- Essays··7 min read
Short of Space or Power
Microsoft is sitting on roughly $80 billion of Azure orders it cannot fill — not for lack of demand, and not for lack of chips, but for lack of power. The binding constraint on AI has quietly moved from the fab to the substation, and the hyperscalers' answer — become your own utility — is rational for them and corrosive for everyone else standing in the same interconnection queue.
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Sunday Essay — Borrowing Long Against Chips That Live Short
The hyperscalers are funding multi-year GPU clusters with ten-year bonds against chips that go obsolete in three. The spread between the build-out adding up and not is wider than the people writing the checks acknowledge.
ai-capexhyperscalersgpu-depreciationcorporate-creditRead - Essays··8 min read
Four levels of sovereign, and the clause that decides everything
Europe finally has a legal text for digital sovereignty — and a four-tier scale that decides who wins a tender. The clause that matters isn't Level 4 defence. It's the trapdoor buried in third-country recognition.
digital-sovereigntycloud-ai-development-acthyperscalerseu-regulationRead - Essays··8 min read
Brussels finally wrote sovereignty into a statute. The graveyard it's walking into is well-marked.
Brussels has finally written sovereignty into binding law, and the top rungs of CADA's ladder are built so a US-domiciled parent cannot reach them. On the law, I'd take the over. On the timeline, I'd take the under — heavily.
digital-sovereigntycloud-acteu-regulationhyperscalersRead - Essays··8 min read
The year capex stopped fitting on the balance sheet
Consensus for 2026 hyperscaler capex has roughly doubled in twelve months. That is not a forecast revision — it is a forecast that lost its anchor, financed off the balance sheet and resting on chips nobody can defend as six-year assets.
ai-capexoff-balance-sheet-financinggpu-depreciationhyperscalersRead - Essays··8 min read
The capex is real. The NPV is fiction.
A trillion dollars of compute spend is the most concrete thing in technology right now. The return it is meant to justify is the most fictional. The capex is real; the NPV is a guess dressed as a forecast.
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