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The story behind Changi Airport, Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew called one of the country's best investments ever. 

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I did a Southeast Asia trip over the summer to Vietnam, Singapore and the Philippines. Have a few drafts of trip observations and am sharing this first one on Singapore Changi’s Airport aka “The Best Airport In The World”.

Also this week:

• Nvidia Invests $100B Into OpenAI
• iPods, Yondr and Classroom Smartphone Bans
• …and them wild posts (including T-Pain)

PS. This newsletter is off next week. 

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Singapore’s Changi Airport is often cited as the best airport in the world.

I know this because I went there in July and when I Googled anything related to Singapore (“best hawker stall”, “least busy time to visit Gardens By The Bay” or “smartest strategy to avoid buying $500 worth of merch while at Minion Land in Universal Studios”), I was two clicks away from a travel blog that explained why Changi Airport was the best airport in the world.

Incredible architecture. An abundance of shops and food options. So much passport-less entry!

The last time I was in “The Garden City” was over a decade ago and Changi already had a sterling reputation at the time. In the intervening years, Changi levelled up by adding “Jewel” (a ~$2B entertainment, retail and greenhouse complex).

Designed by famed starchitect Moshe Safdie — who also did the incredibly baller Marina Bay Sands — the 10-storey Jewel structure (totalling 1,461,000 sqft) is connected to Changi’s four terminals and accessible by visiting the airport, whether or not they are actually flying.

Living up to Singapore’s reputation as a green oasis, the inside of Jewel has 100,000 shrubs and 3,000 trees…and the world’s largest indoor waterfall (because if you’re going to YOLO, you should really YOLO).

To be honest, I was a bit wary of the hype and Jewel wasn’t even on our original trip itinerary.

But the whole point of Jewel is that the gorgeous structure is unmissable by anyone flying in and out of Singapore. The time commitment to check it out is minimal.

Sure enough, we had a few hours on departure day. We also really had to go because my son is in his Pokémon card-collecting phase and a Singaporean cab driver rugged me by telling us that there was a Pokémon store on the 4th floor of Jewel.

Aside from getting bodied by Pikachu and Charizard card packs, here is my review of Jewel: IT IS VERY IMPRESSIVE! YOU HAVE TO CHECK IT OUT IF YOU EVER GO TO SINGAPORE!

I instantly went from “why would anyone need a 131-ft indoor waterfall” to “why doesn’t every airport have a 131-ft indoor waterfall?”.

Look at this thing. A giant waterfall. Indoors.

Unveiled in 2019, Jewel has kept Changi at the top of the airport game.

To wit: global airline rating agency Skytrax has been ranking airports since 2000…and Changi has taken the top spot a record 13 times, including post-Jewel years of 2019, 2020, 2023 and 2024.

In NBA terms, Changi Airport adding Jewel was the equivalent of the 2016 Golden State Warriors adding Kevin Durant. Just complete and utter excess that guaranteed victory.

My feeling of awe is the exact reaction Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) wanted to elicit when people arrived at the city-state’s main passenger airport.

As Singapore’s first Prime Minister from 1959 to 1990, LKY made a series of difficult decisions to modernize a third-world Southeast Asian island of 2 million people (now, 6 million people). His book From Third World To First — which was published in 2000 (LKY passed away in 2015) — details the myriad obstacles he faced to build a nation.

Befitting LKY’s focus on practicality, the main challenges are detailed right there in the chapter titles (and it turns out that the airport was among his most expensive bets).

I revisited the book during my recent Southeast Asia travels and two sections — Chapter 4 (“Surviving Without A Hinterland) and Chapter 15 (“Conductor of an Orchestra”) — had notable insights on Singapore’s airport strategy.

Ultimately, LKY wanted tourists, politicians and business folk to understand what Singapore had to offer the second they stepped off the airplane.

It’s for this reason that LKY called Changi Airport “the best S$1.5 billion investment [Singapore] ever made" (it cost ~10% of the country's GDP when it opened in 1981). 

The practical decisions that Singapore made with its airport are emblematic of the practical mindset that saw the country’s per capita GDP (inflation-adjusted USD) rise from ~$400 in 1959 to $12,000 in 1990 under LKY as Prime Minister. Now, in 2025, Singapore’s GDP per capita is the highest in Asia and 8th highest in the world at $91,000.

