{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"AI Neanderthal by Malcolm Werchota","title":"#15 - AI Stopped Being Software","html":"<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless src=\"https://share.transistor.fm/e/ebd46b8c\"></iframe>","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2829,"description":"The chatbots were the trailer. The machine age is the film — playing now in concrete, chips, electricity and debt.\n\nYesterday: who holds your switch. Today we go one floor down, into the basement of the AI boom — where the money quietly moved into atoms. Six stories, one supply chain: trade policy, capital, marketplace, debt, factory, crash.\n\nIn this episode:\n🏛️ Washington thinks about taxing the machines (02:15) — Proposed chip tariffs could reach servers, laptops and gaming consoles; January's data-centre carve-outs may fall. A proposal, not a law — but it would touch your next computer. Tom's Hardware\n🔩 The software kings bought a hard hat (07:45) — a16z, the \"software is eating the world\" firm, raises a $1.1B Machine Age Fund for chips, memory, power and robots. The high priests of bits just bought atoms. TechCrunch\n🏪 Nvidia buys the town square (13:15) — Friday's cliffhanger answered: Nvidia reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face for ~$12.9B — 86× revenue. And Kevin Durant's early $250k stake is reportedly worth $60M+. Not yet confirmed by either company. TechCrunch\n💳 $45B of compute, bought with borrowed money (19:30) — Anthropic's six-year Nscale deal, Broadcom's $60–100B debt vehicle, and the lease-not-buy machine behind the boom. Ed Zitron vs. Dwarkesh Patel — pick your team. TechCrunch\n🏗️ America finally builds AI memory at home (24:45) — SK Hynix breaks ground on the first US HBM base ($4B, Indiana, production 2029), Kioxia/Sandisk plan $31B in Japan, Nvidia commits up to $160B to memory. The bottleneck gets the factory. UPI\n🤖 The robot superstar fell off the stage (28:15) — Unitree: +460% on debut, briefly $66B, then −45% and $30B gone. Quarterly profit: ~$6M. \"All bubbles are doomed to burst\" — Dong Baozhen. Never confuse a great demo with a great business. Reuters\n\nThree things this week: map your physical exposure (30 minutes, one page) · separate demo from business in your own pilots · ask every AI vendor who owns their compute — and who owns their...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/0Up7tcMuVZ4o57Iv4ifZS1RwZ9v586rtihtmL6xMbcU/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9hMjM5/YzFjODNkNmY4NDNk/MDllMDE5NGQ3MjE4/NTM3ZS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}