Unchained
February 18, 2026

Why $700 Billion in AI CapEx Could Be the Next Debt Bubble: Bits + Bips

Why $700 Billion in AI CapEx Could Be the Next Debt Bubble: Bits + Bips

By Unchained

Date: October 2023

This summary unpacks the collision of real-time inflation data, massive AI capital expenditures, and blockchain's growing role in financial markets. It's for investors and builders navigating a world where traditional economic indicators lag and new tech creates both opportunity and risk.

  • 💡 How accurate are traditional inflation metrics: What does real-time data reveal about current economic conditions?
  • 💡 Is the massive AI capital expenditure: By tech giants a sustainable investment or a speculative bubble reminiscent of 2008?
  • 💡 How are blockchain and AI agents: Poised to disrupt traditional finance and payment systems, and where will value accrue?

The global economy is a wild ride, with macro forces and crypto innovation constantly colliding. This episode of Bits + Bips, featuring Austin Campbell, Ram Alawalia, Chris Perkins, and Stefan Rust, CEO of Truflation, dissects the real-time inflation picture and the colossal, yet uncertain, AI capital expenditure spree.

The AI CapEx Echoes of 2008

"They're echoes of 2008 when you had debt that wasn't worth par that was being issued at par and you had equity securities that were highly inflated."
  • Debt Concerns: Anthropic projects a trillion dollars in revenue in five years, while OpenAI has a trillion in committed spend obligations against only $23 billion in revenue. This suggests a significant mismatch between future revenue expectations and current financial commitments, raising questions about the true value of associated debt and equity.
  • MAG7 Releveraging: Tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon, traditionally cash-rich, are now taking on hundreds of billions in debt to fund AI infrastructure. This shift from share buybacks to massive capex for AI chips (primarily Nvidia) means less capital returning to shareholders and dirtier balance sheets, potentially impacting their stock performance.
  • Value Capture: The current AI boom sees model companies incinerating capital, but it is unclear if they will be the ultimate beneficiaries. The value may accrue to "picks and shovels" providers like Nvidia, or to those who master customer acquisition at low cost, like content creators with direct audience relationships.

Real-Time Inflation vs. Lagging Data

"We're below 1% according to Truflation and aggregating real-time data. We're below 1% in aggregate."
  • BLS Lag: The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) relies on manual surveys and limited data points, leading to significant revisions and a lagging view of inflation. This means policymakers and investors are often making decisions based on outdated or inaccurate information.
  • Truflation's Edge: Truflation aggregates nearly 30 million items daily from hundreds of data providers, providing a real-time inflation rate currently below 1%. This granular, automated approach offers a 45-day lead indicator for BLS reads, giving macro traders a critical advantage.

Agents, Stablecoins, and Deflationary Payments

"The thing that agents do best is they optimize. They are extremely good at optimization."
  • Agent Economy: AI agents are rapidly developing, capable of automating complex tasks from investment analysis to radiology. This will create a new economy of microtransactions, with agents interacting and settling payments autonomously.
  • Stablecoin Dominance: US dollar stablecoins are emerging as the preferred currency for agent-to-agent transactions due to their high throughput and low cost on blockchain rails. This bypasses traditional, inflationary payment systems (e.g., 3% credit card fees), offering significant deflationary benefits globally.

Key Takeaways:

  • 🌐 The Macro Shift: The global economy is undergoing a dual transformation: a shift from lagging, survey-based economic data to real-time, granular insights (like Truflation's), and a speculative AI infrastructure build-out by tech giants. This creates a tension where deflationary tech (AI agents, blockchain payments) meets potentially inflationary capital misallocation, demanding a re-evaluation of traditional investment theses.
  • ⚡ The Tactical Edge: Monitor Truflation's real-time inflation data and the balance sheets of MAG7 companies to identify early signs of market dislocation or mispriced assets.
  • 🎯 The Bottom Line: The convergence of AI and blockchain will redefine economic measurement and payment rails, while massive AI infrastructure spending could create a new financial bubble. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for navigating market volatility and identifying genuine value creation over the next 6-12 months.

