Tech Geopolitics
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This Week: Power Is Only Useful Before You Spend It
Power spent is power gone — and the actors who understand that are the ones who still have some left.
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The Strait of Hormuz Is a Leverage Test
The risk premium on Hormuz isn't collapsing because Iran surrendered — it's collapsing because the Gulf states made the threat redundant by simply pumping more.
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China's Open-Weights Play Is a Geopolitical Move
Open weights are not a gift. They are a toll booth — and the US AI industry is about to find out it doesn't own the road.
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Trump's Canada Tariff Threat Is Already Backfiring — Before It Even Takes Effect
Dominance is the ability to impose costs. Leverage is the ability to trade costs for concessions. The US has enormous dominance. It is systematically converting that dominance into demonstrated willingness to use it — which is different from, and less valuable than, the credible threat.
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Oil at $100 Rewrites the Fed's Script
The price of macro risk is being set in Sanaa and Tehran, not Washington — and the Fed's only move against a Strait of Hormuz disruption is to choke domestic demand until the pressure drops.
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Alibaba's Claude Ban Is the Tech Cold War Going Hot
Alibaba isn't just banning Claude Code today — they're selecting Anthropic's permanent exclusion from that organization's AI layer.
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Europe Built a Sovereign ID on American Rails
You cannot build digital sovereignty on top of a stack you don't control — and the EU just built its national ID system on Google and Apple's trust layer.
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SK Hynix's US Listing Is a Memory Arms Race
Memory is the chokepoint the AI stack can't route around — and SK Hynix just made a $29.4 billion bet that everyone is about to remember that.
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Microsoft's Chinese Model Problem Is a Feature
Microsoft treating model origin as an economic variable rather than a security constant is the kind of decision that looks fine in a quarterly earnings call and catastrophic in a postmortem.
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Big Tech's Private Oceans Are Everyone Else's Problem
The application layer looks diverse. The substrate looks like an oligopoly — and the oligopoly is drilling into the ocean floor while regulators argue about chatbot disclosures.