Domain 09 · 24 cases
AI in Business
Picks-and-shovels positioning, capex arms races, substitution risk and the physical chokepoints behind the AI boom, from Nvidia and TSMC to ASML, CoreWeave and Chegg.
- Position as the indispensable enabler, not the headline bet
- Audit your product for the part a free model now does
- Notice when the binding constraint has quietly moved
Air Canada's Chatbot Liability
In late 2022 a grieving traveler asked Air Canada's website chatbot about bereavement fares, and the bot confidently told him something that simply was not…
ASML: The Supplier Behind the Supplier
Every advanced AI chip in the world depends on a machine built by one Dutch company most people have never heard of. To print circuits at the width of a…
Big Tech Goes Nuclear
Three Mile Island was shut down in 2019 as an uneconomical relic. By 2024, Microsoft had a deal to restart it. Facing multi-year waits for grid connections…
Bubble or Boom?
By early 2026 the AI numbers carried a strange tension: roughly $660–690 billion in capital expenditure chasing about $51 billion in direct revenue, a…
Caterpillar: Old-Economy Winner in the AI Boom
Caterpillar makes bulldozers and diesel engines, and it became one of the biggest winners of the AI boom. The reason isn't a software pivot. A data center is…
Chegg: Disrupted Overnight
Chegg built a billion-dollar business selling students fast, correct answers, step-by-step solutions and homework help behind a monthly subscription, with…
CoreWeave: The Leveraged Shovel-Renter
CoreWeave ran the oldest play in any gold rush: sell the shovels. It bought Nvidia GPUs by the thousands and rented them to AI companies desperate for…
Duolingo and the "AI-First" Backlash
Duolingo is one of the most loved consumer apps on earth. In April 2025, a single internal memo nearly undid that in a week. CEO Luis von Ahn told staff the…
GE Vernova and the Gas Turbine Boom
Nuclear power is the clean, firm energy hyperscalers say they want, and it takes about a decade to build. When AI data center demand exploded across 2023 and…
Getty, Adobe, and the Training-Data Fight
Generative image AI was trained on the internet's pictures, and when the money started flowing, who owned those pictures became one of the most contested…
Klarna: The AI Customer-Service Round Trip
In early 2024, Klarna made headlines by announcing its OpenAI-powered assistant was handling two-thirds of customer service chats, doing in a month what had…
Nvidia: Selling the Shovels
By 2025 Nvidia hit roughly $4 trillion in market value without building a ChatGPT or any AI product a consumer could name. It sold the GPUs that every AI…
OpenAI's Economics
By early 2026 OpenAI had more users, more brand recognition, and more revenue than any other frontier AI company. It had also committed to compute…
Stargate: The Megaproject
In January 2025, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced Stargate, a roughly $500 billion bet to build out US AI data centers, about ten gigawatts of…
The Circular Financing Loop
In September 2025, Nvidia agreed to invest up to roughly $100 billion in OpenAI, which committed to buy millions of Nvidia GPUs. Oracle signed a $300 billion…
The Copper Crunch: Tracing the Supply Chain
The AI boom looks like a software revolution. Trace it far enough upstream and it becomes a copper shortage. Between the grid and the servers sits a stack of…
The Enterprise Agent Bet
By 2025 every major enterprise software vendor had pivoted to agentic AI, the pitch that software would no longer just chat but act. Salesforce launched…
The HBM Memory Supercycle
For decades, memory chips were a brutal commodity business: cyclical, margin-crushing, mostly ignored. Then AI accelerators turned high-bandwidth memory into…
The Hyperscaler Capex Arms Race
Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta together planned roughly $650 to $725 billion in capital spending for 2026, up about 77% in a single year, the largest…
The Power Bottleneck
The race to build smarter AI quietly turned into a race to keep the lights on. For years the contest looked like a chip race, and Nvidia became the world's…
The Publisher Traffic Collapse
Stack Overflow's question volume fell roughly 75% from its peak after ChatGPT launched. For a decade the open web ran on a simple loop: user has a question,…
The RAM Price Shock: Second-Order Effects
The AI boom was supposed to be about software. In early 2026 it quietly raised the price of your laptop. Memory chips share production lines, and one bit of…
TSMC: The Chokepoint Foundry
NVIDIA designs the most powerful AI chips in the world, and yet it does not manufacture a single one. That job belongs to one company in Taiwan, and the…
Vertiv: The Unglamorous Winner
While investors argued over which AI model or hyperscaler would win the boom, a company that makes cooling systems and power distribution for server rooms…
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