Podcast Link: Click here to listen

They're echoes of 2008 when you had debt that wasn't worth par that was being issued at par and you had equity securities that were highly inflated. So I don't think it's great for Mac 7. We're seeing at the higher end elder generation not looking for a new job anymore just sticking it out.

We're seeing on the younger generation people graduating struggling to actually get a first job. I think the first thing is you're seeing an absolute manifestation that this error of regulatory risk is over under the Gendzor error. There's no way Black Rockck or Apollo would have come into the space.

Hey everybody, welcome to Bits and Bips where we explore how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. I'm your host Austin Campbell, high scholar of Zero Knowledge Group. Here with my co-hosts as usual, Ram Alawalia, Maester of wealth, leader of Liba, and Chris Perkins.

Chris, I think you still haven't named your thing yet, so I'm going to continue to poke you at that until it's done. Soon. All right, fair enough. We'll see. And today we are joined by a guest I'm personally very excited about, Stfan Rust, CEO of True Flation.

So, we're here to discuss the latest of the worlds of crypto and macro. But just remember, nothing we say here is investment advice. Check unchanged crypto.com bits and bips for more disclosures. And before we begin, a quick word from one of our sponsors.

This episode is brought to you by Adaptive Security, the first cyber security company backed by Open AI. As AI makes deep fakes and synthetic identities easier than ever, Adaptive helps companies test and strengthen their defenses. Learn more at adaptivecurity.com.

The Energy Network is an intelligent decentralized grid that coordinates smart devices to balance supply and demand. Energy Dollar is the native token of the network from one of Europe's fastest growing energy startups. Follow at fuse energergy onx to find out more.

Quick note before we get into today's episode. Bits and bits now has its dedicated feeds. We're spinning off from the Unchained feed and moving to a new podcast and YouTube channel. So if you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns, make sure to subscribe to Bits andB directly.

We won't publish there until March, but subscribe today so you can be ready for launch. Be sure to subscribe to the new feeds at unchainedcrypto.com/bitsandbbits.

All right, before we begin on our topics today, we have somebody who may have a unique level of insight on one of them. So, Stefan, I don't know if all of our viewers are going to be familiar with true flation yet. So, could you take a brief moment and explain to us what that is?

Yeah, thanks. Four years ago when true flation was only meant to be transitory, I got together with two other co-founders and we looked under the hood to see how inflation was actually calculated. We saw it was done manually.

It was done on a survey basis thousand households tracking the whole cost of living across the US. And they were only tracking some 60,000 items. And in a world of technology, internet, web 3, we felt that it could do with a hell of a lot more transparency, more immutability, accessibility, and automation in that whole process.

So we started aggregating today maybe nearly 30 million items that we track every day across some hundred different data providers that we pull together around the world to then calculate what our interpretation is CPI it's not the same as the BLS we do use our data to then try and replicate the BLS number and we got that down to an accuracy of about 99.93%.

The main Reason why we do that is because most of the Wall Street or the city or sort of financial institutions really like our forecasting of where we believe the BLS read is going to go or as we call it the Bureau of Lagging Statistics and we try to give that a real time interpretation of it.

All right. Thank you. inflation is a complicated topic in general as somebody who's had some unfortunate exposure to it in the past. So let's talk about that exact topic right now. Uh we'll call this segment soft jobs softer inflation question mark.

And the overall setup here is pretty complicated which is one 2025 payrolls were revised down to 181,000 jobs total from 584K initially reported. BLS subtracted 862,000 jobs in benchmark revisions from March 2024 to 2025 This makes 2025 the weakest hiring year since 2020 and the weakest, we'll call it nonrecession year since the early 2000s.

January, however, added 130,000 jobs versus 55,000 expected. Unemployment is currently is the way we calculated at 4.3%. That's labor. Inflation is drifting towards the target.

So Headbine CPI fell to 2.4% 4% year-over-year in January, down from 2.7. Core CPI was at 2.5, lowest since March 2021. Gas prices are down about 3% month over month and 7 and a.5% year-over-year. Used car prices are down slightly month over month.

