Financhill

$MSFT is the Mag 7 laggard, and investors keep pointing to one thing: Copilot. Another redesign just dropped ahead of Build next week, a tell that MSFT still hasn’t figured out where AI should live across 365 and Windows. Best distribution in tech. Still chasing the UX.

~$10 TRILLION in AI infrastructure capex this cycle according to Morgan Stanley. vs. $1T for the entire mobile/cloud era. 10x the last platform shift.

Anthropic’s chip deal is a masterclass in financial engineering: Apollo + Blackstone raise ~$36B in debt → buy GOOGL TPUs → lease them to Anthropic. But wait, there’s more: $AVGO, which co-designs those TPUs, is backstopping ~$31B of the senior debt. A chipmaker underwriting demand for its own chips.

Claude Opus 4.8 isn’t pitched on benchmarks. It’s pitched on customer ROI, token efficiency, and controllable spend. The AI race is evolving from “smartest model” to “cheapest reliable unit of work.” Margins matter now.

Anthropic announces $65B raise at $965B valuation.

@Brian_Stoffel_ Infra software and cyber very different from pure SaaS

$SNOW (and $DDOG) results should be very bullish for any USAGE-BASED SaaS company. Not so much for those that are seat-based and making the transition (though it's undeniably the right move for them to make)

ByteDance AI capex… 2025: ~$25B 2026: up to $70B 2027: potentially ~$100B 4x step-change in 2 years

$MSFT data center estimates 4x in 4 years. Upward pressure on Azure.

Acer CEO thinks CPU shortages will be worse than memory in 2H26.

$NVDA punching back in CPUs. Vera’s Olympus ARM cores reportedly delivered the strongest ARM server CPU Phoronix has ever benchmarked….. ……competitive vs $AMD EPYC 9005 Turin and materially ahead of $INTC flagship Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids.

Anthropic’s Mythos Preview surfaced 10,000+ high/critical vulns at ~50 partners in 30 days. >10x prior bug-finding rates in some cases. Finding vulnerabilities is now trivial. Verifying, disclosing, patching, deploying fixes is the new bottleneck.

Solo founder formations are crushing multifounder ones across every category… ….and Q1 2026 was the biggest quarter on record for both AI and non-AI solos.

Token prices are down ~70% since December. Token volume: up roughly 25x. Total token spend is at new ATH at 2.12x the Dec ’25 baseline. Jevons Paradox is evident and a clean bull case for AI infra you’ll see this quarter.

John Doerr: generative AI is the largest tech wave he’s ever seen. Bigger than PCs. Bigger than the internet. Bigger than the iPhone. Bigger than cloud. The bottleneck is electrons. “Insatiable hunger and appetite” for power. Pick your shovels accordingly

The CIA is compute-constrained. WH reportedly green-lit a secret $9B request to put $NVDA Grace Blackwell superchips inside classified intel systems. $800M already being fast-tracked while Congress weighs the rest. $NVDA is becoming a national security stock!

Here’s a theme most retail investors haven’t priced in: $NVDA next-gen chips require 800V data center power, up from 400V. It doubles the power semi content opportunity per rack. From Blackwell Ultra (2026) to Feynman (2028), IFX’s content could 10x. The AI trade 🚀

Four companies are about to spend an almost incomprehensible amount of money: $MSFT +$38B $AMZN +$21B $GOOGL +$10B $META +$10B That’s $79B in INCREMENTAL cloud capex above prior estimates. This is a SUPERCYCLE.

Wall Street consensus has cloud capex growing ~15% in 2027. Morgan Stanley’s tracker says +37%. The buy-side is at ~25% and still getting it wrong. The infrastructure build is not slowing down.

$WDAY +15% and the bears are already sharpening knives. Best net new ACV in 5 years but didn’t raise FY, cut 2Q cRPO, and cut 2H sub revenue. ….customers are running Workday AI in testing environments, not production. Unclear if it’s real demand.

Spotify told investors: “This is NOT a product day.” Then $SPOT announced raised guidance + an AI deal with UMG to legally create covers and remixes. Stock +13%. The best catalysts are the ones the company undersells.