Stratechery: Google's Earnings Confirmed the Anthropic Hedge, and Jassy Explained Why the Capex Is Defensible
Stratechery·medium signal
Ben Thompson argues Google's latest earnings validate its hedged position — owning a frontier lab while also backing Anthropic — and that Amazon's Andy Jassy gave the clearest articulation yet of why hyperscaler AI capex pencils out. The analysis reframes the capex debate from 'is this a bubble' to 'which layer of the stack captures the return,' with the frontier-model case treated as separable from the infrastructure case. Useful counterweight to the credit-default-swap anxiety currently circulating about AI debt financing.