Delivery Dollar Memory

Goldman Reverses the Dollar Call, Foxconn Hits Records, and a Competition Law Primer

Goldman Sachs abandoned its weak-dollar call, citing the AI boom as the primary reason. The argument: if AI delivers the productivity gains optimists expect, the U.S. economy will outperform its peers by enough to support a stronger currency, overriding the fiscal deficit and current account concerns that had supported the weak-dollar thesis. Foxconn's 40 percent Q2 revenue jump on record AI server demand gives that thesis empirical grounding — when the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer reports a 40 percent jump driven by a single product category, the data center buildout is confirmed as real and accelerating, not merely a narrative.

Micron broke ground on a nine-billion-dollar memory chip expansion in Hiroshima — the memory side of the same story. AI models are extraordinarily memory-hungry, and memory bandwidth remains one of the primary bottlenecks in AI infrastructure deployment at scale. Hiroshima was chosen partly for its existing semiconductor workforce and partly because Japan has become a strategic alternative to Taiwan for advanced chip manufacturing, supported by significant subsidies from both the Japanese government and the U.S. CHIPS Act framework.

Uber is pausing its European food delivery expansion while pursuing a potential acquisition of Delivery Hero, and the antitrust dimensions of any such deal warrant explanation. The foundational American statute is the Sherman Act of 1890, which prohibits monopolization and restraint of trade — but having a monopoly is not itself illegal. What is illegal is acquiring or maintaining that position through exclusionary conduct. In Europe, the standard is more precautionary about dominant market positions. Any Uber-Delivery Hero combination would create dominant positions in multiple national markets simultaneously, which is precisely the structural concentration European competition authorities have historically moved to block. Market share alone does not determine the outcome — the question regulators will ask is what the combined entity would do with that share.

Alphio AI's launch of natural-language automated stock trading on Robinhood removes one of the last friction points in retail investing — potentially democratizing access to sophisticated trading strategies, and potentially democratizing access to sophisticated mistakes at a scale not previously possible. China's move to cut fuel prices by the largest margin in nearly six years adds a macro note of caution: a fuel price reduction of that magnitude typically reflects either weakening domestic demand or deliberate government stimulus. Given the broader context of Chinese economic pressure, the cut reads more as the latter — with implications for global energy markets and how Beijing is managing its own growth slowdown.