Zephyr Perspective

Setting up a family office is widely treated as a rite of passage for serious wealth. Running one, it turns out, is rather more like discovering that the rite comes with a standing monthly invoice. The cost of running a family office has surged between 2022 and 2026, driven by a ferocious talent market, mandatory cybersecurity spend, and an ever-expanding compliance perimeter. For principals in the $10 million to $100 million emerging segment, that invoice often looks worse than the returns it was meant to protect. The honest math, across North American benchmarks, runs roughly like this. A traditional single-family office typically consumes 0.5% to 1.5% of assets under management annually, and many arrangements cross 2.0% once external manager fees and bespoke family services are aggregated. At $25 million in assets, a 1.5% drag equals $375,000 per year, which quietly cancels a fair chunk of standard portfolio yield. At $1 billion, the same structure compresses to roughly 35 basis ...

On January 14, 2026, the White House imposed a 25% tariff on certain advanced AI chips, including examples such as Nvidia's H200 and AMD's MI325X, with carve-outs for U.S. data-centre uses and a handful of other applications. The short version of the AI chip tariff story for most small businesses runs like this. Direct hardware costs will rise if you were planning to buy GPU servers. Cloud AI bills may drift upward over the coming quarters. The years-long reshuffle of semiconductor supply chains between Taiwan, the U.S., and the rest of Asia has just been nudged along again. Panic-buying servers tomorrow morning will not help. The useful exercise is understanding which costs in your AI stack are exposed and which are insulated by the exemptions. What the AI chip tariff actually does The duty applies to a defined list of advanced AI accelerators, with the H200 and MI325X cited as headline examples. It is not a blanket tariff on semiconductors generally, which means cons...