What happens when the unstoppable force of AI meets the immovable object that is Apple’s stranglehold on the supply chain? Guess we’re gonna find out because, according to technology columnist Tim Culpan, the massive amounts of cash being thrown at AI have more than caught up with how much Apple spends on chips.
With the continuing AI boom, and each GPU from clients like Nvidia and AMD taking up a larger footprint per wafer, the iPhone maker’s chip designs are no longer guaranteed a place among TSMC’s nearly two dozen fabs.
Culpan says that Nvidia has likely now surpassed Apple as TSMC’s largest client. It makes sense, as growth in smartphone sales is harder and harder to come by and only a relatively very few people have yet experienced the joys of having an AI girlfriend.
“She likes everything I like and has no opinions or needs of her own! It’s great!”
Sometimes it seems like we’re just days away from a definitive solution to the Fermi paradox, doesn’t it?
Foundry
It is wild to consider that the massive amount of money Apple spends on chip production could be eclipsed by something else but when you see investors dump $20 billion into an AI company that copied off another AI company’s homework and the signature feature it has to show for it, the one thing it’s known for, is making child pornography, you can see this is money well spent.
Yeahhh.
Look, it’s not like these tech companies ever make any bad bets, right? The efficiency of the market will ensure that, while not every bet pays off, these are all making very judicious gambles that-
Meta’s enormous bet on virtual reality ended last week, with the company reportedly laying off roughly 1,500 employees from its Reality Labs division…
Oh. Well, it’s not like the company literally changed its name to Meta because… well, actually, it mostly did that because it was running from the bad reputation the Facebook name had made for itself, so at least that part kind of worked. But it’s not like it spent a lot of money–
In total, the company had funneled some $73 billion into Reality Labs. To put that into context, you’d have to spend $1 million per day for 200 years to match that kind of spending.
You know, the Macalope doesn’t consider himself some kind of super genius by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s pretty sure he could find better ways to spend $73 billion than condemning legless meeples to endless meetings in the visual equivalent of whatever conference room facilities were apparently attached to the Wii Sports complex. If anyone other than a billionaire pitched that–“Hey, remember the low-fi appeal of Wii Sports, where it wasn’t about the graphics, it was about the motion and fun? Well, we’re gonna do that, but for meetings! And we’re gonna spend $73 billion to do it!”–they would have been immediately institutionalized. Yet Mark Zuckerberg is free to roam the streets to this day.
The iPhone’s supremacy was never going to last forever, but is all this spending on AI warranted? The Macalope has said repeatedly that AI has any number of practical, valuable uses, particularly in programming, data analysis, and accessibility. It just doesn’t belong in literally everything. Even Dell knows that. When the tech industry’s fan sheet, Tiger Beat in the Valley, rushes to say “It’s not a bubble! Gawd! … It’s, um, actually a number of bubbles,” it doesn’t seem great.
Good news for those throwing billions at AI, though. When the bubble pops, however bad it is, their pals in the Trump administration will be right there with a bailout package. And guess who gets to pay for that?