I wrote a ton on Changi's back story that won't fit into this e-mail including: 

• LKY's Plan For Singapore's Economy...
• ...And Why A Top-Tier Airport Was Key
• Changi's Engineering Challenge 
• How Boston's Airport Influenced Changi
• Changi's $10B Expansion Plan For 2030

Hit this button to read the full piece. 

Nvidia *Intends* To Invest $100B Into OpenAI

There’s that incredible scene in the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap when the guitarist shows off his amplifier by turning the volume knob “up to 11” (because the dial at 10 isn’t loud enough).

As it relates to AI hype cycle, some of you may have foolishly believed that Softbank’s $40B investment in OpenAI earlier this year was an 11 on the dial. Nope.

That was closer to a 7 or an 8. The knob only officially hit 11 last week with the announcement that Nvidia “intends to invest up to $100 billion into OpenAI”.

Now, the words “intends” and “up to” are major qualifiers but do make sense because:

• Jensen isn’t Venmo-ing $100B into Sam Altman's checking account next week.
• Rather, OpenAI plans to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems (equivalent to 4-5 million GPUs) and will receive $10B for each 1GW it builds out ( by one estimate “every $10 billion Nvidia invests in OpenAI, the startup will spend $35 billion on Nvidia chips, according to an analysis from NewStreet Research”).
• The cash will be used primarily to lease Nvidia chips (Nvidia will bear more of the asset depreciation risk).
• The first tranche hits in 2H 2026 and it will take a number of years to build out all these data centres.

This financing structure is meant to prevent dilution of existing investors, per CNBC:

The initial $10 billion tranche is locked in at a $500 billion valuation and expected to close within a month or so once the transaction has been finalized, people familiar with the matter said. Nine successive $10 billion rounds are planned, each to be priced at the company’s then-current valuation as new capacity comes online, they said.

If Nvidia closed the full $100B right now, that would be 20% of OpenAI’s current valuation.

A guy I know that owns 1% of an SPV of an SPV of an SPV that owns 0.1% of OpenAI would not be happy with such rapid dilution. However, Nvidia investing over time is more palatable for the existing OpenAI cap table and matches up well with the chipmaker’s sales cycle (the $4.5T firm currently has ~$50B cash and is generating free cash flow of $15-20B each quarter).

Let’s assume OpenAI builds out the 10GW over the next decade. Each successive $10B investment by Nvidia will receive a smaller slice of ownership as long as OpenAI’s valuation goes up (the first $10B will be for 2% of the equity).

M.G. Siegler did some napkin math and thinks OpenAI in the early 2030s could be “nearly [33%] owned by Microsoft, with SoftBank and NVIDIA taking up another roughly 25% combined” or about 12% each.

OpenAI’s non-profit arm is looking at a 20% stake, which would leave 22% for everyone else (including Sam and potentially even Elon based on how his various lawsuits shake out, since he was the first money into OpenAI in 2016).

The popular reaction to the deal was captured in this post by Sully Omarr:

so let me get this right:

Oracle says Openai committed $300B for cloud compute → oracle stock jumps 36% (best day since 1992)

Oracle runs on Nvidia GPUs → has to buy billions in chips from Nvidia

Nvidia just announced they’re investing $100B into openai

Openai uses that money to... pay oracle... who pays Nvidia... who invests in Openai

So much circular and definitely feels bubbly. It’s worth noting that many of the Big Tech players have been paying for their GPUs with free cash flow but have had to tap debt markets as their capex spend goes through the roof.

Debt means that the AI race is entering a new (and riskier) chapter.

I get the rationale for this $100B Nvidia-OpenAI partnership, though.

Nvidia is printing so much cash that it needs to find ways to deploy it. They recently announced a $60B share buyback. That’s one way. Tossing $5B into Intel soaks up some cash. $900m to acquihire the CEO of AI hardware startup Enfabrica soaks up a bit less. This OpenAI deal — which helps to ensure the largest AI consumer platform in the world (700m+ users) has access to compute — is soaks up a lot more. On top of that, it owns 7% of $60B AI cloud provider CoreWeave and has invested in Elon’s xAI.

On a recent episode of the BG2 podcast, Jensen said he views the potential $100B outlay as more of an investment because he believes OpenAI will be the next “multi-trillion dollar hyperscaler” to compete with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Nvidia is already an “AI infrastructure partner” with those other cloud giants as well as helping to build xAI’s massive data centres.

Meanwhile, OpenAI needs to access as many pots of money as possible. It’s contracted $300B with Oracle (who will happily take the business) but currently only has $13B in revenue (although its inevitable ads business will help boost that number).

