From Emma at her Past Life, Present Cleavage substack, October 12:
Florence Balcombe was the pretty one. In 1870s Dublin that was practically a job title, and she did it so well that men wrote her letters, and one of the men writing letters was a very young Oscar Wilde. He was at Oxford, not famous yet, already dressing like he knew he would be. At some point he gave her a small gold cross.
She married Bram Stoker instead.
I think about this choice more than is healthy. Bram was a civil servant at Dublin Castle who reviewed plays for free on the side, a big athletic bearded Irishman, and Oscar was Oscar. When Wilde heard about the engagement he wrote asking for the cross back, which is petty in a way I find deeply relatable, and then he stayed friendly with the Stokers for years anyway. Bram moved them to London to manage the actor Henry Irving's theater, the Lyceum, which really meant managing Henry Irving, and in whatever hours were left he wrote novels that mostly didn't sell. In 1897 one of them was Dracula.
Photographer unknown, Florence Balcombe, c. 1880
It did fine. It was not the cultural event we picture now, not in his lifetime. Bram died in 1912 without much money, and Florence, in her fifties, became a widow whose main asset was the copyright on a vampire. She sold some of his notes and papers. She watched the royalties. Dracula was her pension, and she guarded it exactly like one....
Here is what I can't stop wondering about. Every culture that has ever written anything down has also written down a ghost story, and we are still doing it, still turning off the lights on purpose every October, and I want to know why....
A prolonged squeeze on America’s favorite protein powder is turning into an opportunity for food-tech companies that extract the macronutrient out of everything from alfalfa to bog microbes.
Leaft Foods has never been so busy. The New Zealand startup, which makes a protein shot extracted from alfalfa leaves, saw sales spike 600% in the year through June, says Chief Executive Officer Ross Milne — a big jump for a company operating a single demo-size production facility inside a Canterbury business park. “The market demand has increased beyond what anybody forecast,” Milne says. Now, Leaft is planning an expansion — maybe even a brand-new factory — to keep up.
Half a world away, Bay Area food-tech startup the Every Co. is riding a similar wave. Its fermented egg protein powder went viral on Reddit last December, and the company sold out its full 2026 capacity in the first six months of the year, it says. Customer orders are 10 times what they were last year.
For decades, whey has reigned supreme among the added protein in packaged foods or athletes’ shakes, thanks to its dissolvability, digestibility and sheer ubiquity. (Nearly 7 million tons of whey, a natural byproduct of cheesemaking, is churned out every year in the US alone.) But with diners wanting protein in almost everything they consume, from tortilla chips to cold brew, demand is outpacing supply, driving shortages and pushing up prices. That has opened the door for smaller startups trying to extract the macronutrient from other sources.
“Companies are now focused on protein diversification and supply chain resilience in a way they never have before,” says Every Co. founder Arturo Elizondo. In just the past few months, he says, companies using whey in their recipes seemed to suddenly realize the market is fragile and concentrated. “That’s been the big tailwind for us.”
Big food companies, with their deep pockets and established supply lines, have mostly been able to find the whey they need during the latest supply crunch. It’s the small businesses and those hoping to launch new high-protein products that are being pressed into using alternative ingredients. “I can’t tell you how many small brands have reached out to us saying they literally cannot source” whey, says Magi Richani, CEO of soy protein brand Alpine Bio. “They can’t get enough of it at any price.”
“Whey protein has been the incumbent for 30 years, nearly,” says Sean Torbati, co-founder of the Ambrosia Collective. The US company sells a line of supplements with a protein from supplier Solar Foods that’s made by fermenting a microbe originally discovered in Finnish bogs....
....MUCH MORE *Note to self: keep an eye on Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
We don't have many posts* on the dairy business, every couple years or
so I break out the "What's Mooving" headline but the business, at least
the way (whey?) it's structured in the U.S. is tough to trade from a portfolio perspective. In addition it seems to foment (ferment?) some simply awful puns in folks who write about it.
Years ago I heard of a Chicago company that made a whey-based artificial cheese.
Apparently the operation was headed by a mad scientist type who had come up with the formula but had no marketing ability.
He was producing the stuff and not selling any, converting all the investors cash into this "analog" goop and storing it in Chicago area warehouses.
Then the Chernobyl reactor blew, the price of whey skyrocketed, I've no idea what the connection was, the company went broke and the receivers opened the warehouses to find tons of this 'cheeze', semi-molten in the summer heat.
That's what I thought of when I saw this story, tons of the stuff oozing out of bonded warehouses. No connection of course, just a visual....
