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Big Tech Off-Balance Sheet Concerns
A couple of weeks ago, WSJ published a piece titled “Why Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems”. Some excerpt from the piece:
“Each quarter, big tech companies disclose their massive capital expenditures on artificial-intelligence infrastructure, from data centers to chips.
But those figures
Stripe’s “Singularity” and the Divergence from Adyen
Last week, Stripe announced their acquisition of OpenRouter, the AI model gateway and routing platform. Ben Thompson had an interesting take on Stripe’s OpenRouter deal, so I won’t repeat the potential strategic reasons to pursue such an acquisition. I do want to focus a bit more on the
Core Memory
Programming Note: As a reminder, every Sunday, I write pieces that are predominantly based on personal experiences which may or may not be loosely connected with investing. If you are reading MBI Deep Dives everyday, I think it would be rather useful for my readers to understand my personal lens
The Non-linear Economics of Grocery Delivery Basket
A couple of days ago, I discussed about Instacart’s unit economics and mentioned “there is non-linearity in grocery economics in terms of basket size which is why owning half the basket size of Instacart certainly does not lead to half the profits.” Today’s post is about quantifying
Walmart’s Evolution
After posting 4%+ same store sales growth in the US for eight consecutive quarters, Walmart’s comp numbers last quarter surprised investors a bit as it came to be only 2.6% in Q2 FY27. During the call, management flagged their health & wellness (H&W) segment as the
Instacart’s Unit Economics, and Implications for DoorDash
While covering DoorDash’s 2Q’26 a couple of weeks ago, I showed the company’s LTM unit economics on a per order basis. I re-created this per order economics for Instacart. I will discuss the unit economics of Instacart as well as some implications for DoorDash behind the
Airbnb Model Update (2026)
The last time I shared my updated Airbnb model was October 2025. As the stock has gone up ~50% since then, investors need to re-underwrite the assumptions today. As promised last week, I am going to share my updated model and lay out what you need to believe to
Rethinking the Data Moat
I want to highlight a couple of pieces which I found to be quite intriguing. The first is Dwarkesh Patel’s conversation with Ryan Greenblatt, chief scientist at Redwood Research. Admittedly, while the conversation about whether automating AI research triggers recursive self-improvement was thought provoking, it was also quite
Why DoorDash’s Autonomous Strategy Beats Uber’s Hodgepodge
Uber’s decision to divest its stake in Serve, the autonomous delivery robot company that was spun out of Uber in 2021, was more interesting than it may appear at first glance. When I looked into it, I came to realize that Serve is actually a publicly listed company now.
The AI Compute Squeeze
Programming Note: MBI Deep Dives will be off during the weekend and I will resume the daily posting cadence from Monday next week.
If you followed hyperscalers earnings, you probably already knew that the neoclouds would repeat some version of “demand for compute is outstripping supply” in their earnings calls.