Will the AI hype cycle continue? A major point that Jensen’s been making is that the market size for inference will be 1,000,000,000x larger than the original ChatGPT because of the reasoning tokens. That forecast is also an “11” on the dial but is consistent with the industry’s attempts to make “agentic AI” happen (on a very related note: OpenAI released a product called “Pulse” that is like a personal assistant who combs through all your chats and comes up with ideas or questions to advance your goals while you sleep and drops you a summary in the morning).

How you feel about that statement probably correlates well with how you feel about the overall bubbly-ness (this also applies to your feelings about Sam Altman’s related blog post “Abundant Intelligence”, where he says he wants to eventually deploy 1GW a week because he doesn’t want the world to have to choose between “how to cure cancer” or providing “customized tutoring to every student on earth”).

Either way, the biggest loser in the deal was investment bankers, who look to make 0.0000% from the potential $100B partnership:

Altman and Huang negotiated their pact largely through a mix of virtual discussions and one-on-one meetings in London, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., with no bankers involved, according to people close to the talks who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Just old-school negotiating right there. A “mix of virtual discussions” and “one-on-one meetings” could also describe that time I messaged MJFan76891 on Craigslist and met him at the Starbucks three blocks from the subway station to buy a pair of used Air Jordan 11s (Space Jam Edition)….except my deal was 3-figures while theirs was 12-figures.

Until the 10GW is fully deployed, the biggest winner so far is the leather jacket industry:

iPods, Yondr and Classroom Smartphone Bans

The banning of smartphones in the classroom has to be some of the lowest-hanging fruit in the educational world.

There have been some studies showing that cell-phone bans only have marginal effects on the student’s wellbeing and classroom performance…but, c’mon, this is just pure common sense.

Every single person reading this email has had a handful of moments on a social app doing the “pull-to-refresh” like a pigeon in the Skinner Box looking for that next hit of sweet sweet dopamine. The prefrontal cortex — responsible for decision-making, planning and higher-order behaviour — isn’t even fully developed until we’re 25. Hell, I make 8-9x decisions a week that make me question whether my own prefrontal cortex is fully developed.

I do NOT want my kid with a smartphone (or around people with smartphones) in a classroom environment.

Of course, smart phones in the classroom are a terrible idea. Terrible and a lot of countries have smartly instituted a ban or partial ban including Australia, China, Italy, France, Brazil, Canada and the US (20 states have a complete wireless communication ban).

Aside from the students and teachers, there are two other major winners of this trend.

First is Yondr. You’ve definitely seen these things: a grey fabric pouch with magnetic lock that can only be opened with a special unlocking thingy.

Launched in 2015, Yondr sold 25,000 units and was popularized by Dave Chappelle, who didn’t want the audience recording his sets.

According to the Wall Street Journal, sales were projected to hit 10 million units in 2024. At $30 a pop, Yondr was minting $300 a year with schools now accounting for 70% of all purchases.

The margins for Yondr must be crazy.

Literally, fabric and some magnets. Although, they probably also spent a ton of lobbying education departments (which, again, I’m happy about).

Second is the iPod resale market. Due to the wireless device school bans, kids are looking for other devices to use for dicking around and the r/iPod subreddit has exploded with Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids swapping intel on the best MP3 players.

Some old iPods are being relisted on eBay at $500+. Meanwhile, the New York Times recently wrote about kids using iPods and Walkmans…and the Redditors are worried that the prices will soon blow up (there’s been a clear bump in Google searchers for “iPod Nano” and iPod Classic”).

Quick reminder: the iPod peaked at 40% of Apple’s sales in 2006 (~$8B of $19B), which was a year before the launch of the iPhone. As someone astutely highlighted on X when I shared this iPod story: “idk which Apple exec needs to hear this but next year is the perfect time to re-launch a 25th anniversary clickwheel iPod…would do insane numbers”.

Links and Memes 

TikTok US Sold For $14B…to a group of investors. Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX will own 45%. ByteDance will continue to own 19.9%, which is just under some law that says something about 20% foreign ownership.

Existing investors will keep 35% including General Atlantic, Susquehanna and Sequoia.

The Murdoch family might come in. Same with Michael Dell.

A first huge caveat is that the Chinese government has yet to say anything about this deal even as President Trump has done his go-to Executive Order signing move (remember, it was his Executive Order nearly 5 years ago to ban TikTok that started this whole “will TikTok continue to exist” song and dance).

