#15 - AI Stopped Being Software

The chatbots were the trailer. The machine age is the film — playing now in concrete, chips, electricity and debt.

Yesterday: 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.

In this episode:

🏛️ 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

🔩 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

🏪 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

💳 $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

🏗️ 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

🤖 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

Three 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 debt.

📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904 — team Zitron or team Dwarkesh?

🌐 werchota.ai

AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Straight from Bregenz, Austria. Same cave tomorrow.