10-year yields fell postrelease as markets priced greater odds of a rate cut. And where we've ended up here is consumer prices are still about 25% higher than 5 years ago. So affordability remains a major talking point, but wage growth is moderating as hiring slows.

And the inflation narrative has become somewhat complicated. Uh, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson referenced true flation during his Senate testimony and policy may already be restrictive relative to real-time inflation, but where is real time inflation?

So, Stefan, I want to start with you. What are you seeing currently in the inflation numbers?

So, I mean, right off the bat, we're below 1% according to True Flation and aggregating real-time data. We're below 1% in aggregate. We track 12 different categories and in each of those categories we vary significantly depending on the movement what we've seen a slight uptick signific you know sort of in in sort of from 0.68 68 to 0.9.

We've really I mean not that it makes a difference to every single household, but from a mathematical standpoint and from a derivatives perspective and from a hedging perspective, it these numbers are make it have a significant impact. And we've seen this uptick largely due to transportation costs spiking a little bit and picking up more people traveling.

the cost of airfares, public transportation have all jumped a little bit and people are witnessing that and that's also the echo that we're getting on the street. Not only our numbers are showing that but you're seeing that in real time sentiment feeds on all social media.

Does that inflation from labor and housing and shelter costs or is it primarily goods and merchandise?

It's it's also including housing. So we include housing costs in there. We have our own sort of interpretation of shelter where we extract utilities out of the actual shelter costs. The main reason why volatility in utilities is greater than the movement of your rent or your mortgage payments.

But yeah like we are labor costs in this also in terms of social welfare costs associated with labor or in terms of employment costs just wage wage inflation wage inflation is not it's a separate item that we track separately.

Got it. Got it. So I think I think that's a key distinction to make because overall capitalism delivers deflation. Prices of things drop over time. Anyone that's in the technology industry seen this, we've seen waves and waves of that. But the the big inflation costs have been around the cost of of labor and you know the cost of housing.

That's a delta go. Yeah. Yeah. No, we're I mean this this I mean we're definitely seeing a change in the labor market. I mean we're all aware of you know productivity gains. We're seeing at the higher end, the elder generation not looking for a new job anymore, just sticking it out.

We're seeing on the younger generation, people graduating struggling to actually get a first job. Universities haven't done a great job in preparing them for the real world. And that's been a challenge.

And so on those two front ends, we've seen the military come in and hire a lot of new some some 200,000 new recruits hired in the military. So those are things that we've seen. We've launched an employment index largely because we see the BLS is really falling behind and during the shutdown they didn't have any data.

They weren't tracking the data. They're tracking fewer numbers. Their budgets have been cut. So ultimately the data that the Fed is using is getting worse and worse. And so we just felt that those were the two items that we really wanted to track and get good at.

How do you get your numbers wrong by 400,000 Stefan? I mean, they had 400,000 ghost jobs last year like how does that happen?

So, the way we understand it is they look at the number of businesses created in a given year and they take an average employee per business created and then they multiply that and that's how they extrapolate and put a deviation into there and that's how they come up with this number. and then in the end they get the actual numbers and then they have to revise it downwards.

So essentially if we're looking at that sort of thing we're seeing that small businesses or businesses recently created or hire call it less than they would have expected for the model and you're seeing less businesses created under the previous administrations. It was very and still today it's still very heavy regulatory regulatory heavy in terms of launching a new business complianceheavy and so a lot of costs are needed up front to launch a new business a lot of permits are needed so how do we sort of reduce the friction and I think we've started to feel it earlier in sort of last year now where the regulatory burden in terms of going and reporting all the time for publicly listed companies has dropped significantly and we heard what was anyway a lot of the big public listed companies mentioning that you know they don't need to go to Washington all the time and justify what they're doing and spend a lot of legal costs constantly knocking on SEC's door or answering to SEC letters.

I mean the tariffs were a big punishment to small business that couldn't absorb or shift or avoid void cost burden quickly as compared to Walmart and Costco which didn't see much inflation pickup and their cost of goods sold. Small businesses were in pain.

How do you see just the outlook though? Right. If I look at the price of oil, it was at 56, now it's 65, that's up 20%. Gasoline futures are going up. Markets are rallying around commodities like all of the commodities energy stocks are going up.

