Samsung's $70B Chip Bet, Apple Doing Nothing But Winning AI, Bezos' New Fund | Diet TBPN - TBPN Recap

Podcast: TBPN

Published: 2026-03-19

Duration: 1860

What Happened

Samsung is making a bold move by investing $70 billion to enhance their fab capacity, aiming to regain their position in the AI chips arena. They are currently a key player in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and OLED displays, trailing only Apple in smartphones and TSMC in the semiconductor foundry business. Notably, semiconductors constitute 30-40% of Samsung's business, and they supply HBM to NVIDIA for advanced systems like the H100 and Blackwell.

Tesla has partnered with Samsung on the foundry side, utilizing Samsung's 14-nanometer process for their Full Self-Driving (FSD) system chips. With 3.2 million Teslas equipped with FSD systems running Samsung chips on the road in America, Tesla's collaboration with Samsung is substantial. Meanwhile, Tesla uses the dojo chip, fabricated at TSMC, for training in data centers before deploying the model onto Samsung chips in the vehicles.

Apple's AI revenue is projected to surpass $1 billion this year, primarily driven by generative AI applications such as ChatGPT. The App Store's revenue model charges a 30% commission on subscription fees in the first year and 15% thereafter, contributing to Apple's financial success. Apple's AI strategy leverages personal information stored on iPhones and custom-designed chips for on-device AI, further solidifying their market position.

Jeff Bezos is ambitiously raising $100 billion for an AI manufacturing fund, named Project Prometheus. This fund aims to transform manufacturing by acquiring companies in sectors like chipmaking, defense, and aerospace. Bezos has been traveling to regions like the Middle East and Singapore to engage with sovereign wealth representatives, positioning the fund to rival SoftBank's $100 billion fund.

The podcast highlights a significant moment in semiconductor history with Samsung's stock increasing by 11% over five days, contrasting with the NASDAQ's 2.2% decline. This surge reflects investor confidence in Samsung's strategic investments and their potential impact on the tech industry. Concurrently, the geopolitical tension involving China's CCP and Taiwan's energy crisis threat could influence the American chip buying sector.

Cursor's new coding model, Composer 2, is priced competitively at 50 cents per million input tokens and $2.5 per million output tokens, making it 10 times cheaper than its competitors like Opus. Despite its affordability, Cursor faces challenges with customer satisfaction due to changes that quickly exhaust monthly credits. This highlights the balance between cost-efficiency and user experience in the competitive coding model market.

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