combined with Neuralink and its “Telepathy” human interface, is about to become “the world’s leading […]
Samsung Reclaims Its Mojo
For much of the past decade, Samsung Electronics (OTCM: SSNLF) has struggled with a credibility problem across two of its most important semiconductor businesses: foundry and advanced memory. The issue was not capital investment, ambition, or technology roadmaps. It was execution. At critical points, Samsung failed to deliver consistent yields and power efficiency at scale, […]
The Five Semiconductor Growth Engines That Will Define 2026
Where should investors look for semiconductor growth in the new year? The industry entering 2026 is no longer governed by traditional demand cycles. It will not be evenly distributed across markets or segments. It will be forced into a small number of areas where spending cannot be deferred without long-term strategic consequences. 1. Wafer Fab […]
Nvidia Entering the Lion’s Den with Groq Megadeal
Nvidia built its dominance in artificial intelligence on training workloads. That dominance is visible not only in GPU shipments and software ecosystems, but in the reconfiguration of the memory supply chain. Memory for training GPUs remains the primary driver of high-bandwidth memory consumption, DRAM wafer allocation, and advanced packaging investment, and it continues to anchor […]
A Christmas Gift
The world of disruptive technology is unveiling a new Christmas present. Not born in Bethlehem, but near it in Israel, is a new technology paradigm. It’s birthed in a town called Migdal Haemek, “the Silicon Valley of the Galilee.” This is the home of Tower Semiconductor (TSEM), the world’s leading complex of analog wafer fabs […]
Be Like Russia, Be Like Japan, Be Like China…
About once per generation, American intellectuals lose faith in liberty and urge us to adopt the statism of our rivals. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the brainy ones presented the Soviet Union as the last best hope of mankind. Immortalized were the calculated lies of New York Times foreign correspondent Walter Duranty painting […]
Why Do Nations Wage Wars When They Could Wage Wealth?
Why do nations mobilize armies when they could emancipate minds? Sometimes they are forced to defend themselves, like Israel when blitzed on October 7, 2023, or the United States under air-strikes at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. But through the ages, the goal often has been to capture “scarce natural resources,” or in the […]
Chinese Gain Share in Semiconductor Markets
The global semiconductor industry is being realigned by geopolitical pressure, backfiring U.S. policy and the accelerating rise of China’s manufacturing capacity. The root cause of this shift remains U.S. sanctions restricting China’s access to advanced tools but simultaneously accelerating its investment in homegrown capability. Illustrating the volatility caused by inconsistent policy was a U.S. announcement […]