MBI Deep Dives

MBI Deep Dives

What if there's an overinvestment in AI?

A programming note: In case you missed it, I published my Deep Dive on ASML yesterday which you can read here. Without the benefit of hindsight while it can be hard to figure out where we are in the AI capex cycle, it is extremely likely that we will at

ASML: The Machine that Builds the "Machine God(s)"

You can listen to this Deep Dive here “It is perfectly normal to feel dizzy in this place. Not because of the sterile air, but because the mere thought of the extremely complex tools needed to make the chips destined for the phones of the future can make you lightheaded.

Nvidia and OpenAI's Gambit

A programming note: I will publish my Deep Dive on ASML tomorrow. As a reminder, I only send one email per day; therefore, on the day I publish my Deep Dive on a company, I won’t publish anything else. Early this year, I remember looking at Nvidia’s consensus

Airbnb's Evolution

How does Airbnb make money? Let’s go through an illustrative example first assuming an individual host lists their home at $100 per night. If a host lists their home at $100/night, Airbnb charges the host ~$3 to cover the payment processing costs; hence, the host receives $97 for

The resilience of consumer spending in the US

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston had an interesting piece last month about the resilience of consumer spending which is ~70% of GDP in the US. They looked at credit card spending data for low, middle, and high-income group (representing first, third, and fifth quintiles in their dataset respectively) in the

My Experience on Airbnb Experience

A few months ago, Airbnb has made a big splash about re-launching “Airbnb Experience”. While I stayed at 17 different Airbnb homes over the last 7 years, I have never booked an Airbnb Experience before. So a few days ago, I went to the Airbnb app and looked for experiences

The Data Center Story: Part 2, Portfolio Change

So I finished the Data Center episode by stepchange yesterday. But let me offer a correction from yesterday’s piece first. I quoted “stepchange” saying, “Many enterprises had PUE numbers around 2, meaning twice as much power went to lights, cooling, and everything else compared to the amount of power

The Data Center Story: Part 1

I came across this recently launched podcast named “stepchange”. The podcast is basically Acquired-style story telling of “human progress through the lens of transformative technologies, systems, and infrastructure”. They have covered two topics so far: Coal, and Data Center. Naturally, I started with their Data Center episode. Since I grew

Thoughts on Meta Connect 2025

I bought my first Meta Ray-Ban Glasses back in 2023. After using it for a few days, I reviewed my initial thoughts here. For almost the last two years, I have been a Daily Active User (DAU) of these glasses. In fact, after losing a pair early this year, I

Amazon's "unfair" advantage in advertising

Amazon started disclosing their advertising revenue from 4Q’21. Before 4Q’21, their ad revenue was “hidden” in “other” segment. Everyone, of course, knew ads was ~80-90% of “other” revenue. Amazon’s other segment grew from quarterly revenue of $1.1 Billion in 3Q’17 to a whopping $8.1