🇺🇸 United Stakes of America 🇨🇳

Good afternoon! Berkshire just lost one of its key stock-picking brains: Todd Combs is leaving Warren Buffett’s empire and his seat running GEICO to build a new strategic investment arm at JPMorgan, reporting directly to Jamie Dimon. It’s a heavyweight move between two longtime allies, with Buffett himself giving the switch his blessing.

The hire plugs into JPMorgan’s massive national security push, which includes $1.5 trillion in financing and a $10 billion venture pool targeting AI, minerals, and defense tech. Meanwhile, Berkshire is shuffling its own leadership deck ahead of Greg Abel’s takeover, naming Nancy Pierce as GEICO’s next CEO and announcing several key executive changes across the conglomerate.

It is never a dull day in the GPU Hunger Games. Yesterday, two men were detained for trying to smuggle fifty million dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips out of the country, which feels less like a crime and more like a sign of the times. The irony is brutal. The arrests happened barely twenty-four hours after Washington gave Nvidia permission to sell its H200 chips to China, as long as the US pockets a 25 percent cut. The move helps Nvidia tap billions in pent-up Chinese demand, but it also shrinks America’s compute advantage from something like a canyon to a ditch.

The logic in Washington is simple. If China cannot buy the fastest chips, it will build its own, and fast. By letting controlled H200 exports resume, US officials are trying to keep Beijing dependent on American hardware rather than letting its homegrown challengers grow unchecked.

The problem is that those challengers are already growing anyway. Huawei has dropped multiyear supernode plans. Moore Threads exploded 400 percent in its IPO. And new GPU entrants like Enflame and Biren are sprinting to fill the demand Nvidia cannot satisfy.

Now comes the twist. Nvidia’s rally on the Trump approval fizzled the moment the Financial Times reported that Beijing may tightly restrict H200 access. Chinese regulators are debating whether to allow only limited purchases, with long approval times and strict explanations for why domestic chips are not enough.

That is the same playbook they used when they quietly killed demand for Nvidia’s earlier H20 chip. US politicians dislike the H200 export plan. Chinese officials dislike relying on Nvidia. And investors hoping for a clean, billion-dollar China rebound may be waiting a long time.

One thing is certain. Whether through sanctioned exports or attempted smuggling in the dead of night, the US–China chip race is only getting more chaotic.

And Nvidia is stuck in the middle of a geopolitical custody battle that does not seem close to ending.

Meta spent most of 2025 talking a big game about Llama 4, but the model never fully showed up.

That left Mark Zuckerberg in catch-up mode, launching a full-blown talent raid to build his new Meta Superintelligence Labs. The group is now racing to finish its next model, Avocado, a project growing so fast that Meta’s own org chart can barely keep up. CNBC reports the expansion has created internal tension, and in a twist, Avocado may end up closed-source despite Zuck’s open-source sermons. The original late-2025 deadline has already slipped into early 2026.

Apple, meanwhile, is drifting away from the rest of Big Tech like it accidentally wandered out of the AI party and never came back. BATMMAAN stocks are surging on model breakthroughs, GPU demand, and trillion-dollar data-center bets, yet Apple has delivered underwhelming updates to Apple Intelligence that have left investors guessing what the company is actually building. Its correlation to AI-sensitive names like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Broadcom has evaporated. The one upside is that Apple holds steady when AI stocks fall, but whenever the hype cycle kicks back up, Apple just sits quietly in the corner. Leadership changes suggest a reset is coming, but the company has yet to show it knows which direction to take.

The pressure is even worse at OpenAI, which is sprinting to push out GPT-5.2 this week after Google’s new Gemini 3 model scored a clear edge on key benchmarks. Sam Altman reportedly issued a “code red,” pausing AGI experiments and Sora 2 to force the entire company to focus on upgrading ChatGPT. The urgency is not just competitive. OpenAI has signed more than a trillion dollars in long-term compute and data-center deals, and slowing growth would make those commitments a lot harder to support.

To regain momentum, OpenAI is doubling down on user-driven signals, the same engagement-first approach that helped GPT-4o explode in popularity. A second update is planned for January with faster responses, stronger vision capabilities, and a more polished personality.

Internally, leadership sees this two-stage upgrade cycle as the window to close the gap with Google. Altman publicly downplayed the rivalry, saying the true long-term battle may be with Apple once AI shifts to on-device computing, but the reality is simple. OpenAI needs ChatGPT at the front of the pack, and it is willing to slow the AGI moonshot to make it happen.

Big Tech’s AI race used to feel like a straight sprint. Now it looks more like a marathon where half the runners keep tripping, switching shoes, or changing directions. The next wave of breakthroughs will not just decide who leads AI. It will decide who still belongs in the club.

Tomorrow’s spotlight isn’t on any run-of-the-mill data drop.

It’s the Fed, full stop.

But while everyone’s bracing for that final 2025 rate cut, the real plot twist may be what happens after the calendar flips. Globally, 2026 is shaping up to be the year central banks rediscover their inner hawk: the ECB (European central bank) isn’t expected to cut at all, Australia looks poised to hike, and Japan might squeeze in two rate increases before the year is out.

The U.S. is the wild card. Markets have trimmed expectations from three rate cuts next year to two, but Jerome Powell’s scheduled May exit means his successor could pull a softer, more market-friendly playbook.

And before the Fed steals all the oxygen, tomorrow’s earnings lineup includes Oracle, Adobe, Synopsys, Chewy, and Vail Resorts

A solid distraction until Powell steps up to the mic.

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