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Wednesday, October 7, 2026

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What I’ve Been Up To

Cogent Communications and AI data-center bottlenecks feature in a newsletter update on recruiting, financial media and conference takeaways.

CCOI $428M
Stock Thoughts 4 clicks

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.

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Research Roundup Vol. LV

OpenAI’s enterprise privacy push and Synopsys’s Factory 2 royalty model anchor a technology roundup, alongside oil above $100 and Bitcoin’s…

SNPS $90B
Monte Independent Investment Research

New Position (ONON): Game is On

On Holding (ONON) is gaining sportswear share, expanding store space and launching soccer with Kylian Mbappé as investors debate U.S.

ONON $12B
Aurelion Research 4 clicks

Deep Dive: Intuit ($INTU)

Intuit’s $21.4 billion software franchise faces AI-driven pricing pressure in tax and accounting, even as QuickBooks and TurboTax retain…

INTU $88B
Rebound Capital 4 clicks
VEEV · long

Veeva Systems INC

Veeva Systems is a vertical software company valued as if its best growth years are behind it.

VEEV $51B
Value Investors Club

Canterra Minerals: Research Note

Canterra Minerals increased Lundberg indicated tonnage 55% to 26.1Mt, with 226.2Kt of contained copper equivalent, supporting a Buchans…

EQX $13B
Atrium Research - Equity Research 1 click

Kenorland Minerals: Research Flash

Franco-Nevada bought 10.0 million Kenorland shares, a 12.4% stake, for C$22.2 million in a secondary transaction that issued no new shares.

FNV $47B
Atrium Research - Equity Research 2 clicks

Solid Power Still Has Promise

Solid Power reported a $0.11 Q2 loss and $419.3 million of cash, with its electrolyte pilot line and BMW and SK On validation central to…

SLDP $473M
Quad 7 Capital 2 clicks

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