Steinman de Bruyn, CFA

Is this good? This seems good. 'Al-driven value accruing to the hyperscalers is +ALT the likely outcomes given fierce model competition and scarce compute' $AMZN

MS: "All four are dramatically increasing capital expenditures driven by insatiable AI compute demand. Memory pricing inflation is a universal headwind, and management across all calls acknowledged they have consistently underestimated compute needs. Memory scarcity likely benefits cloud providers as suppliers prioritize largest customers." -META: CapEx guidance raised to $125–145B for 2026 (from $115–135B), driven by "higher component pricing this year and additional data center costs." Contractual commitments stepped up by $107B this quarter. "Our experience so far has been that we have continued to underestimate our compute needs." -GOOGL: CapEx guidance raised to $180–190B for 2026 (from $175–185B), including Wiz acquisition. Sundar Pichai noted: "We are seeing unprecedented internal and external demand for AI compute resources." Critically, 2027 CapEx expected to "significantly increase" vs. 2026. Cloud revenue "would have been higher if we were able to meet the demand"—i.e., compute-constrained. -AMZN: Q1 cash CapEx was $43.2B, "primarily relates to AWS and generative AI." Andy Jassy: "We expect Trainium will save us tens of billions of dollars of CapEx each year." AWS backlog stands at $364B (excluding the $100B+ Anthropic deal). Some investors are asking does that imply AMZN capex is actually decelerating given the big increase in memory costs and everybody else increasing capex on the back of memory. -MSFT: Calendar year 2026 CapEx expected at ~$190B, including ~$25B from higher component pricing. Q4 CapEx alone expected to exceed $40B. Amy Hood: "We expect to remain constrained at least through 2026." Added another gigawatt of capacity this quarter and on track to double overall footprint in two years.

🟠Alpine Capital Investor Newsletter - Q4 2025 alpinecapital.co.za/post/alpine-ca…

BREAKING: DoE Announces Realignment of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation Programs $MP $UUUU $USAR $UAMY Effective immediately, The Office of Critical Minerals & Energy Innovation will be divided into three pillars, each of which will be led by a corresponding Deputy Assistant Secretary. 1) The Office of Critical Minerals, Materials, and Manufacturing Will accelerate mining activities, diversify supply chains for critical minerals and metals, expand battery and magnet research, stimulate innovation in processing and metallurgy, and facilitate the recycling of black mass, battery materials, and other critical minerals. 2) The Office of Energy Technology Will continue to lead the world in research and development for cutting-edge energy technologies, fuels, chemicals, and hydropower. This office will also drive the commercialization and deployment of technologies that enhance energy networks across the United States and reduce the cost of energy for American ratepayers. 3) The Office of Innovation, Affordability, and Consumer Choice Will exercise DOE’s appliance standards and building codes authority, with an emphasis on fact-based analysis, process transparency, and consumer choice and affordability. The office also oversees and manages multiple state and community energy and weatherization programs. This office will promote innovation and the adoption of new and beneficial technologies for buildings and industrial applications. energy.gov/cmei/articles/…

The train is not stopping. AMAT LRCX SOXX AMD

🇺🇸 BREAKING: US CORE CPI 0.20% M/M Better than expected!

The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world. Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life—speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival—under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime. Western media refuses to do so because it has fundamentally misunderstood Islam. Or worse, it has chosen not to understand it. Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people,” Arabs, or “the Middle East,” as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine. This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs,” “all Arabs are Muslim,” and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers.” Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture—Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable—are erased. By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them—or ignores them entirely. There is another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media is economic issues. As you know, Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalized or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government’s dark void of empty promises. Covering Iran honestly would require acknowledging that these policies are harmful. They have been tried. They have failed. Catastrophically. This is deeply inconvenient for Western media institutions that routinely promote expansive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism. Iran demonstrates where such systems lead when insulated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It shows that when the state controls livelihoods, non-conformity becomes existentially dangerous. That lesson cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas in softer language. Western liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white. Iranian protesters do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape. That is what terrifies Western liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored. So the silence continues.

This is the key difference between the Dot Com and AI CAPEX booms.

$AMZN we are just getting started

Tonight I declare before everyone that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior! Repost if you’re with me!

🤔 Bill Gates softens 'Climate Disaster' approach @CNBC cnbc.com/2025/10/28/bil…

$APO: "Hyperscalers are currently spending a record high 60% of their operating cash flow on capex"

This is more significant than Trump's announcements over the weekend👇

The bidding up of gold doesn't mechanically push the globe into a crisis. People are talking about the price like it's a countdown to extinction. It is indicative of *conditions* which: have been in play for a couple years now, we all see happening, and are likely to continue.

The biggest hurdle for investors = everyone wants the returns, but no one wants 2x volatility…

S&P 500's forward profit margin has been rising sharply and is at a new all-time high

It seems like the main beneficiaries (over the short term at least) will once again be the general populace via greater products (and hence value creation, at least via efficiency gains) at minimal cost. We all know the ROI isn't there currently, but the large players have to protect their current moat. If you think about it, isn't this what they've been doing over the past decade anyway, at least to a large extent?

AI is a giant game of negative ROI chicken.

@Globalflows How much of the past couple of months inflation data can be attributed to tariffs? Will the tariffs have a lasting permanent effect, or is it temporary? The market seems to be pricing in a temp increase?

The Fed is cutting into resilient growth with core services still >3%. That’s tinder for inflation

When the marginal cost of: - Energy - Labor - Intelligence Fall to ~$0. Humanity enters an era of ABUNDANCE. The future is gonna be amazing.