8 October 2025

3 clips · 9 minutes of listening · 1 show

4 shows published 9 episodes in the period, 8.7 hours in all. These are the 9 minutes worth hearing.

Investment

Acquired

None. The two hosts present the episode alone; the Google, DeepMind and Waymo people thanked in the credits were background research interviews, not on-air guests.

Episode

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio)

Hosted by

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

6 October 2025 · 4h 6m · 1 clip below

contrarian

Alphabet earns roughly $400 a year from each US user of a free search product, and Acquired cannot name who pays that much for an AI subscription.

Google holds about 90 per cent of search against a plausible AI steady state of 25 to 50 per cent across several funded products, so matching today's revenue per head still leaves a much smaller business. The queries likeliest to move to a chat interface first are the expensive ones, trip planning, health, legal and insurance, and the hosts add that in 1998 Google was the better product and had AdWords within two years, neither condition holding now.

2m 25s · from 3:43:09
My observations
- Search revenue can hold while travel, health and insurance queries migrate, and then the headline stays flat while the revenue underneath it deteriorates, which shows up in cost per click long before the top line.
- The 25 to 50 per cent share estimate is asserted with no method behind it. It is a reasonable prior for a market with four or five funded competitors, and it is the number I would want to see someone actually model before leaning on this case.
- Both hosts say in the disclaimer that they may hold positions in companies they discuss, and the episode is broadly admiring of Google. Read this section as the case they had to work against their own sympathies to make, which is usually the more informative direction.
- equities
- ai-and-markets

AI

Acquired

None. The two hosts present the episode alone; the Google, DeepMind and Waymo people thanked in the credits were background research interviews, not on-air guests.

Episode

Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI? (Audio)

Hosted by

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

6 October 2025 · 4h 6m · 2 clips below

1 of 2 contrarian

Acquired puts Broadcom's margin on Google's TPU work near 50 per cent against Nvidia's 75 to 80, and argues that in an industry running 50 per cent gross margins the cheapest producer of tokens takes the market.

Chips and their depreciation are over half the cost of running an AI data centre, engineering and research a quarter to a third, and power only 2 to 6 per cent, so the markup a silicon supplier takes is the largest single lever on cost, and Google pays roughly 2x where everyone else pays about 5x. Gavin Baker of Atreides is cited against this, on the ground that Google did not win search by being cheap.

3m 48s · from 3:36:36
My observations
- The hosts source the Broadcom margin as something they have heard rather than anything disclosed, and the conclusion does not survive if the real gap is 65 against 80 rather than 50 against 80.
- Chips and depreciation are more than half the cost and power is under 6 per cent, so the energy story that dominates the coverage is the small term and supplier margin is the big one.
- Where the purchase turns on model quality, enterprise trust or switching cost, a 5x hardware markup is a drag on margin rather than a verdict on who wins.
2 of 2 framework

Waymo reports 91 per cent fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers, and Acquired sizes the business against the $470 billion the CDC attributes to US crash deaths in a single year.

Gilbert discards the frames that would normally be reached for, automaker market capitalisation at 2.5 trillion globally because Waymo does not make cars, and ride-hailing at around 300 billion because the plan runs to owned vehicles and long-haul freight. Applying the claimed tenfold reduction in serious collisions to that figure leaves roughly 420 billion annually, larger than Google's entire revenue, set beside cumulative investment of 10 to 15 billion.

3m 12s · from 3:04:33
My observations
- Nobody invoices for a crash that did not happen, so the 470 billion bounds the value created and says nothing about what Waymo can capture. The hosts half-acknowledge this and then use the number anyway.
- Ten to fifteen billion since 2009, against 2,000 vehicles, over 10 million paid rides and 100 million driverless miles, puts Waymo's capital intensity well below the frontier model labs, which is not where I would have guessed it sat.
- What would test the thesis is cost per vehicle-hour rather than market size. Charging, cleaning, depot returns and sensor replacement all get named here and none of them get quantified, and that is the line between a Google-sized business and a permanently subsidised one.

8 October 2025

Investment

Alphabet earns roughly $400 a year from each US user of a free search product, and Acquired cannot name who pays that much for an AI subscription.

AI

Acquired puts Broadcom's margin on Google's TPU work near 50 per cent against Nvidia's 75 to 80, and argues that in an industry running 50 per cent gross margins the cheapest producer of tokens takes the market.

Waymo reports 91 per cent fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers, and Acquired sizes the business against the $470 billion the CDC attributes to US crash deaths in a single year.