Bullpen.News From Edwin Dorsey
Get Daily Recap Feedback

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Back to today

From X

@convequity

Convequity on X

The $3T “hidden AI debt” number is not the story WSJ just put a headline on the shadow capex we’ve been tracking for a while. Purchase commitments + leases that have not started. Most of it never hits the balance sheet. The $3T is real. The interpretation is not. Add the explicit debt-like items on the books of $GOOGL $MSFT $META $AMZN and you get ~1.69x. Widen the definition to implicit / off-book instruments and it can balloon to 8.36x — approaching that $3T figure. That is the chart. It is not the economics. 1. Most of this is contract value, not a hard legal obligation to pay. A lot of it is pay-as-you-go. The commitments they actually have to fund already sit on the balance sheet. 2. The implicit load is shared. It is spread across financial players — private credit and equity — who are underwriting the build. Their IRRs are not insane. Current ROIC on this spend is still high. This is not a bubble from here. 3. AI ROIC can compress later. I would not be surprised. Near-term it is more likely to stay elevated or even rise. Compute is still short. Efficiency gains are raising, not lowering, the value of each incremental GPU-hour. 4. What the hyperscalers are actually doing: paying a bit more, accepting a slightly lower margin, and sharing a slice of the economics with investors who want the risk. That is risk offload, not hidden leverage. The cleaner setup is still the player that can keep building more capacity internally without leaning as hard on this structure. SpaceX is the extreme version of that. It also means more profit pass-through to the specialized GPU clouds sitting in the middle of this: $IREN $NBIS $CRWV and others. The $3T is a real number. Treating it as imminent balance-sheet stress is the wrong read. Pictures below are snapshots from our AI Bubble Barometer.

Investor Letters

All letters

GameStop Is Extreme Deep Value

GameStop's collectibles mix rose to 45% of sales as gross margin reached 44%, supporting a deep-value case built on cash and store…

GME $13B
The Value Road 9 clicks

A2Gold: Research Note

A2Gold’s first Taylor drill holes returned 20.96 g/t AuEq over 1.5m and 209.4 g/t silver over 10.7m, alongside 141.10 g/t gold at…

KGC $28B
Atrium Research - Equity Research 4 clicks
INVH · long

Invitation Homes INC

Invitation Homes owns more than 85,000 homes valued at $43 to $48 per share, versus a roughly $30 share price, with occupancy above 96%.

INVH $16B
Value Investors Club 6 clicks

“Going Through Some Pain”

Dick’s Sporting Goods’ $2.4 billion Foot Locker acquisition nearly quadruples its store count and adds international exposure, risking a…

DKS $12B
TSOH Investment Research 2 clicks

The Monday Morning Briefing

Latticework’s weekly briefing spotlights discounted European assets including Barco, Bolloré, Brookfield and D’Ieteren, with catalysts…

BN $82B
Latticework by MOI Global 5 clicks

Publications we follow

Every publication on this site, hand-picked.

109 publications

Newsletters 92

YouTube 4

Blogs 12

Seeking Alpha 43 of 211

Nominate a publication

X accounts we follow

Every account on this site, hand-picked.

73 accounts
Nominate an account

Investor letters we follow

189 firms

Sectors

Ordered by how often our editor reaches for them.