So forwardlooking market indicators are saying that inflation is coming. Is that accurate or you know will that then flow into your data? Because your data is looking at snapshot in real time of what just happened.

Yeah. But what we what we very quickly realized was our customers or users of our data didn't really just want the actual real-time data sets. They wanted to be able to where's it going? I mean we had customers asking us 10 years out what is inflation in 10 years time.

I mean I don't know how we calculate that but we give them a forecast and ultimately it's a directional thought piece more than anything else but we definitely see commodity prices going up all the raw materials for a lot of the especially rare earths energy battery silicone a lot of those are moving upwards and and drastically gold silver have been you know and then to your point energy and that's going to have an impact in everything but we just believe the volume and the scale are going to bring down unit costs significantly and with robotics and AI coming in the productivity gains and the volume that's going to be created and have a impact on unit costs at the end which is what the consumer bears is not going to be significant enough to really have a big impact on inflation we actually see the inflation going downwards even further.

Everybody thought tariffs was going to have a big impact. We didn't actually see much of an impact and we actually saw more of the export side of the industry taking on a bigger load. So it was people trying to sell into the US versus the importers carrying a lot of the burden.

Overall worldwide trade is at its highest level. the BIS which is the bank of international settlement, the central bank of central bankers they actually did a report and they highlighted that the fabric of global trade has never been stronger than it is right now which is contrary to what we're reading and what we're hearing all the time.

how to interpret that, you know, you know, I think it's it's time will tell, but right now so far, we really haven't seen much of an impact of these tariffs overall.

All right, let me pick on you then on something you said that I think will be interesting which is if we think about what consumers actually bear in the form of inflation probably the one that is produced the most like a recently is housing. So I would like to ask you especially given in the United States some of the dispersion across individual housing markets because if you look at like call it San Francisco versus like an Austin Texas versus Chicago or New York City versus Miami you're getting very different stories.

So how do you think about inflation in the housing market? How are you computing that? What components are in there? Because another question that may be a step beyond that is also commercial real estate.

So housing prices haven't moved much on the you know on the face of it. Underlying though we're seeing a lot of rent subsidies kick in. So you're seeing one to two three months free rent come in but that's not being tracked.

And so we're trying to sort of go a bit deeper into the pricing and housing. How is that being priced? We did a big report with Penn State University. I think it was about a year and a half ago or nearly two years ago now and there we sort of tried to really how could we aggregate better real time information and extract the utility elements out of there.

Now how do we make sure that we can capture some of these subsidies and what does that look like? How big are they? Are they really that big or not? But people are trying to hold rent prices largely due to mortgages and and valuations of the real estate.

Austin's been booming area areas where the again the regulatory framework where it's easier to build you can bring supply onto the market have a significantly greater impact than more restrictive environments New York San Francisco where the licensing go through a lot more yeah challenging times in the process of trying to build some new property.

just want to shout out stuff as in the last week and a half or so we had we saw David Saxs mention trueflation as as as as an important reference. You saw Secretary of the Treasury Bessent talk about you guys. Can you talk about some of your growth in in in users and adoption because it feels like you're starting to develop this social consensus, a concept that we always focus on in the crypto space at least and you're seizing I mean this is a white hot company, a white hot initiative and it sounds like you're starting to be really capture that social consensus and people are pivoting more towards BLS. I mean it's apples to oranges obviously but tell us about your your user adoption because it sounds like it's been pretty profound.

Yeah, we we hit a a big spike when true inflation hit 12% and the BLS were at 8% at the peak. We definitely went through the ringer. We were battle tested. We had a lot of critics sort of, you know, try to battle test our calculations and methodology, but it was actually just a more accurate reflection of where we were.

Since then, we've been yeah, bobbling around and and sort of holding the 2%. We broke down below the two%, we're now below 1%. And we've gotten a lot more traction. The growth over the last two weeks has been Yeah, I mean the systems have all stayed up. So that's that's a nice sign. Exactly.

