According to McKinsey, between now and 2030, there will be 6.5 trillion in capex spending on data centers and AI; Oracle is spending 100% (or nearly 100% accounting for prepayments) of its revenue on capex.

Hyperscalers are embedding very high levels of maintenance capex that people don't appreciate; leases are essentially debt lasting 30 years with obligations to upgrade technology with expensive new Nvidia chips; there is no rainbow in year four—depreciation and maintenance capex are permanent.

Semiconductors now represent one-fifth of the global equity index; historically semiconductors are the most capital-intensive, most cyclical industry (2% of index in past, now 20%); for Asian managers, TSMC, SK Hynix, and Samsung make up 40% of Asia MSCI benchmark but managers can only own 10% max per stock, forcing them to buy inferior semiconductor companies they don't want.

Open AI deferred its IPO to 2027, which is strategically problematic because Open AI is too big to fail from ecosystem perspective; if Open AI fails, it brings down everything in the AI ecosystem.

S&P 500 earnings are at record divergence from national income earnings (tax-based earnings), matching 2000 and 2007 peaks; this divergence is driven by financial engineering including other income (unrealized gains on investments like Anthropic positions at inflated valuations) rather than core operating earnings.

Germany is now creating a strategic reserve of natural gas (shocking that this wasn't done already); US Department of Defense will stockpile lithium; this multi-year strategic reserve buildout will underpin commodity demand; simultaneously, inventories were run to zero in past 3-4 months and need to be rebuilt, creating double demand for commodities.

China's CIPS payment system has grown from 3% to 8% market share (still low but large move); CIPS is encroaching on SWIFT's dominance, and combined with China's push to denominate trade in renminbi, this represents a multi-year process of eroding dollar hegemony, not a single event.

Alibaba is committing $70 billion over three years to data center capex while the three major hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) are committing $700 billion this year alone; this disparity reflects China's focused, efficient capital allocation versus Western overcapacity.