Odd Lots

We know that companies around the world are investing heavily in AI. So intense is the race to win the AI battle, that it feels like there's almost no upward limit on how much you could spend on it. So how are CFOs thinking about capex in the AI age? In this episode we speak with Winston Cheng, CFO of Chinese-founded multinational tech firm Lenovo. Lenovo is known for its personal computers, especially its Thinkpad line of laptops, but they are making a push to move beyond its role as one of the leaders in personal computing, integrating AI agents into their devices and investing in building out an “AI Cloud” infrastructure alongside Nvidia. We talk to Cheng about how Lenovo's allocating capital during one of the biggest capex booms in history. We also discuss involution and market competition in China, and how Lenovo's been adapting its supply chain to tariffs.
Read more:
AI Sales Start to Justify Data-Center Spending Boom, Report Says
Anthropic Accuses Alibaba of ‘Illicitly’ Accessing AI Models
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The Strait of Hormuz has (mostly) re-opened! Crude prices are still up since the start of the war with Iran, but popular predictions earlier this year of $200-a-barrel Brent didn’t pan out. Why is that? We last talked to Rory Johnston, the founder of the Commodity Context newsletter, at the start of the conflict. And in that conversation he said that the Strait’s closure would lead to $200 oil if it persisted for any length of time. Today, he returns to tell us what he’s learned about the oil market since then. He explains the various factors that kept a lid on prices, including some re-routing, Trump jawboning, and (crucially) surprise import reductions from China.
Previous: Rory Johnston on How Oil Could Surge to Over $200 a Barrel
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The last time the World Cup came to the US was 1994. Before then, the World Cup was an enormously popular event with surprisingly limited commercial significance; the 1990 tournament in Italy, for instance, lost money for broadcasters. But that all changed in 1994, when American companies sought to make their mark in the form of advertisements and sponsorships: firms like McDonalds, Mastercard, and General Motors saw the potential to reach a global audience through one of the world's most watched sports events. Today, we speak with Joey D'Urso — a freelance sports journalist and author of the recent book More Than A Shirt: How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money and Power — about the 1994 World Cup and this year's competition, which is being held jointly, by the US, Canada, and Mexico. We also talk about other surprising stories of corporate and geopolitical influence in the world of football.
Read more:
Unilever, Pepsi Tap Celebrities, Players During World Cup
Mexico’s Sheinbaum Invites Merlín the Duck to National Palace Amid Soccer Craze
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China's AI industry has changed a lot since DeepSeek released its cheap frontier model last year, and briefly sent US tech stocks falling. After being locked out of the most advanced chips, Chinese companies are now allowed to buy some Nvidia H200s. In fact, many of the big Chinese tech companies — like Baidu — are making a push to become full-stack players, with their own chips, models, and cloud infrastructure. Today's guest is Grace Shao, an independent AI researcher and the author of the AI Proem Substack. She's a bit of an insider when it comes to China's AI industry, and when we were in Hong Kong we spoke with her about the latest in open-source models, the competition among Chinese frontier labs, DeepSeek's place in an increasingly crowded Chinese AI market, China's manufacturing edge, where bottlenecks exist right now (spoiler: it isn't data centers), if Chinese grandmas are actually using OpenClaw, and finally, of course, AI psychosis.
Read More:China AI Lab’s 170% Stock Surge Cements Winner-Loser Pair Trade China Plans Mechanism to Evaluate AI Impacts on Job Market
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We closed out our New York live show on May 28 with a panel that featured three of our favorite Substackers: James van Geelen of Citrini Research, Sam Ro, founder of The TKer, and journalist Jasmine Sun. They've all been Odd Lots guests before, and we wanted to get them together to discuss how journalists and analysts are supposed to cover this incredibly strange and highly pressurized moment in markets. Not only has AI basically infected every corner of the world, the media included, but there's just so much news that it's sometimes hard to figure out what the focus should be. But James, Sam, and Jasmine have all found their own niches, and cover AI in a really unique way. This panel discussion debates how the media has covered fears over the AI bubble and the possibility of mass job loss, if people in Silicon Valley are scared about the future of society, if AI can really mimic a writer's voice and personality, and (if they can) how writers can hedge against that future.
Read more:Amazon in Talks to Sell Custom AI Chips in Bid to Undercut NvidiaAI Company Dream Triples Value to $3 Billion in Funding Round
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