In the US, the period from 1870 to 1970 saw massive economic growth. Known as the “special century,” real GDP per capita grew about 2.0% per year. After 1970, growth stagnated and real GDP per capita has only grown about 1.8% per year since.[1]
Researchers noticed that total factor productivity (TFP, a measure of how efficiently we use resources) correlates well with this difference.1 The usual story is that the special century’s growth came from a handful of great inventions: electricity, the internal combustion engine, running water and indoor plumbing, the telephone, and chemicals which all improved productivity.1
However, since 1970 jet air travel, personal computers, cell phones, and the internet have all either been invented or deeply penetrated the US economy leaving researchers to wonder why they did not impact growth or TFP.[2] No explanation is given for why certain productivity inventions cause growth, but others do not.
A simple theory for US growth and stagnation:
My proposed explanation is that in order to impact growth, the innovation must impact a market large enough to matter or a set of markets large enough to matter. While it is statistically possible for hundreds or even millions of innovations to add up to high growth (and for indoor plumbing to lead to millions of innovations), it is much more likely that a smaller number of innovations impacting very large markets occurred. I argue that 7 times in the special century, innovations dramatically cut cost for products that, by themselves, were more than 1% of economic growth. This has never happened since 1970.
One way to drive economic growth is to reduce the cost of things the economy needs. When something gets cheaper, the economy can produce the same amount of it and still have resources left over to make other things. Spending the excess money from cost reductions pulls freed resources into new uses, and, via Jevons paradox, we also, often, end up buying more of the thing that got cheaper.[3] Standard economic growth is really the sum of all the innovations that save us money and make us richer, causing us to spend more which is directly proportional to growth at nearly 1:1[4]. Some of the money from cost reductions could be saved and therefore invested with a different economics return, but for commodities I assume that little of these cost reductions went to savings because they usually represent a small fraction of the final product’s value.
There are many ways to create large cost reductions in the economies, either many innovations can create cost reductions across dozens or even thousands of products adding up to massive economic growth, or a single innovation on a huge product can drive economic growth. A single innovation is much more likely than multiple innovations.
So, if we look at which single products made up more than 1% of the US economy between 1870 and 1970 there were eight: general-purpose concrete, mild steel, gasoline, diesel, electricity, coal, field corn, and upland cotton.[5],[6],[7],[8],[9] Wheat, coal, and hay also topped 1% at times briefly, but not in a sustained way.[10],[11],[12]
Multiplying each product’s share of GDP by its price decline on a decade basis estimates the GDP growth each year:[25]
The average growth of the special century was about +0.2% per capita, which is nearly entirely explained by the cost reduction in these 7 products which account for +0.17%.[26]
However, by 1970, each of these materials had reached a steady state price, and in the 1970s some started to rise in price due to shocks like the oil crisis.[27] Thus, after 1970, no product that is worth more than 1% of the US economy has reduced in price.
We're going to need some big ideas. All of which brings mind one of my favorite Warren Buffett stories (they are legion).
....a couple snips from Warren Buffett's Letters to the Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway
The '85 Berkshire letter continues one of my favorite BRK stories.
First the background, from the 1984 Chairman's Letter:
"...Using my academic voice, I have told you in the past of the
drag that a mushrooming capital base exerts upon rates of return.
Unfortunately, my academic voice is now giving way to a
reportorial voice. Our historical 22% rate is just that -
history. To earn even 15% annually over the next decade
(assuming we continue to follow our present dividend policy,
about which more will be said later in this letter) we would need
profits aggregating about $3.9 billion. Accomplishing this will
require a few big ideas - small ones just won’t do. Charlie
Munger, my partner in general management, and I do not have any
such ideas at present, but our experience has been that they pop
up occasionally. (How’s that for a strategic plan?)..."
And then, the dénouement in the paragraph which immediately preceded the Halley's bit in the 1985 letter:
...You may remember the wildly upbeat message of last year’s
report: nothing much was in the works but our experience had been
that something big popped up occasionally. This carefully-
crafted corporate strategy paid off in 1985. Later sections of
this report discuss (a) our purchase of a major position in
Capital Cities/ABC, (b) our acquisition of Scott & Fetzer, (c)
our entry into a large, extended term participation in the
insurance business of Fireman’s Fund, and (d) our sale of our
stock in General Foods....