But yeah, we've really become we've got a lot more interest. demand has picked up both from the independent financial analysts, macro analysts, macro traders that have always been using Truflation. So they've already seen a 45day lead time indicator from Truflation. So you get and we've done regression analyses around these associated and you can download it from a website.

We've open sourced our calculations and samples, even the code, so you can go and do your own simulations with the data. But a lot of the macro traders and macro analysts already are using Truflation. And so now it's just swinging over into more institutional hedge funds, big private equity traders that are starting to use this data more and more.

And we're also beginning to see the interpretation where true flation is acting as a signal to drive investment decisions. So they're using trueflation against interest rates or yield to identify the real yield based against true inflation and what is that impact in risk assets in the dollar. what is that impact having on the market and where is it going to go especially if we have these pivot changes in the market and so that's what we're seeing happening which is really exciting how do we now financialize the data as we call it right with AI coming in we're already connected into all the AI tools we have MCP for all the data and by the way all of this data resides on a brand new SQLbuilt blockchain so it's using standard database language standard database technology so that anybody can on-ramp really quickly with new sets of data.

You have a block explorer where you can trace all the sources of data. So you can go and pick data sets, build your own inflation calculation if you would wish to do so and then ultimately the output equally easy to integrate into an application into your AI etc. And so we've tried to really make it decentralized number one and number two is easy at simple purpose-built for data l crypto and macro how more crypto and macro can you get sorry Rob great great combination no that was great I think remember when true inflation first came out the perception would be that we would see the true inflation numbers and they'd be way ahead and above what the CPI was reporting.

And it's actually well below, which is a a narrative violation for a lot of people, especially people in digital assets. And most people that go out to a restaurant, they're seeing higher prices. When they try to get someone to mow their lawn, it's higher prices. You get a babysitter, it's higher prices. You get a nanny, it's higher prices.

Now, a lot of that is because of services, right? The number one employer in the vast majority of states the United States is services and it's healthcare. We have a services-based economy rather than a goods and manufacturing based economy which I think is a good thing. It's more stability. It's a more mature economy.

So how relevant is the goods-based inflation data in a world where it's the services costs that are going higher and and impacting people's quality of life?

So a couple of things there. So we break out goods and services as well. So you can hit a button and you get the goods side and you get the services side and you can compare the two as well. So we actually do break it out just to make it more visible and try to just slice and dice the data in any way we can.

I think what a lot of people the misconception on inflation is we only track inflation year on year. So what was it the same time one year ago? If we look at it five years back and I think you know we were saying earlier that it's it's 27% or 28% inflation over the last five years. So that's a significant increase.

So everybody's cost has gone up over the last 5 years and people begin to feel that. You go to the grocery store 10 times a month. Every time you go to the grocery store you're going to feel that pain in terms of any food item in there that's going to be a bit more expensive.

We believe the consumer can't handle any more price rises. So it's really hard to come up with price rise. What's happening much more is you know the the grocery stores are building their own brands and taking out all of the marketing costs associated. You know you can see that with Costco with their Kirkland brand.

you know, Sam's Club's got, you know, got their own brand that they're building out to try and bring down costs and leverage their distribution power to bring down Unicotts again. So that you have a choice between, I don't know, one brand and another brand, right? And so and and the home brand, the domestic brand.

What are you seeing around healthcare and just care in general? That's an increasing part of the GDP. It's a one-way direction. It's not benefiting from technology and the the magic of capitalism. Do you have data that you could share there?

We are just putting something together. We don't have it right now. Healthcare is notoriously difficult to get data on. But we've we've sort of set out. I think it was in December where we really started going deep into the health care and the education categories.

health care. Yeah, I mean it's it's highly tied to labor costs and and the demand of skilled labor in specific categories as it gets more and more nuanced. And the the wellness category is taking a lot of resources out of traditional health care and Medicare. And so that's sort of what we're seeing and we'll share more on that going forward.

All right. So I want to rewind to something that you had said earlier about people piling in to use more and more of the true flation products because a theme that myself, Ram, Chris have talked about before is trust and institutions overall and how that art is evolving over time. Do you see people primarily using trueflation in addition to the BLS as an augment or people deprecating the BLS data or just not trusting it using trueflation essentially as call it either the replacement or primary source of data? Because to me those are two very different pathways.

