- Essays··7 min read
Short of Space or Power
Microsoft is sitting on roughly $80 billion of Azure orders it cannot fill. It has the demand and it can buy the chips. What it cannot get is power. The binding constraint on AI has quietly moved from the fab to the substation, and the hyperscalers' answer, becoming their 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. Everyone is watching Level 4 defence. The clause that actually decides the money is a trapdoor buried in third-country recognition.
digital-sovereigntycloud-ai-development-acthyperscalerseu-regulationRead - Essays··7 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. The law will probably land. The timeline, on this institution's record, will slip badly.
digital-sovereigntycloud-acteu-regulationhyperscalersRead - Essays··7 min read
The year capex stopped fitting on the balance sheet
Consensus for 2026 hyperscaler capex has roughly doubled in twelve months. A forecast that moves that far has lost its anchor, and this one is financed off the balance sheet, resting on chips nobody can defend as six-year assets.
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The capex is real. The NPV is fiction.
$1 trillion 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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