The two shades of green indicating 'drought removed' and 'drought improves' are almost exactly where a stylized representation of El Niño rainfall is expected in the continental United States. From IRI/Columbia via NOAA:
Emmanuel Macron says American free speech is "the opposite of free speech." In his view, freedom only exists inside a "common framework" set by the state.
He compared posting an insult online to hitting someone in the street. Those are different things, because one is speech and the other is violence.
He wants people punished for posting "nonsense," with state-backed fact-checkers deciding what qualifies. He wants a verified identity behind every social media account. He has written to Ursula von der Leyen demanding the DSA be enforced "much faster, much more forcefully."
https://t.co/hpzXKuQne3
If it were my headline it would read "worse than you might think" but it's Ars Technica's on top of an Ars Technia story so we'll go with it. October 13:
Solar geoengineering simulation shows what happens when geopolitics takes over.
When it comes to deciding the fate of the planet, Colleen Golja always thought science and reason would have a seat at the table. That was until one morning last September in London, when the climate researcher took part in the first in a series of war games. The goal: to prevent an uncontrolled global race to develop a technology aimed at cooling the planet but that comes with vast, unknown risks that could reshape life on Earth.
“I thought that would be such an easy thing. Like, we can all agree to do ethical research and make sure it’s for the better of all humans,” she told WIRED. “And boy, was I wrong.”
The simulation, titled Exploring Geopolitical Tipping Points and Climate Cooling Strategies, saw a couple dozen foreign-relations experts, scientists, military personnel, and former government officials from across the world convene in a meeting room at Queen Mary University of London. After making introductions over coffee and little yogurts, they sat at tables arranged in a square with the name of the country or organization each person was playing: national governments, climate NGOs and nonprofits, indigenous groups, and tech companies. Golja was assigned to provide technical advice to help participants make scientifically literate decisions.
The point of the game was to stress-test the world’s response to a group of prospective technologies known collectively as solar radiation modification. These technologies promise to reverse global warming by reflecting away a portion of the sunlight reaching Earth, for example by spraying particles of sulphur dioxide or some other manufactured substance into the atmosphere. The cooling effect of this kind of solar geoengineering is widely accepted. It would mimic the well-known impacts of large volcanic eruptions, which temporarily cool the planet by half a degree or more. But the fallout is less certain—and less equal. Some regions will suffer: Models predict drying in sub-Saharan Africa and more intense tropical storms in the Atlantic. The cooling effect would also last only as long as the geoengineering continued; after that the global temperature could shoot back up with wild and hard-to-predict effects.
Until recently, the idea of solar radiation modification was a speculative niche of climate science. That has changed fast. Private firms are exploring solar geoengineering as a commercial opportunity: Last year, a US-Israeli startup called Stardust Solutions raised $60 million, and in May it released details of a suite of new inventions it claims would give humans the ability to dial down the global temperature as desired. In August, Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX might be a candidate for delivering geoengineering interventions, threw his voice behind solar geoengineering, writing on X: “Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.”....
That snapback effect is just one of the arguments against any approach that requires constant inputs, whether the goal is dim sun or polar albedo or terraforming terra.
For some of the other reasons just have your supercomputer do a few million model runs to see what else can go wrong.
If, and we are not there yet but if adaptation and effect-mitigation do not increase the time available to formulate actual geoengineering solutions the safest approach is slow, incremental iron fertilization of the Southern Ocean to stimulate plankton growth, pull CO₂ into the plankton biomass and then sequester it in the ocean depths either as detritus slowly sinking into the muck or as whale dung doing the sinking in a modified form.
Our preferred approach to geoengineering the carbon cycle, if one is deemed to be essential, is a gradual seeding of iron into the Southern Ocean to feed the phytoplankton and eventually sequester the carbon in the briny deep, either as sinking dead plankton cells or more probably as fish and whale poop.
But there's more to the story. If you prepare the iron to the plankton's taste you get a lot bigger effect.
From the American Geophysical Union's EOS, October 30:
A new study of seafloor sediments suggests reactions in the atmosphere convert dust-borne iron into forms more readily taken up by phytoplankton.
Windblown iron carried on dust particles from the Sahara travels long
distances. The critical nutrient is ferried to plants in the Amazon and
to phytoplankton in the Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere. But much of this
iron is initially locked up in molecules that are not bioavailable—cells
simply can’t use it.
New research published in Frontiers in Marine Science
shows that the farther this iron travels on windblown dust, the more
bioavailable it becomes because of chemical reactions it undergoes while
in the atmosphere.
