Hi All,
Welcome to our brief overview of portfolio news from the past few days. Before we begin, please note the following:
Our Grab deep dive was originally scheduled for release today, but we have decided to hold it back briefly to fine-tune a few final sections. With the holiday period approaching, we want to make sure the report lands exactly as intended. The full deep dive will now be published on 5 January, and we appreciate your patience for a few more days while we put the finishing touches in place.
Amazon’s Drone Retreat & Cloud Stumbles
Amazon is pulling back on its drone ambitions in Italy while facing heat over cloud reliability.
The Drone Drop: Amazon has halted its commercial drone delivery program in Italy, citing a regulatory framework that doesn’t support its long-term goals.
AWS Outage: On Christmas Eve, AWS suffered a significant disruption, reportedly its third large-scale crash of the year, taking down tens of thousands of websites and sparking user complaints.
The drone news is a reminder that regulation remains a massive “hidden tax” on innovation, technology is ready, but the rules aren’t. Meanwhile, frequent AWS outages are a genuine risk; reliability is the cloud’s core promise, and repeated failures could open the door for Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud to steal frustrated enterprise customers.
Samsung’s Strategic Shift
Samsung is taking more control over its destiny with the upcoming Galaxy S26.
In-House GPU: The company will debut its first in-house mobile GPU design in the Exynos 2600 chip, slated for early 2026.
While Samsung designed the layout, the underlying architecture remains licensed from AMD.
“Remaining licensed” means Samsung is still paying AMD to use the fundamental blueprints (RDNA architecture) but is customizing how those blueprints are built (the layout) to optimize for power and heat. This is a “middle ground” step towards full independence. For us, it signals that owning the silicon stack is now table stakes for AI-enabled hardware, where efficiency is everything.
The AI Energy War: Google’s $4.75B Power Play
Alphabet is making a massive move to secure the one thing AI needs most: energy.
Google agreed to acquire Intersect for $4.75 billion. The deal includes “multiple gigawatts” of energy and data center projects.
This allows Google to build power generation in “lockstep” with new data centers, rather than waiting for slow utility providers.
This is a brilliant move. Power cooling and availability are now the primary bottlenecks for AI scaling. By vertically integrating energy infrastructure, Google gains a structural speed and cost advantage over rivals who are still at the mercy of the public grid.
Other Key Updates
Alibaba & AMD: Reports suggest Alibaba is weighing a purchase of 40,000–50,000 of AMD’s MI308 AI accelerators. If confirmed, this validates AMD as a serious alternative to Nvidia in the restrictive Chinese market.
Waymo’s Resilience: Waymo is updating its fleet after a massive San Francisco power outage tested its systems. While service was paused, the vehicles successfully navigated 7,000 “dark signals”.
OpenAI Ads: OpenAI is officially exploring ads in ChatGPT. This was inevitable. The real test isn’t if they do it, but how, if they clutter the experience, users might flee. If they nail it, Google Search has a new, serious rival for ad dollars. Of course, this was the main risk from the beginning.
That’s a wrap. See you soon.