Azeem Azhar

Their backlogs are strong.

And revenue momentum is really, really high.

So for me, this valuation level gauge still sits in the green.

Another gauge that's important to track is the quality of capital that is supporting this CapEx.

I mean, simply put, you want great experienced investors or you want the companies themselves to be funding this expansion.

So you need to look at the resilience of the funding sources across the stack.

Is this internal cash versus external debt?

Who is providing that debt?

Is it coming from established players, from established markets?

Are there complicated structures that might obfuscate risk while expanding access into those funding flows?

Weak capital structures amplify drawdowns and credit squeezes can force really disorderly unwinds.

Railways relied on heavy debt and retail money and they were hit hard in the panic of 1873.

At the turn of this century, the telecoms companies had piled lots of cheap debt.

It was very clear revenues were not keeping up and many of them defaulted as revenues lagged.

In the case of the dot-coms, it was all about equity exuberance and the moment there was any sense of uncertainty, things collapsed.

Where we are today is that the big tech companies are minting cash and they have tons of it on their balance sheets because for many, many years, they've been producing products that we want, that enterprises want, and they've been doing so profitably.

So they are largely able to fund this from their own balance sheets.

Although over the course of the next four or five years, they will need to find external funding.

There's a funding gap of about one and a half trillion dollars that will need to be filled by private credit and other types of

infrastructures.