Paul Kudrowski
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So let's take that as a given.
It's, as you said, it's just part of the process of building out.
But the deeper issue is, are you going to get to a point where it's obvious that the companies are stretched in terms of, let's take, for example, most of the publics that we're familiar with, the hyperscalers, are spending as much as 50% of income on CapEx, which is unprecedented.
This doesn't happen.
Normally, if I did that as a Microsoft or an Amazon, I would absolutely be taken to the woodshed and beaten by investors because that's such an incredible investment, not just in terms of capital expenditures, but on one narrow slice of CapEx that you're going to be punished for that.
So they're not being punished for that.
So what are they doing instead?
And this goes to your point about what we should be watching for in a sense.
Yeah.
There's a way of thinking about it goes back to like economists like Hyman Minsky and others that what you start looking for are whenever the mechanisms that they use to raise money to do this become increasingly opaque.
So what I'm watching is how they're moving the financing off balance sheet.
Because that, for me, is a reflection of, I don't want the credit rating agencies to look at what I'm spending.
I don't want investors to roll it up into my income statement.
So what we're seeing increasingly are these SPVs, these special purpose vehicles being created where I have a stake in it as meta.
Some giant private debt provider, credit provider has a stake in it.
And yeah, okay, fine.
The data center at the end is under my control.
But hey, hey, hey, I don't own it, right?
And so you don't get to roll it back into my balance sheet in terms of assessing my credit worthiness.
It doesn't change my credit rating.