![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/GettyImages-732024.jpg\")
(Photo by Gilles Mingasson\/Liaison)<\/p>\n(Photo by Gilles Mingasson\/Liaison)<\/p>\n
Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!<\/p>\n
As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we\u2019re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle; highlighted links are free for everyone. Additionally, you have complete control over what we send to you. If you don\u2019t want to receive This Week in Stratechery emails (there is no podcast), please uncheck the box in your delivery settings<\/a>.<\/p>\n On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.<\/p>\n Tech\u2019s Looming Chip Problem. My first obsession in tech was semiconductors, back when every new generation provided such astronomical gains that it fundamentally shaped how the entire software industry approached development. Then, for a few decades, semiconductors faded to the background: yes, they matter, but they were commodities, both in terms of availability and ongoing costs. Today, however, chips matter more than ever thanks to AI. Yet even though it\u2019s no longer an esoteric topic, I actually think that the industry is not thinking about them enough<\/a>: today we have chip shortages, but if demand doesn\u2019t take the initiative to restructure supply than the shortages looming by the end of the decade could dramatically curtail AI\u2019s impact and, by extension, the entire industry\u2019s revenue potential. \u2014 Ben Thompson<\/p>\n What Is Meta Doing, and Why?\u00a0Thursday\u2019s Daily Update was a return to Stratechery\u2019s bread and butter: unpacking Meta\u2019s latest earnings announcement<\/a> and explaining why Wall Street might be overreacting to the results. Come to read how Meta beat expectations again (continuing a trend that began in Q2 2025<\/a>), and stay to learn why, despite Wall Street\u2019s apparent permission to spend up to $135 billion on AI infrastructure, there are fair questions to ask of Zuckerberg\u2019s enormous bets. We doubled back to discuss all this on the podcast this week<\/a>, including thoughts on whether Zuckerberg is ultimately stuck in the same box he\u2019s been in for years\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the world\u2019s most successful app developer, yearning to be something more\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and the stark contrast between Apple and Meta in the AI era.\u00a0\u2014 Andrew Sharp<\/p>\n Disappearing PLA Generals and \u201cDe-Risking.\u201d\u00a0The past few weeks have seen both Canada and the U.K. make outreach to the Chinese government to gin up new business and de-risk from the U.S.; on Sharp Text, I wrote about why that\u2019s a bad idea<\/a> (and why the fawning over Mark Carney\u2019s Davos speech annoyed me). Elsewhere, a warning: we don\u2019t have many answers as to what the hell is happening at the top of the PLA, but Xi has now purged 5 of the 6 appointees of the Central Military Commission, and 50 senior officers since 2023, including his number two in command, Gen. Zhang Youxia, last weekend. This week\u2019s episode of Sharp China<\/a> probes the questions raised by all this (for Taiwan, for Xi, was Zhang leaking nuclear secrets to the US?) and it was a terrific coda to a week of rampant speculation in the wake of genuinely seismic China news.\u00a0\u2014 AS<\/p>\n Stratechery Articles and Updates<\/p>\n Sharp Text by Andrew Sharp<\/p>\n Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball\u2019s John Gruber<\/p>\n Asianometry with Jon Yu<\/p>\n Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism\u2019s Bill Bishop<\/p>\n Greatest of All Talk with Andrew Sharp and WaPo\u2019s Ben Golliver<\/p>\n Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson<\/p>\n This week\u2019s Sharp Tech video is on the Apple Vision Pro not getting live events right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Photo by Gilles Mingasson\/Liaison) Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery! As a reminder, each week, every Friday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-260959","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}