AI Wants a New Theory of the Firm

April 27, 2026

In 1937, economist Ronald Coase asked a great question: why do firms exist? His answer—for which he won a Nobel Prize 54 years later—was that coordinating efforts is expensive. Markets require constant negotiation—finding suppliers, agreeing on terms, and enforcing contracts. Firms arise when it becomes cheaper to organize activity internally than to rely on the […]

The AI Productivity Boom Hiding in Plain Sight

April 22, 2026

I keep hearing that artificial intelligence (AI) is not delivering on promises of booming productivity. Economists look at national statistics and see only modest gains. Skeptics conclude that AI is overhyped—another technology long on promise and short on measurable gains. I heard the same thing back in the early 1990s when a plethora of distinguished […]

The Companies Getting Smarter on Your Dime

April 20, 2026

Buy the Companies That Own the Problems The biggest winners in AI and advanced manufacturing are not just building better products. They are learning faster than everyone else—and, more importantly, learning from work their customers do for them. For most of the industrial era, competitive advantage lived inside the company. The company owned the factory, […]

The CPU Is Dead. Long Live the CPU

April 15, 2026

The more graphics processing units (GPUs) Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) sells, the more central processing units (CPUs) the datacenter needs. That was not the original storyline. Starting circa 2024, with the AI boom, the story was that GPUs won, CPUs lost. Parallel math beat general-purpose compute, and the old king of the datacenter, CPUs made mostly by […]

The System Xi Cannot Afford to Break

April 13, 2026

Everybody knows Communist countries can’t get rich. So, we tend to tell ourselves a story about how China got rich, a story people may find comforting at first but over time becomes enraging. The story is that China got rich by stealing. It sounds right. It preserves our assumptions. If Communist China is succeeding, it must […]

What Becomes Scarce When Intelligence Abounds?

April 8, 2026

I have been working with and learning from George Gilder for more than 40 years, and I still remember the first thing he taught me about economics. It was “wires and switches.” In “Microcosm,” which I edited, he described the economics of the old Bell System. Almost since the invention of the telephone, the most expensive […]

Let’s Get Vertical

April 6, 2026

Have you noticed that vertical integration is making a comeback? Suddenly, nearly every leading technology company is vertically integrated. Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), the world’s most valuable company, is still often described as a chip maker because its GPUs (graphical processing units) are the all-but-indispensable tools for artificial intelligence. As we have noted in this space before, […]

Why Nvidia Will Keep Winning?

March 16, 2026

Why does Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) keep winning? Every major AI company is trying to build an artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator to challenge Nvidia—or at least bypass it. Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), chips designed specifically for machine-learning workloads. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has Inferentia, its custom AI inference processor. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is designing its own chips. […]

The Moat Outside Nvidia

March 11, 2026

When investors talk about “moats,”—durable barriers to competition—they usually mean things a company owns: patents, factories, or proprietary technology. But some of the strongest moats in technology companies live elsewhere: beyond company borders, inside the minds of the people who build on their platforms. And those people are not employees. They are pursuing their own […]

Thinking Isn’t AI’s Hardest Problem

March 9, 2026

The big talk in artificial intelligence (AI) is about the race for faster compute, what you might call faster “thinking.” Lately, some attention has focused on the multiplying power needed to drive it. In truth, the AI world is hosting three races at once: faster compute faster communication faster synchronization Compute gets the most headlines. […]

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