(Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Made on YouTube 2025)
Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!
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On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.
- The YouTube Juggernaut. Maybe the most surprising thing about YouTube is how a service can be so dominant, and yet fly so completely under the radar. That has a lot of implications, including on my analysis: in The YouTube Tip of the Google Spear I look at the history of user-generated content to explain why video tends to be a bigger business than text, which means that YouTube, powered by Google DeepMind, has the potential to win in consumer AI. Google, though, has been about potential, not products; that’s why some of the new features at last week’s Youtube event were such a big deal. — Ben Thompson
- What Does an Nvidia-Intel Partnership Mean? Once upon a time Nvidia saw Intel as an existential threat, but that was almost thirty years ago. Today, as Intel confronts its own spectrum of existential threats, Nvidia is following the U.S. government’s lead and throwing the company a $5 billion life preserver; Monday’s Daily Update took a closer look at the details of the partnership. In short, the deal will help Intel’s cash flow and long-term credibility with potential chip customers, both of which Intel desperately needs, but to be clear, Nvidia is not going to be fabbing any of its chips at Intel foundries, which America desperately needs to succeed. Instead, Nvidia found a way to position itself as an Intel savior with a design deal that assumes none of the risk of actually fabbing chips at Intel, uses Intel’s customer base to increase Nvidia’s access to the enterprise market, makes them an even more formidable foil to AMD, and likely dissuades Intel from competing in the GPU space. President Trump called Jensen Huang “a smart cookie” earlier this year, and this deal supports the claim. — Andrew Sharp
- Let’s Talk About Sushi Robots. For anyone who needs something completely different, I’m here to endorse 20 minutes on the history of industrialized nigiri production. The latest from Jon at Asianometry focuses on the rise of sushi robotics in 1980s Japan, but also traces the origins of sushi and the art of forming the shari-dama (“rice jewel”), which took chefs 4 to 5 years to master, after which chefs could make 300-350 rice pieces per hour. That is, until the robots arrived: In the 1970s a company called Suzumo began filming chef hand movements and attempting mechanical replication, and by the ’80s they had succeeded. Today, what was dubbed a “sushi robot” can make up to 1,200 rice bases per hour, allowing sushi chefs to reallocate their energy to plating and fish preparation, reducing the cost of production overall, and allowing sushi businesses to scale all over the world. If you’re interested, Jon’s video is also available to Stratechery subscribers as a podcast, which you can download here, right before you start making plans to find some sushi this weekend. — AS
Stratechery Articles and Updates
Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber
Asianometry with Jon Yu
Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop
Greatest of All Talk with Andrew Sharp and WaPo’s Ben Golliver
Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson
This week’s Sharp Tech video is on whether Apple is changing the world.
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