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Hundreds of investing and finance newsletters hit my (and maybe your) inbox every week. This is the best of the best of tech from the past week. Every Monday, we’ll tackle policy, and every Wednesday, we’ll recap finance.

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Well, that was fast. The stock market seems to have crowned a new AI king, and it's not who you think. Google, once the laggard, is now being priced like the leader thanks to its Gemini 3 model and custom TPU chips, fueling a rally in both Alphabet and its chip-making partner, Broadcom.

The heat sent OpenAI scrambling into a "code red." CEO Sam Altman slammed the brakes on new products to fix ChatGPT's wobbly performance. To make matters worse, its blockbuster $100 billion deal with Nvidia is apparently still just a handshake agreement. They haven’t even signed the dang thing.

Meanwhile, Amazon is playing its own game. It's quietly arming its massive AWS cloud business with practical AI tools for enterprise clients and building chips that are apparently more cost effective than Nvidia’s, proving the AI war is being fought on multiple, less flashy fronts. It’s also announced 30 minute Amazon Prime deliveries. Hello.

As AI valuations hit nosebleed levels, Wall Street's professional party-poopers are getting flashbacks. Famed short-seller Jim Chanos is calling out debt-fueled defaults, while "Big Short" legend Michael Burry compares Nvidia's hype cycle to Cisco's right before the dot-com bust.

The skepticism centers on what critics call "circular" financing. Nvidia just dropped $2 billion into chip designer Synopsys, a move that looks like either a brilliant ecosystem play or just funneling cash to a partner so they can buy more Nvidia chips. You decide.

This financial drama is unfolding against a backdrop of insane physical demand. Data center energy needs are projected to nearly triple by 2035. That kind of infrastructure buildout will require mountains of cash and could seriously strain power grids, creating a whole new set of risks for investors to worry about.

This episode of The Best One Yet unpacks Lululemon’s founder publicly roasting his own CEO, the shocking rise of crypto‑hungry soldiers on U.S. military bases, and how AI agents quietly orchestrated a quarter of all Black Friday purchases.

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That’s all for today. Write us and let us know your thoughts on the market, the newsletter, or the weather—we’d just love to hear from you.

Till next time,
— Brandon and Blake