Chris Miller

I think we've learned over the last couple of years there's no silver bullet.

President Trump's tried tariffs.

That comes with obvious downside.

President Biden tried subsidies.

That worked to a degree, but only to a degree.

Here's the reality.

The chip industry has evolved.

hundreds of billions of dollars of capex over the last several decades.

And so it's just not going to move fast.

And so if you want to slowly change the structure of where chips are produced, you've got to plan for years of implementation of measures designed to shift the economics of the chip industry.

Calling AMD a competitor to NVIDIA might be a bit of a stretch, says Tufts historian Chris Miller.

The company commands less than 10 percent of the AI chip market.

So Miller says it makes sense for AMD to give up part of the company to attract a big money customer like Meta.

And Meta gets more than equity in AMD, says analyst Gil Luria at DA Davidson.

It also gets a diversified supply chain for the hardware that is the choke point in the AI boom.

Offering equity to customers is just the latest in what's becoming a tangled web of deals in AI.

But what can look like a virtuous cycle of investment can also tip into something more troubling.

Circular financing, where the same dollars circulate between companies, says Jay Goldberg at Seaport Research.

And right now?

A 12-sided die from Dungeons & Dragons?