Syz the moment

So the ~100 GW of announced capacity implies roughly $8T of capex & “no way you’re going to get a return on that,” since you’d need “about $800B of profit just to pay for the interest” Source: Wall St Engine

https://lnkd.in/eMkGJKyi Source: Jack Farley @JackFarley96, FT

A great FT article on how OpenAI partners amassed $100bn debt pile to fund its ambitions.

The Commitments: $250B in cloud compute from Microsoft $38B from Amazon 36 gigawatts of contracted capacity All tied to a total deal value up to $1.8 trillion HSBC’s estimate: OpenAI will owe ~$620B per year in data-center rent once everything ramps… and only a third of that capacity is online by 2030. 🔢 The Math (and the Problem) By 2030: Cumulative rental costs: $792B (→ $1.4T by 2033) Projected free cash flow: $282B Cash from Nvidia/AMD: $26B Undrawn debt: $24B Liquidity: $17.5B Even after stacking every possible dollar, there’s still a $207B hole — plus the $10B safety buffer HSBC thinks they need. 💥 And here's where it gets tricky 👇 HSBC’s model already assumes everything goes right: 3B OpenAI users by 2030 (44% of all adults outside China) Paid conversion rising from 5% → 10% 2% share of global digital ads $386B in annual enterprise AI revenue Even under that fantasy scenario, OpenAI still can’t pay the bills. HSBC’s suggested “solution”? OpenAI may need to walk away from its data-center commitments and hope Microsoft/Amazon “show flexibility.” Translation: The economics don’t work — unless everyone politely pretends the contracts aren’t real. And yet this is the company anchoring a $500B Stargate project and driving hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure spending. If this is what the best case looks like… imagine the base case. My take: be very careful with AI plays which are asset-heavy. They might disappoint in terms of shareholders' returns in the years to come. Do you remember the Telecom bubble? The long-term winners have been the asset-light companies. The asset heavy companies never recover. Source: Hedgie on X, FT

👉 But none of it shows up on Meta’s balance sheet. How? Meta shifted the entire project into a joint venture: 🔹 Meta owns 20% 🔹 Blue Owl Capital owns 80% 🔹 A holding company (Beignet Investor) issued $27.3B in bonds, mostly bought by Pimco 🔹 Meta will rent the data center starting in 2029 And here’s the kicker: the lease is structured to qualify as an operating lease, not a finance lease — letting Meta avoid listing the giant asset and the massive debt. But peel back the layers and things get messy: 🔥 Meta runs the data center 🔥 Meta carries the risk of cost overruns 🔥 Meta guarantees the full value of the bonds if they don’t renew 🔥 Yet Meta insists it doesn’t “control” the venture enough to count it on the books Even the Wall Street Journal called it “artificial accounting.” 🧩 It’s part of a bigger trend: Tech giants want unlimited AI infrastructure… 🚫 …but they don’t want the debt that comes with it. Morgan Stanley estimates the industry could need $800B in off-balance-sheet financing by 2028. Meta may not be borrowing on paper — but economically, this is debt with extra steps. What do you think: smart financial engineering or a red flag in disguise? Source: Hedgie

The "Google bets" basket (Alphabet, Broadcom and Celestica) just hit a new ATH while the "Open AI" basket (Nvidia, Softbank & Microsoft) has been hut hard since the end of October. Source: Steno Research, Macrobond, Bloomberg

It’s meaningfully better at everyday tasks like working with slides and spreadsheets. The new AI tops coding benchmark, leading in key tests like SWE-bench Verified at 80.9%, Terminal-bench 2.0 at 59.3%, and OSWorld at 66.3%, beating models from Google and OpenAI in coding, agent tasks, and computer use. It features a 200K token context window, uses far fewer tokens for the same work, and costs much less at $5 per million input tokens. Developers can now access it through APIs, apps, and platforms like Amazon Bedrock and GitHub Copilot, with engineers noting its strength on complex bugs. Source: CNBC-TV18

Source: Bourbon Capital @BourbonCap