A while back, I wrote about Google and the AI-financing drama (#1430666), the behemoth that swallows everything etc, (#1446786).

Mr. Levine is on the hunt today as well, with the fascinating headline that the AI-hungry-hungry hippo wants more moneeey:

As a background observation, everything is upside-down in fiat financeland... (which is of course why the fiaters dressed up as Bitcoiners -- Saylor, Bailey, Mallers, Pomp etc -- are out there playing fiat games #1500368, #1500384, #1500082)

I wrote back in 2015 that “the public stock markets are increasingly about capital return rather than capital raising”: The main thing that public companies do in the stock market is buy** back stock, not sell it.

Been, eh, going on for a while!

THE CLANKERS ARE COMING, THE CLANKERS ARE COMING!THE CLANKERS ARE COMING, THE CLANKERS ARE COMING!

A lot of the biggest and most successful companies now are enormously capital-intensive. They are artificial-intelligence hyperscalers, and their business model is like “build nuclear power plants and orbital data centers and massive chip fabrication facilities.” After years in which the cutting edge of the economy was nearly zero-marginal-cost software, now the cutting edge of the economy is extremely capital-intensive, uh, software.

Funky, funky. Now Buffett is involved?!

-> apparently:

The company has embarked on an unprecedented spending spree to build the infrastructure that it needs to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence models and meet demand from customers who want to buy its chips to fulfill their own AI ambitions.

Alphabet “bought back $62 billion of stock in 2024 and $46 billion in 2025,” notes Barrons. it had $133 billion of net income and $165 billion of operating cash flow in 2025, along with $91.4 billion of capital expenditures. This is a company that runs a giant lucrative business that can pay for a lot of data centers. But still not enough data centers. I assume that somewhere at Alphabet there’s a finance employee who modeled out their need for $80 billion, but I like to think that the main reason for that number is to be slightly bigger than the (expected) SpaceX deal.

Lol, obviously because finance is all a numerical joke now (420! 21!)

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