Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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CAPEX retrospected! Onward!
My Writing
Follow the CAPEX 2025 Retrospective
Letting an LLM take a shot at writing this piece was good for my sense of future value. It failed—sloporifically—and the post was hand-crafted. Beyond getting data right across disparate sources, new insights and jokes remain hard.
Announcement: I am surrendering to the em dash. With LLMs making the em dash commonplace, and all the grief I get for being overly parenthetical, I’m embracing that extenuated mark. But my em dashes are artisanal—I manually replace parentheses.
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News
Don’t be Cleveland: Amazon’s Exit
Amazon has reduced their Seattle headcount by ~20%, given up a million square feet of Seattle real estate, and just doubled their space in Bellevue. Downtown Seattle has record office vacancy.
Mayor Wilson must be so proud! She’s killing it!
Don’t be Cleveland: Drunken State Spending
Unclear if he was referring to a particular meeting or the entire legislative session.
Did OpenAI Find the Money this Week?
Yes, with a caveat they need to find even more…
But it warned it will burn more than twice as much cash through 2030 than previously predicted, as it spends $665 billion on the costs of running and training its AI, according to the financial forecasts.
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Did OpenAI Find the Money this Week? (Feb 20), Is OpenAI’s Too Big to Fail Strategy Working?, Did OpenAI Find the Money This Week? (Nov 7), Did OpenAI Find the Money This Week? (Oct 31), Did OpenAI Find the Money This Week? (Oct 24) Did OpenAI Find the Money This Week? (Oct 17), They Don’t Have the Money: OpenAI Edition, They Don’t Have the Money
Introducing the “Strategy Outage”
We’ve transcended the “strategy tax”:
Amazon’s cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools, leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant’s push to roll out these coding assistants.
Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.
Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.
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Nova: The Bermuda Triangle of Branding?, AWS re:Invent Weirdness, The Arc of the Generative AI Universe Bends Towards Cash: Anthropic Edition, Culture Clash Conjecture: Amazon and Anthropic, Amazon Even More Bullish on Finding a Compression Algorithm for Experience, 326 Features into a 10k Race, Existential Corner: How Many Steps into the 10K are We?, Team Primitives: What Sayest Thou?, Amazon Desperately Seeks Compression Algorithm for Experience, Most Greatest AI Company in Entire Universe Makes Major Strategy Pivot, The AWS Generative AI Soap Opera, The Amazon AI Inferiority Complex
Memory as Affordability Issue?
Might we see a Presidential Executive Order telling data centers to make their own memory?
Existential Corner: Xbox
Ben Thompson at Stratechery doesn’t go back far enough in Xbox history. Xbox was a hedge against PlayStation disrupting the home PC from the living room. Mission accomplished!
Reserve the XBOX ticker.
Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk: “Unhinged AI” in Classified Settings
“Unhinged AI” continues its search for product-market fit.
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Quicker Hits
Bronny Gets Allowance Raised: Paramount Wins Bidding War for Warner Discovery as Netflix Drops Out.
M.G. Siegler on the economics ahead for Larry and Bronny.
New York Times AI Assistant. This was misnamed — should have been called Hector.
Utility Computing: “US tech giants are expected to sign a pledge next week to build or buy their own energy supplies to power data centers.“
Mercantilist Meets Bigger Mercantilist: German business lobby warns of unfair trade practices by China
Tim O’Brien on Anthropic and the Pentagon
Diego Oppenheimer “I replaced our CRM with a git repo and an AI Agent”