Iron is essential for some of life’s most basic processes, playing a
key role in biomolecules responsible for photosynthesis, DNA repair, and
more. It’s a key constraint on the growth of phytoplankton, the bedrock
of ocean ecosystems and a major driver of the planet’s carbon cycle.
Iron-rich dust from the Sahara can therefore have a tremendous impact on
distant ecosystems.
“There are neat interconnections across huge scales of time and space,” said Vernon Morris,
an atmospheric scientist at Arizona State University who was not
involved with the study. Morris leads a project called AEROSE (Aerosols
and Ocean Science Expeditions) that has been following Saharan dust
storms across the North Atlantic since 2004.
Connecting Air and Ocean Making the chemical link between what happens to iron-rich dust in the atmosphere and what happens to it in the oceans has been challenging. Researchers have measured total iron levels in ocean floor sediment cores, but this approach doesn’t consider whether that iron was in forms that organisms can use, said Timothy Lyons, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Riverside, and a coauthor of the new study....
The headline quote is from oceanographer John Martin during a 1988 lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here's NASA's Earth Observatory archive page on the statement.
It
is a bit of an exaggeration, you may need ten of those Valemax bulk
carriers, currently the second largest ships in the world at 400,000 dwt
(Euronav's two TI oil tankers at 441,000 dwt are bigger), to make an
environmental change but what a change it would be. The orders of
magnitude of carbon the iron-fed plankton would sequester are almost
mind-boggling:
...Martin gathered the results of the incubation experiments and laid out
the evidence in support of the Iron Hypothesis together with some
back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations and presented his findings at a
Journal Club lecture at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in July of
1988. He estimated that using a conservative Fe : C ratio that 300,000
tons of iron in the Southern Ocean induce the growth of phytoplankton
that could draw down an estimated two billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Then, putting on his best Dr. Strangelove accent, he suggested that
“with half a ship load of iron….I could give you an ice age.” The
symposium broke up with laughter and everyone retired to the lawn
outside the Redfield Building for beers (from Chisholm and Morel,
Editors, preface to: What controls phytoplankton production in
nutrient‐rich areas of the open sea? Limnology and Oceanography, 36, 8 December 1991).
This
year's energy-sourced emissions of CO2 should come in at 30.6
gigatonnes ( 30,600,000,000 tonnes) of which a large part will reenter
the carbon cycle, becoming plant material etc. but it is the stuff that
remains in the atmosphere after the rest is sequestered that is
available to feed the plankton.
So, very, very serious business.
Don't try this at home....
*****
....Coming up tomorrow, the Pope, and a Vancouver stock promoter.
From the Globe and Mail's Report on Business magazine, September 25:
Ranking Canada’s Top Growing Companies of 2026 The 375 companies on the ranking are closing the innovation gap and finding ways to grow through the ups and downs of a turbulent economy and geopolitical landscape
For the past eight years, Report on Business magazine has produced a ranking of Canada’s Top Growing Companies, measuring businesses on three-year revenue growth. These companies represent the entire spectrum of the Canadian economy, from mining to tech to retail and more. One thing this cohort of 375 companies has in common, though, is tenacity—they continue to show outstanding growth despite operating through an escalating trade war and economic uncertainty. Read on to see who made the list.
1. Kathairos Solutions Inc.
CalgaryPrivate CompanyEnergy & Natural Resources
Uses nitrogen to eliminate methane venting from oil and gas operations
Italian tech conglomerate Bending Spoons, the owner of Airtable, disclosed the move in an X post from Federico Simionato, a product leader at the parent company.
The cuts were a reflection of the company’s “deep belief that small teams ship more and better,” Simionato explained....
How investors react to this is a separate question but the truth remains that sales and earnings and cash flow afford some measure of comfort in a cold, indifferent universe.
From Yahoo Finance, October 7:
....The two companies are expected to account for more than one-third of earnings per share growth for the S&P 500 (^GSPC) for the third quarter, according to a ZeroHedge analysis. The platform assessed earnings estimates compiled by Goldman Sachs and FactSet.
What's more, the two semiconductor giants will generate more earnings growth than the bottom 490 S&P 500 companies combined. In total, the analysis found that AI infrastructure companies are expected to drive more than half of S&P 500 EPS growth for the third quarter....
From the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, Pro-Market, September
What Makes a Venture Capitalist Successful?
In new research, Blake Jackson and Ilya Strebulaev track the careers of 100,000 people working at venture capital firms in the United States to ask which investors succeed and why. They find that five percent of VCs generate 90 percent of the industry’s profits, that the backgrounds investors bring with them predict who ends up in that group, and that public recognition itself opens the doors to the deals that keep them at the top.
