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A collection of 52 issues

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

How people use ChatGPT and its implications, Portfolio Change

There was a lot of chatter about an NBER working paper “How People Use ChatGPT” yesterday. Unlike most survey work or academic paper looking into this question, what differentiates this paper is it is written by people at OpenAI. As you can imagine, there is a treasure trove of interesting

More Alphabet!

“Eventually, AI will change everything…though not everyone fully grasp the extent of the tsunami that is approaching…Training AI models is a gigantic multitrillion-dollar market. It's hard to conceive of a technology market as large as that one. But if you look close, you can find one

Google's evolving TPU strategy

Google built the first Tensor Processing Unit (TPUs) because general‑purpose chips were too slow and too power‑hungry for the surge of machine‑learning inference inside Google Search, Ads, Photos, speech etc. As Moore's Law, the long-standing observation of exponential growth in transistor density, began to falter,

Why I bought more Alphabet!

Believe it or not, it’s not necessarily because of Judge Mehta’s ruling yesterday! After coming back to Google as a shareholder back in April this year, I will elaborate on my decision to add to my existing position in Alphabet behind the paywall. Subscribe

Google's "first mistake"

I have been listening to Acquired’s latest episode on Google. I haven’t finished the episode yet; I’m half-way into the four-hour episode. As you can imagine, there are a lot of cool anecdotes from the spree of some of the best acquisitions Google has made over the

The Promise and Pitfall of Agentic Commerce

We are entering the age of agentic commerce, where autonomous AI agents, acting as our digital deputies, will navigate the endless aisles of online stores, evaluating products and making purchases on our behalf. Agentic commerce promises to crush search frictions and expand the practical consideration set from a handful of

Beyond the "Search" Box

Anecdotally, we have all been hearing some version of this in the last few months, at least on twitter: “After I started using ChatGPT, my Google search usage went down a LOT!” While Google bears increasingly depict a visceral visualization of Google increasingly being replaced by ChatGPT, Google search bull

Golden age of Digital Ads, LLM P&L

Golden age of Digital Ads Last month, some researchers at Meta published a very interesting paper that highlighted Meta’s ability to monetize LLMs through its core advertising platform. Meta management sort of alluded to some of these during earnings calls, but this paper really drove the point home for

Digital Advertising Snapshot, Corpay 2Q'25, Portfolio Change

Digital Advertising Snapshot As is the tradition in every earnings season, I am sharing my digital advertising Snapshot after 2Q’25 earnings. Three key takeaways: 1. For the nine consecutive quarters, Meta has outpaced Google in terms of incremental share. If Meta’s guide is any indication, that will almost