Chips for China, land for Russia, scorn for Europe

Also: Jets and AI merge

Dec 09, 2025

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Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business and power.

Tuesday! Below we’ll talk chips and China, AI regulation and the states, a new venture capital fund, and more. But the most critical news in the world today is that Stellantis is bringing the Fiat Topolino to the United States. The tiny EV is technically a quadricycle, but it’s the perfect city car. Small, electric, cute, and did I mention small? Be still, my beating, cholesterol-choked American heart! — Alex

📈 Trending Up: Microsoft in India … Skild AI … Microsoft in Canada … defending Europe … heat pumps … should have just waited … new AI models from OpenAI, Meta in the new year … Fal’s coffers … oops … Tigers with short-term memory loss …
📉 Trending Down: Wind power bans … Google strongarming the Internet … iOS lockin … driving yourself to Caesar’s …

Things That Matter

Boom: I first heard about Boom back in 2016. My then-boss chipped into one of its earliest rounds, putting the startup’s efforts to build a supersonic passenger airliner onto my radar. Good luck, was my non-sarcastic response. We need faster air travel, but the road ahead would be incredibly difficult.

Thankfully, founder Blake Scholl — I interviewed him for TWiST in September — did not give up and has continued to make progress towards getting us across the pond at Mach 1.7.

There’s much work to do before Boom’s Overture jet lands in customers hands in 2029 or 2030, but in the meantime, the startup has an AI use case. Don’t roll your eyes, this is good stuff. It turns out that the engine Boom is building for its supersonic passenger jets called Symphony is good for other work, too:

Boom Supersonic is developing an industrial gas turbine version of its Symphony turbofan to power AI data centers […] Dubbed Superpower, the natural gas-fueled Symphony derivative has been launched by Crusoe, an energy company building the first Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas.

Crusoe, an OpenAI partner, has ordered 29 of the adjusted engines (more on their costs and difficulty in my chat with Blake; the segment is too long to reproduce here). This is great news, twice. It’s brilliant to see Boom snag a piece of the AI infra buildout, because it could use the near-term revenue as it works on its longer-term projects. And, having more options to generate power quickly to ease grid concerns is good for national-digital competitiveness. Hell yeah.

Good for Lulu: Speaking of things I like, Lulu Cheng Meservey raised a venture capital fund. Lulu is best known for her work in comms roles at well-known technology companies and encouraging startups to go direct, eschewing the press. While I disagree that the media is merely worth dodging — hello, it’s me, I’m the problem? — I’ve always liked the Rostra-founder’s willingness to cut across conventional grains.

News that the Shopify board member put together a $40 million dollar fund to back companies her comms firm works with makes good sense. Given how painfully slim venture capital firm fundraising has been this year, more capital is more good. And I like seeing challenger firms pop up.

The Orbánization of the United States continues: After Netflix won the right to buy much of WBD, jilted buyer Paramount began working the phones. That’s not quite right. The parent of the head of Paramount began working the phones, while his child promised to repaint a cable news network in more regime-aligned colors. Here’s the WSJ:

Ellison’s father, billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a Trump ally, called the president after the Netflix deal was announced and told him the transaction would hurt competition […] During a visit to Washington in recent days, David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN, a common target of President Trump’s ire, people familiar with the matter said. Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.

Ensuring that media companies wind up in the hands of friendly business allies is precisely what we’ve seen in Hungary. The country’s press freedom has since fallen precipitously, as has its democratic vigor.

What the EO on AI regulation may look like: After the 2026 NDAA failed to include preclusions on state-level AI regulations, POTUS stood up to say that he’ll do what Congress did not, and block states from regulating AI. The argument is that a patchwork of rules will be difficult for AI companies to follow, and thus we’ll lose the AI race to China.

More on that last point below.

Precisely which mechanisms the upcoming AI executive order will employ to try and dissuade states from regulating the burgeoning technology isn’t yet clear (perhaps the end of the disbursement of certain funds, like broadband subsidies), but the limits of what the EO may try to cover are.

Per national AI head David Sacks, states’ work to require “online platforms to protect children from online predators or sexually explicit material (CSAM) would remain in effect,” the EO won’t force communities to host AI infra they don’t want, copyright fights will remain at the Federal level to be decided in the courts, and when it comes to censorship, Sacks thinks that POTUS will defend against it from the White House.

What will states be able to do, then? Not much!

I honestly do not know whether the Commerce Clause (giving the Federal American government primacy over interstate commerce) or the 10th Amendment (reserving state authority where the Constitution doesn’t delegate power to the Federal government) will win the AI regulation legal scrap. But it is clear that while Congress remains gridlocked, industry is poised to dictate national policy via the executive pen. Something worrying if you are in favor of distributed national power, or innervating if you find federalism to be little more than a national quirk.