Much of the United States economy today is made up of companies and innovators that raised their initial financing from venture capitalists (VCs). VC-backed companies account for 41 percent of total U.S. market capitalization and 62 percent of public U.S. companies’ R&D spending. Seven of the top ten largest companies by market capitalization as of December 2025 were primarily backed by VC funds earlier in their lifecycle.
One important feature of the VC industry is the prominence of individual venture capitalists who make and manage investments on behalf of VC firms. Don Valentine, founder of the VC firm Sequoia, is a well-known early backer of Cisco and Apple. Michael Moritz, also of Sequoia, is widely credited for making early investments in Google and PayPal. Marc Andreessen, of a16z, is famous for highly successful venture investments in Airbnb and Lyft. But their reputations rest on more than a handful of smart bets. Each is known for picking winners repeatedly, across many years and market cycles.
What is, perhaps, most interesting to an observer of the VC industry, or someone seeking to invest in a VC fund, is that existing empirical evidence bears out this reputation. The ability of individual venture capitalists to make successful investments is persistent. For example, the identity of the venture capitalist sitting on the board of a startup is far more important for explaining whether an investment in a startup subsequently succeeds or fails than which VC firm the venture capitalist represented or the year they took a board seat.
However, surprisingly little is known about these individual venture capitalists. Are there persistent differences in the backgrounds of successful venture capitalists? What individual characteristics of venture capitalists, if any, can explain investment outcomes, career paths, and returns? Insofar as these characteristics and experiences are costly to replicate or acquire, to what extent are returns to investing in the VC industry concentrated among a relatively small number of professionals?
In our new paper, we aim to answer these questions. Such a research agenda has historically been hampered by incomplete, potentially biased, and opaque data. To combat this, we assembled the largest and most comprehensive dataset of individual venture capitalists based in the U.S. to date by tracking their entire careers, deals, and outcomes. We also collected data on their individual characteristics and relevant biographical details based on existing collections of commercial VC data as well as the historical, archived websites of U.S. VC firms.
To collect our data, we made use of a system of large language models (LLMs) designed to crawl, parse, and scrape these historical websites. We paired this process with large-scale manual collections that helped validate the reliability of our process. All in all, we tracked about 100,000 individual VCs, 37,000 of whom are professional investors. By our estimates, about half of our data points covering the backgrounds and investments of these professionals are not available in standard commercial datasets alone.
Our new dataset reveals the striking degree to which VC investment success is concentrated among venture capitalists in the U.S. Only 38 percent of the venture capitalists in our sample were ever credited with a successful investment (an investment in a startup that later went public, was acquired for at least five times the amount invested, or achieved a valuation of at least $1 billion). Only about seven percent have made five or more. And no more than three percent of U.S. venture capitalists have ten or more successes to their name. In net profits terms, the top one percent of venture capitalists account for roughly 57 percent of the approximately $1.2 trillion in inflation-adjusted net profits generated across the sample, while the top five percent account for about 90 percent. This distribution is very unlikely to arise from randomly assigning investments to venture capitalists.
As the concentration implies, venture capitalists who previously made successful investments are more likely to succeed again. Deals made by investors with one prior successful investment are two percentage points more likely to have a successful outcome, and those with five prior successes are about seven percentage points more likely to succeed. This is almost a 50 percent jump relative to the average rate of investment success....
Either that or get a time machine. Both H.G. Wells or Back to the Future have interesting possibilities but going completely meta would have the VC fund a time machine.
This type of information advantage is more and more accruing to the biggest and richest of corporations. It is a type of rich-get-richer advantage akin to the flywheel effect:
...Much more important than the direct monetization of big data is the strategic advantage it can bestow over time.
In a winner-take-all economy, as in a horse race, small differences in
superiority are rewarded all out of proportion to the actual advantage. A
top thoroughbred may only be a couple fifths of a second faster than
the field but those two lengths over the course of a season can mean
triple the earnings for #1 vs. #2.
In commerce the results can be even more dramatic because rather than
the 60%/20%/10% purse structure of the racetrack the winning vendor will
often get 100% of a customer's business.....
It's not some cutesy management* fad or pop insight like "Business secrets of Genghis Khan."
To
the rich go the profits and internalizing that fact makes the rest of
this portfolio construction/fund management/investing stuff easier to
conceptualize and execute.
And AI is accelerating the already extant dynamic....
