fin: “The reason the outlook for AI infrastructure is so murky, and the bubble debate more heated than in the internet buildout era, is mainly that compute spending has certain visibility while demand visibility is low, which creates enormous uncertainty, and in between sits a layer of financial risk from the timing mismatch between revenue and spending — a buildout financial risk that, as every party keeps raising its bet, has escalated to the point where it can even affect Treasury issuance. But I hold to the view that even on a base case with no new paradigm at all, the buildout through at least 2027–2028 is not a bubble. Compute is intelligence, and intelligence is enormous revenue.”
Mint: “Government incentives have helped turn India into a major electronics assembly base, particularly for mobile phones—55 million iPhones, accounting for 14% of Apple’s production, are assembled in India by Foxconn, Pegatron and Tata Electronics. In 2025, smartphone exports touched $30 billion, with iPhones accounting for 76% of the total, according to the ministry of commerce and analysts. The next policy push is looking to go deeper inside the device.”
NYTimes: “The lesson of the East India Company is not only that corporations can behave monstrously abroad. It is that they can flex their powers at home, too. Like the East India Company before them, today’s giants are using their lobbying dollars and closeness to power to warp our politics and our economy as they take on the powers and functions of a nation-state. Burke understood this in the 1780s. His greatest anxiety was not what the company was doing in Bengal but what its money would do to Britain. History shows that when a company starts acquiring the attributes of a state — the revenues, the courts, the treaties, the capacity to make war and peace — its transformation can damage the parent country at least as much as the territories it exploits. Its lobbying corrupts the legislature. It captures the treasury, because the corporation’s solvency becomes a public interest. It converts foreign policy into an extension of a balance sheet. And it shows that the threshold, once crossed, is astonishingly hard to recross. The window in which any of this can be undone closes fast.”
FT: “In The New Dark Ages, Marriott, a columnist at The Times, suggests short-form video is threatening to supplant the written word as the dominant medium of public discourse. If this comes to pass, he argues, the very foundations of science and democracy will be undermined: a society built on enlightenment rationalism will sink into a mire of ignorance…Introducing a healthy dose of perspective, Marriott points out that the decline of reading predates the internet: the peak of mass literacy, and of reading as the primary form of entertainment, was sometime around the middle of the last century, and today’s hand-wringing about online screen time has a modern precursor in the moral panic over television, which began in the 1950s and continued into the 1990s. But the smartphone’s impact is of a different order of magnitude, and if print culture does eventually give way to screen culture, the ramifications could be far-reaching indeed.”