Two two sides I mean two two different user segments. The macro traders that have been using us really early on just use true flation. They don't even look at the BLS numbers anymore. The general traders today, I mean, there's still some $5 trillion tied to the BLS inflation number.

If if you don't look at the whole bond market, if you just look at tips, for example. So there's a big value tied to the Bureau of Lagging Statistics number. And so, you know, that's always going to be important and that's the stickiness that they have. true inflation unfortunately not yet doesn't have that stickiness but we're working to build that out but yeah more and more people especially younger generations are and new analysts coming into the market they're looking for an edge they're looking for something different and they're beginning to use and interpret with the trueflation data do I buy Bitcoin or not when do I buy Bitcoinflation is acting as a source of truth when do I buy dollar when do I go long dollar when do I shortflation is acting as that s source of truth.

yeah, things like that which which you know we find you know risk you know. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. So all of these inter we have lots of I mean they're all coming to shine where we've seen all these new analysts come up with these new ideas, new reports new interpretations and building out regimes sorry building out strategies using the trueflation regime which is what we are trying to put forward a lot more.

Stephan, can you unpack a little bit more how you're using blockchain technology in your solution? I mean, we've seen how many projects where somebody comes up with a big idea. They launch a token, they're like, "Ah, it'll be governance in the future. Everyone buy it." Then it blows up later. Uh, but what you've done is you've created something that looks of real material utility and and now you know you're leveraging blockchain rails. Can you walk walk us through how you're using those rails and then how you intend to build off of that going forward?

So, we very early on partnered with Chainlink. So chain link was sort of the era of truth where we published all of our indexes to the Ethereum chain with chain link or through chain link through chain link node. In parallel we saw ahead of the time you know we saw AI's coming you know four years ago when we launched we also saw that the purpose-built ledger technology wasn't suited for high-end and volumes of data that we needed to aggregate.

We partnered with a company called Quill, out of Austin and we built and were heavily focused on building out an SQL native chain. So, it was a whole new chain using SQL. We needed to have a consensus algorithm to verify all the data. We needed an explorer so people could find and track and trace the data. We needed it to be able to bridge ERC20 onto that chain. So, we had to build that out.

And we needed to enable SQL smart contract development on chain itself. So if you wanted to do calculation of new types of indexes that that would be transparent to certain participants that wanted to have a look at that. Those are all things that we set out to do. We've been investing the last four years to do that. We brought Quill inhouse. And you know we have an experienced blockchain team meets data team that are working side by side on on really trying to scale this.

It's on testn net right now. And we want to expose this to more third parties. And we believe that the prediction market space is going to be extremely interesting, especially related to finance and economics, right? How do we build prediction markets for the economy and for finance? And at what point in time does that then have a bigger influence over where interest rates should go? What does the market really believe based on these binary options that are put in place?

All right, so one more on this topic. Yeah, after this I'm about to go out and get dinner and one of the spicier components of CPI recently over the past year or two has been food inflation. So I'm going to say that's one where knowing some people still on the street, there is a food fight about what is going on in that series. I would be remiss not to ask you what are your views on what's been going on in food and if you have any on where it's going.

So angst was up at $8. It's hit deflation and it's now at $3. Right. So so eggs have come down. So we're experiencing your breakfast should be getting cheaper. Although coffee prices have been going up because there hasn't been enough rain.

But yeah, so I mean food obviously hyper sensitive. We all eat food a lot. we go to the grocery stores, buy and shop a lot of food, but food has been significantly coming down. So, we've seen that trend and yeah, I just don't see much movement in the ability to start pricing food higher.

At the high end, you can start charging maybe a bit more. I think a lot of wealthy individuals or ultra- high net worth individuals, they can afford better food and will always pay higher for quality food or what could be con considered quality food. And but on on the general bracket, I just don't think food prices can go up much more.

So, dinner should stay pretty consistent unless there becomes more tax or something else gets layered onto it. All right. Well, on the topic of paying for things, uh, we're going to be back shortly to discuss even more of people buying stuff. But until then, here's a quick word from one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back.

