The Compute Bill Comes Due
The AI build-out has been financed as if compute were a fixed asset that lasts forever. Depreciation schedules suggest otherwise.
For three months, the market quietly re-rated the cost of time. No central bank asked it to. The consequences are only now arriving on balance sheets.
Read the analysisThe AI build-out has been financed as if compute were a fixed asset that lasts forever. Depreciation schedules suggest otherwise.
For forty years, antitrust asked one question: are prices going up? A new generation of enforcers is asking harder ones.
Equity indices tell you how everyone feels. High-yield spreads tell you who is about to be forced to sell. The two disagree more often than they should.
Capital, cycles, and the price of expectations.
Equity indices tell you how everyone feels. High-yield spreads tell you who is about to be forced to sell. The two disagree more often than they should.
After a decade of rewarding growth at any price, the market has rediscovered an old virtue: companies that can say no.
Liquidity feels like a property of markets. It is closer to a collective agreement — and agreements can be revoked without notice.
The systems being built, and what they cost.
The AI build-out has been financed as if compute were a fixed asset that lasts forever. Depreciation schedules suggest otherwise.
The hyperscalers compete fiercely on everything except the thing that now constrains them all: where to find the next gigawatt.
Frontier models are converging in capability and diverging in price toward zero. Defensibility has quietly moved somewhere else.
Rules, referees, and the shape of the next decade.
For forty years, antitrust asked one question: are prices going up? A new generation of enforcers is asking harder ones.
The most valuable input to modern AI was assembled before anyone agreed on who owned it. The bill for that omission is now being litigated.
Subsidy programs are easy to announce and hard to evaluate. Enough time has now passed to ask the uncomfortable question: did they work?
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