Derek Thompson

And now that box, that special purpose vehicle, is going out, borrowing money, paying for construction, and owning the data center.

Right.

Um, on the surface, I guess you could say everyone's happy, right?

Meta gets money without messing up its balance sheet.

The investors get, you know, high returns, I guess, without obvious risks, because they're basically working with meta.

Um, but what happens if we build too many data centers, right?

Meta is exposed.

The private equity firms, maybe more importantly, are exposed.

Maybe some of these REITs are exposed.

And that means the limited partners, the LPs, whoever's putting the money into those private equity firms, they're exposed as well.

So the same way that, like, if you were going back to 2006, 2007, we were thinking, if this whole house of cards comes down, who's hurt?

You could say, oh, it's Bear Stearns.

Oh, it's AIG.

Like...

Give me a sense of the kind of companies that would be most exposed if we saw a significant slowdown in the AI CapEx world or some kind of significant pullback here.

And putting this all together, right, let's say you're a typical, you're an older investor, you're a conservative investor, you've got some money in REITs, you think this is just sort of your meat and potatoes investment vehicle.

And now you said between 10 and 20% of these REITs are directly or indirectly tied to data centers.

Assets under management.

Okay, so you're right.

So 10 to 20% of these REITs, assets under management, is in data centers.