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All right everybody, welcome back. And now we're going to talk about a topic near and dear to Rahm's heart, which is AI capex. So there has been a lot of spending on capex and AI. It is huge. It is front-loaded and the MAG7 AI capex commitments currently are being framed at roughly 700 billion dollars.

Amazon guided to about 200 billion in 2026 tied to AI and data center buildouts. Meta is somewhere in the 125 billion plus or minus 10 for 2026 capex. And the returns on this are currently uncertain and somewhat laggy, which is to say hyperscalers are spending ahead of clearly disclosed unit economics for AI currently.

And the build is causing some secondorder effects in power, in cooling, in networking, in storage. Um, if you want a good example of a market where there is very significant inflation right now, go look at RAM prices as a result of what's going on with AI. Uh even so, it's hard to fade some of these companies.

Futurum CEO Daniel Newman is arguing Nvidia could capture 40 to 50% of the Mag 7's AI capex, meaning it's monetizing the boom even if the customers don't find the ROI or it takes time. And OpenAI is hiring Peter Steinberger of AI agent fame with open claw even.

So there is the question of where the value capture is and is this a bubble. So for this one Rahm I know this has been something you've been thinking about deeply. Can I start with you and just ask you?

Yeah. What is your view on this and who in this space is both most vulnerable and most durable?

Well, first off it was great framing and by the way briefly on and Peter Steinberger we've talked before about how you're excuse me talked before about how you're going to see a unicorn company of one. That's the first guy. We don't know the acquisition price. They acquired open-source technology, whatever that even means. It's still in the public. Uh they really bought him. And I wouldn't be surprised this was over a billion dollars. So, it's happened.

There's no more important question to risk assets than capital expending AI. That's why it matters. It matters for everything. It's the primary dominant theme in markets is the AI story. It goes back to the inflation dynamic we just talked about a moment ago.

So, you know, what we saw at the end of October is St Mullman had this like awful interview with a hedge fun manager Brad Gersonner where he said, "Look, I got a trillion dollars in committed spend obligations where we come from, we call that debt. Uh but they only have 23 billion in revenue to meet those obligations." So, they're betting on the future. They're betting on demand coming in.

And what we saw this weekend is Dario or the CEO of Anthropic come out and say that they have a projection of a trillion dollars in revenue in in five years. By the way, very few countries get to a trillion dollars in GDP. Does US China, I'm waiting for the third. Okay, so they have a spreadsheet saying we're at 10 billion revenue now. We're going to be at a trillion in five years. and they're making capback spending plans and signing into contracts with companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, which are all below their Trinity moving average.

And now the market saying, gee, are those numbers real? My view is that those numbers aren't real. They're way ahead of their skis, and that you'll probably see those contracts, those revenue performance obligations not be met. I don't think the debt is worth par value. I certainly think the equity is below the face value also. So I think that's the number one thing to track in markets and see how this unfolds.

Chris, I'll jump in. Yeah, sir. So, so first thing is these numbers are are are humongous, right? $200 billion that's larger than the than the market cap of Disney, right? That's that's just about the size of the Ethereum market cap. These are big big numbers.

I think I' I I really want to ask Stefan, but it feels like compute is going to be probably arguably the most one of the most important commodities going forward. You're going to see it getting traded more and more. And I'm wondering if if you're starting to look at it, Stefan, as one of the inputs to your models, and when it how is that going to rise in prominence? I mean, I I imagine the price of compute is going to really inform uh some of these inflationary models going forward. I'd love to get your take on that and then I want to pivot back to to um to the to the agents because I have a lot to say about that. But Stefan, I mean compute, yeah, I mean it's all down to compute, right?

I mean we've we what we look at is compute's the new utility, right? So you got energy, we need energy to feed the compute. Those are two are going to go hand inand the I mean Ethereum is a good benchmark, right? You have gas fees that I ultimately is what you pay for the compute and you have multiple participants actually hosting the compute resources and I think that's the interesting side of things and decentralization is going to distribute a lot of the costs and the maintenance associated with the compute resources that we need and ultimately the more participants you have the bigger the distribution

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