The activity comes ahead of NVIDIA GTC Berlin, taking place from 20 to 22 October 2026, where founder and CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote.
But beyond the conference preparations, the announcements reveal a wider strategy involving startup funding, computing infrastructure, research partnerships and the development of AI applications across European industries.
NVIDIA’s 2026 European investment trail
This week builds on an investment footprint already documented by EU-Startups throughout 2026. The company has participated in funding rounds involving French AI developers Mistral AI (€3 billion) and AMI (€890 million), alongside British companies Nscale (€1.7 billion), Wayve (€1 billion), Ineffable Intelligence (€937 million) and Orbital Industries (€43 million).
In Spain, Valencia-based iPronics secured €107.6 million with NVIDIA backing, while its venture arm, NVentures, joined a €42 million extension for Sweden’s Legora.
Together, these eight announcements represent approximately €7.72 billion in company financing, although NVIDIA’s individual contributions have not been disclosed. Earlier investments in British startup PhysicsX and France’s Scintil Photonics further illustrate its established involvement in European AI development.
Fresh bets on British and French startups
Continuing this investment commitment in Europe, NVIDIA unveiled planned investments in five startups: Boltz, Foresight, Hiverge, Prima Mente and Riverlane. Although the individual investment amounts have not been disclosed, the selection of companies provides an indication of where NVIDIA sees opportunities for technological development.
These companies join NVIDIA’s existing investment activity in the UK, where it has previously supported startups including Synthesia, Wayve, Basecamp Research and Ineffable Intelligence.
The announcement also highlighted the role of NVIDIA’s Inception programme, which now includes more than 3,100 UK companies. The programme provides eligible startups with access to technical resources, expertise and opportunities to connect with NVIDIA’s wider network.
Across the English Channel, NVIDIA announced planned minority investments in four French startups: Doctolib, Entalpic, Genesis AI and Pigment. As previously reported by EU-Startups.
On 13 October, Huang attended an AI ecosystem reception in Paris alongside founders, researchers and policymakers, including France’s Minister of the Economy, Roland Lescure. Later that evening, he met President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace to discuss AI infrastructure, investments in French technology companies, open-source development and AI safety.
Speaking at the Paris reception, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said, “Europe is one of the great regions of industrial manufacturing,” adding, “This is the beginning of the AI journey for the EU.”
This week also saw the launch of the Startup Ireland AI Accelerator Programme, which aims to support 1,000 new startups by 2030. NVIDIA is among the technology partners associated with the initiative, further extending its involvement in Europe’s entrepreneurship networks.
Gartner Says Over $3.5 Trillion of AI Infrastructure Spending Could Be Exposed to Impairment by the End of 2030 By 2030, 80% of Neocloud Providers Are Expected to Cease Independent Operations
More than $3.5 trillion of AI infrastructure spending could be exposed to impairment by the end of 2030, if AI providers continue their current pace of capital spending, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.
“In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030,” said Will Sommer, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner. “However, our research indicates that enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period.”
“Through 2030, AI data center owners would need to generate a cumulative $8.5 trillion in revenue to cover announced capital spending, financing costs, and a 12% return on invested capital (ROIC), which we assume to be the hurdle rate of investment capital,” said Sommer. “However, total enterprise and consumer AI revenue that can be attributed to AI data centers during this period is forecast to reach no more than $3.6 trillion. Because most AI-native providers operate asset-light business models, we predict that less than half of AI revenue will be earned by providers that own significant AI infrastructure.”
Failure to achieve sustainable ROIC on rapidly depreciating assets would almost certainly necessitate write-downs. Based on Gartner projections, a continued AI infrastructure investment trajectory could leave more than $4 trillion in asset value exposed to write-down risk through 2032. In this scenario, Gartner does not expect the 12% ROIC to be achieved until the end of 2032 at earliest....
Seoul shares crash over 7 pct on chip rout amid AI, inflation woes
South Korean stocks plunged more than 7 percent Thursday as major chipmakers extended losses amid growing concerns over the sustainability of investments related to artificial intelligence (AI) and rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. The Korean won weakened against the U.S. dollar.
After opening 5.59 percent lower, the benchmark Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) extended its losses, tumbling 454.59 points, or 7.57 percent, to end at 5,554.22, after dipping as low as 5,450.81.
The KOSPI fell for the seventh consecutive session, marking its longest losing streak since September 2024. Thursday's closing price was the lowest since April 7, when the index fell below 5,500.