A second caveat is that $14B is an absurd price tag. My initial reaction to that figure was that the investors had bought TikTok off of Temu. ByteDance itself is worth $300B+ and does ~$50B in sales. TikTok is probably 20% of that putting it at $10B. A reasonable multiple between 5-10x puts the market value at $50B to $100B.

But this is obviously not a market deal. It’s rightly framed as national security, which is why I always thought America should ban it (there are 150m users in America and the propaganda potential is absurd if controlled by peer competitor nation state). God, I hate TikTok so much…but will concede that this 67-second clip is among the human race’s greatest artistic achievements.

Anyway, a few more details trickled out which make the $14B price tag a bit more reasonable:

• TikTok US will license ByteDance’s algorithm (not clear who is actually in control here...apparently, Oracle will train US data on that algo)
• ByteDance is slated to get 50% of TikTok US’s profit on top of 20% of revenue for licensing the algo.
• TikTok US can’t enter non-American markets.

FYI. These details are all maybes until an official confirmation from the Chinese government. WHO KNOWS!!?!?!?!??! NOT ME! 

Whatever ends up happening with TikTok, it has unfortunately perfected the most addictive social media content format: short-form videos, which every other major app has copied and inserted directly into our retinas (I wrote about this in “The Dorito-fication of Media”).

I have resisted the retina insertion of short-form videos but fully understand that my text-first preference is a tiny slice of the market…and will only get smaller because…

***

…Meta Goes Full AI Slop: After spending billions on AI talent for its Super-Intelligence Lab, Meta’s first product is called Vibes. It’s built on top of Midjourney and is short-form video format combined with AI-generated content. My first reaction was “this is Cocomelon for boomers”, which was pretty mild compared to other takes:

• “Guys it is very important that you resist Vibes. Disable your parents’ phones if they tell you they’re using Vibes. Make fun of your friends relentlessly until they stop using Vibes. Fire employees caught watching Vibes. We’re better than this. Cmon.” (Packy McCormick)
  
  
• “should’ve called it Trough, the kind pigs eat their slop out of” (Sebastiaan de With)
  
  
• “kinda ironic how this launch basically kneecaps meta’s ai recruiting. in some ways it just means the comp premium goes up. in smart circles there are social penalties for choosing one logo over another, & right now meta sits on the wrong side of that table culturally. it also kinda cements the perception that meta is chasing engagement gimmicks rather than setting the intellectual agenda. so instead of meta ai evoking respect like openai or deepmind, it evokes… content farm.” (Signull)

***

Some other links for your weekend consumption:

• Leonardo DiCaprio has been hitting the podcast circuit…to promote Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film One Battle After Another. Honestly, it was a bit jarring seeing Leo in a podcast. Him, Pitt and Cruise are the last of true OG film stars and the pod format doesn’t seem befitting for such a screen legend. Oh well. He did tell the New Heights podcast that his first agent told him his screen name should be Lenny Williams, which is effin hilarious. Lenny Williams would have had the film career of Rob Schneider if that was the case.
  
  
• Paul Thomas Anderson has some great old school interviews…and here’s one of him talking about why he dropped out of NYU film school (on the first day, a professor said “If anyone is here to write Terminator 2, walk out.”
  
  
• Linkedin recruiters are using AI to spam candidates…so someone figured out an ingenious prompt injection in their online bio to mess with automating AI recruiting tools.
  
  
• The most valuable gambling company in the world is Flutter Entertainment…the $50B firm passed Las Vegas Sands ($37B) in recent years. The flippening is a microcosm of how online sports gambling has overtaken in-person casino. Flutter owns FanDuel, Sky Betting & Gaming, Sportsbet, PokerStars and Paddy Power among others. On that note, Joe Pompliano has a good deep dive on FanDuel’s business.
  
  
• A massive hack took down Jaguar Land Rover (JLR)…which is the UK’s largest car manufacturer ($24B sales and 400k+ cars a year). Since the end of August, it had to stop production because its IT network has been turned off and is losing $5m+ a day. The company employs 33k people in the UK and its suppliers are at risk of bankruptcy. Indian conglomerate Tata owns JLR and the IT firm that is overhauling its backend. The Guardian has a solid breakdown of why it’s such a mess.
  
  
• The human circulatory system…could use some better wire management.

…and them wild posts:

Written by me, Trung Phan.

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