The sharp sell-off prompted the Korea Exchange (KRX) to activate a sell-side sidecar shortly after the market opened, suspending program selling for five minutes as KOSPI 200 futures fell more than 5 percent for at least one minute.
As losses deepened, the bourse operator activated a circuit breaker at 12:38 p.m., halting trading on the main bourse for 20 minutes after the KOSPI dropped more than 8 percent from the previous session's close....
Scientists investigating the possibility of a 'gold rush' on the bottom of the ocean have hit upon an unforeseen 'landmine'.
Researchers at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) are now warning that some deep-sea minerals may spontaneously combust when they are brought to the surface.
In 2022, that happened to two samples of metal-sulfide rocks collected from the deep seafloor.
The event caused temperatures above 100 °C in the lab and completely oxidized the original samples.
An article on the discovery, published in Scientific Reports, is being shared early, before full editing, to give the public faster access to new research.
According to the USGS, this is a "potential hazard that could merit special consideration if deep-sea mining of seafloor massive sulfide deposits moves forward".
"The production of heat through exothermic reactions has not been investigated in seafloor massive sulfide deposits but has the potential to cause rapid onset fires on ships," claims the recent article.
The combustible rocks were collected by the USGS in 2022, during a deep-sea investigation of the Escanaba Trough, in collaboration with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)....
Tokyo's Nikkei Index is down 2190 points (3.23%) While Seoul's KOSPI is down another 5% in early trade.
From Bloomberg, October 14/15
A selloff in equities spread to Asia after chip stocks tumbled on Wall Street, as hotter-than-expected US inflation fueled bets on more aggressive Federal Reserve rate hikes. Treasuries rallied.
MSCI Inc.’s Asia Pacific equities gauge dropped 1.5%, heading for a fourth straight decline, led by losses in South Korea, a bellwether for artificial intelligence investment. The Kospi Index slumped as much as 6.5% to its lowest since late July, with chip heavyweights Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix Inc. tumbling at least 7%.
Tech sentiment remained weak, with Nasdaq 100 Index futures falling as much as 1%. Earlier, the Russell 2000 entered a correction and a closely watched gauge of US semiconductor stocks had its longest losing streak since May 2025. CoreWeave Inc. shares plunged as much as 17%. Its debt due in 2032, which investors bought at par four months ago, traded at less than 78 cents on the dollar.
The fastest US inflation in five months prompted traders to ramp up bets on further Fed tightening, raising the prospect of additional rate hikes, even if policymakers pause in October. While Treasuries initially sank after the data was announced, they recovered most of the losses on appetite for bond yields near multiyear highs....
Cheap coal-fired electricity plus cheap funding plus a national strategy of distilling frontier AI models make for a formidable competitor.
From Bloomberg via The Japan Times, October 14:
Tencent Holdings is leaning into cheap offshore yuan debt to bankroll its artificial-intelligence infrastructure, the latest prominent example of leading Chinese technology firms using that edge over global rivals.
The Chinese technology giant sold nearly $5.7 billion of bonds this week to support its AI investments in its largest offering in more than six years. In a shift from its previous debt sales, the deal was dominated by dim sum notes, which carried lower borrowing costs.
Tencent priced 26 billion yuan ($3.9 billion) of offshore yuan securities on Tuesday, with its 10-year and 30-year portions carrying coupons of 2.4% and 3%, respectively, well below the more than 6% yields on the dollar notes. In all, the yuan tranche accounted for more than double the amount raised in the dollar portion.
Tencent’s growing preference for dim sum bonds is part of a wider trend among borrowers seeking cheaper yuan financing as dollar yields surge. That could help fuel Chinese technology companies’ spending on AI-related projects. Other firms that are investing heavily in AI, such as Alibaba Group Holding and Kuaishou Technology, have also raised money in the dim sum debt market over the past two years.
Chinese technology companies are taking advantage of the lower funding costs at a time of abundant offshore yuan liquidity, said Zerlina Zeng, head of Asia credit strategy at Creditsights Singapore. New issues from the sector will likely remain strong over the next 12 months as they further ramp up capital expenditures, she said.
The availability of cheap funding is becoming an even more critical factor in the global AI race as concerns mount over the risks tied to the massive wave of AI investment and debt issuance. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan warned this week that insufficient capital could become the next constraint on the industry’s growth....
Nvidia has figured out a way to build AI factories a lot faster.
These massive data centers bring together billions of dollars of computing equipment into a facility where a ton of different tech, power, cooling, and logistical systems have to work together seamlessly. Managing that kind of complexity is one of Nvidia's strengths.
With chip design, Nvidia architects everything virtually in a simulated environment long before the first manufacturing process starts. And since today's chips and processors have become enormously complex, that orchestration is where the magic happens, in terms of speed, efficiency, and innovation.
Nvidia is applying this same mindset to building AI factories by partnering with Siemens and implementing digital twins, or virtual replicas of real-world environments. This allows Nvidia and its partners, such as hyperscalers and neoscalers, to simulate these elaborate facilities ahead of time and rehearse all of the processes that make them work.
"You’re really building a data center scale computer, along with all the technology, it’s not just about the GPU," Vladimir Troy, Nvidia's VP of AI infrastructure, told The Deep View. "This is the fundamental part that I think people miss about accelerated computing. If you just optimize the GPU, then you have the fastest GPU, and your bottlenecks could be everywhere else."
Digital twins are the key to making it all happen by allowing engineers to simulate a facility's physical behavior. Siemens brings the simulation, automation, and industrial engineering expertise while Nvidia brings the accelerated computing, its Omniverse platform, and the experience with synthetic data.
"You can improve the time-to-token by [roughly] 40% if you’re using digital twins," Ales Alajbegovic, global program manager of industrial metaverse for Siemens, told The Deep View. "If you don’t use digital twins, I don’t even know how you can build this."
In this case, time-to-token is referring to the period from the time you break ground on the facility to the time it's serving its first useful AI query for the public. That metric is critical because AI usage continues to scale up, despite public sentiment turning negative on AI. In the past 18 months, we've gone from roughly 15% of the global population regularly using AI to 19%. And in places like Singapore and UAE, two-thirds of the population are already using it regularly.
All of that usage is putting tremendous strain on today's data centers. Without more data center capacity, the industry faces the risk of AI queries taking much longer to run, the most powerful models being limited to those who can afford to pay a premium, and slowing down some of the most promising uses of AI for science and healthcare. That's why so many of the world's leading cloud and data center companies are building out future capacity, despite limitations on power and component shortages for RAM and data storage....
....Leading enterprises across industries have adopted Thor, including
Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Caterpillar, Figure,
Hexagon, Medtronic, and Meta. Robotic applications require
exponentially more compute on the device and in infrastructure
representing a significant long term demand driver for our data center
platform. NVIDIA Omniverse with Cosmos is our data center physical AI
digital twin platform built for development of robot and robotic
systems. This quarter, we announced a major expansion of our partnership
with Siemens to enable AI automatic factories, leading European
robotics companies, including Agile Robots, Neurorobotics, and Universal
Robots, are building their latest innovations with the Omniverse
platform. Transitioning to a quick summary of our revenue by geography....
...Rockwell has connected it to their tools for industrial automation. Siemens has connected to their, so it's a bunch of APIs that is physically based and it produces image or articulation and it connects a whole bunch of different environments. And so these APIs are intended to supercharge third party tools. And I'm super delighted to see the adoption across it, particularly in industrial automation. And so those are the five things that we did....
CoreWeave (CRWV) stock plunged Wednesday as shares in other artificial intelligence-focused "neoclouds" also sold off after market research firm Gartner predicted an industry shakeout.
In a news release, Gartner forecast that by 2030 "cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud providers to cease independent operations."
Gartner said failure to achieve sustainable return on invested capital on rapidly depreciating assets would result in a wave of asset write-downs.
Shares in Nebius (NBIS), Iren (IREN), Hut 8 (HUT), Digital Island (DOCN), Cipher Digital (CIFR) and Applied Digital (APLD) also retreated on Wednesday.
"Through 2030, AI data center owners would need to generate a cumulative $8.5 trillion in revenue to cover announced capital spending, financing costs, and a 12% return on invested capital, which we assume to be the hurdle rate of investment capital," said Gartner analyst Will Sommer, in a report.
Climate activist condemns ‘extremely violent’ police response as French school unrest continues
Greta Thunberg has travelled to Paris to join the student protests sweeping France.
The Swedish climate activist joined pupils outside the Paul-Éluard lycée in Saint-Denis, where about 20 lawyers in robes formed a human chain to protect the teenagers from alleged police brutality.
Ms Thunberg, 23, condemned what she described as an “extremely violent” police response, and said: “Our future is being robbed away from us.”
She told reporters: “They should know that all over the world we are following these developments. We are inspired by the young people who are demanding their basic rights.
“Whether it’s not funding schools enough, or the climate crisis, or social injustice crises ... it’s about time that young people are stepping up and reclaiming that future.”....
