Published:
Aug 02, 2025
Author:
Sarah Parsons Wolter
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AI isn’t just eating the internet. It’s now consuming capital budgets, power grids, and landmasses. Meta’s newest data center campus, built to house “superintelligence,” will sprawl across a footprint roughly the size of Manhattan. It’s not a one-off. The company is planning multiple clusters and has hinted that 2026 infrastructure spend could top $100b.
Meta isn’t the outlier, it’s the blueprint. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta together will spend over $400b on capex in 2025, more than the entire European Union spent on defense last year. Global data center investment is expected to reach $2.9t by 2028 and $5.2t by 2030. The surge is so large, economists estimate it could contribute up to 0.5% of US GDP growth this year and next.
But scale doesn’t equal stability and what’s being built isn’t built to last. Behind the glossy buildouts are power-hungry machines on short tech cycles. Each rack draws as much electricity as 10 to 15 traditional ones, and the chips inside often become outdated in under two years. Cooling systems are maxed out, and land near power grids is disappearing. And still, everyone’s building.
The data center construction boom is just getting started, and the spending behind it is staggering. The question now is whether companies will deploy that capital efficiently… or just quietly light it on fire?
Portfolio News
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Octane and Honda team up to expand financing opportunities to non-prime customers - Effective July 30, non-prime customers can qualify for financing on Honda's full line of motorcycles, scooters, ATVs, and side-by-sides through Octane's in-house lender, Roadrunner Financial®, Inc., while Honda's dealer network can access expanded financing opportunities for their customers. Read more
Mind If We Build Here?
Inside the relentless race for AI capacity - The quest for superintelligence is spurring a data centre boom - but critics question the cost, environmental impact and whether it is all needed. Read more
Honey, AI capex is eating the economy - AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy, and beginning to approach the railroad boom. However, this surge has unintended consequences. Private capital expenditures don't, for the most part, come from nowhere. While governments can print money to spend, companies generally can't. Capital is being aggressively reallocated - from venture funding to internal budgets - at the expense of other sectors. Read more
Big tech’s $400b AI spending spree just got Wall Street’s blessing - Tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Google are projected to spend nearly $400b in 2025 on AI infrastructure fueling record-breaking market caps. Wall Street is rewarding the spree, with Microsoft and Nvidia now in the $4t club, but rising capital intensity and layoffs signal that not everyone is winning. Read more
Industry News
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Bitcoin ETF institutional investors will now be able to redeem shares for BTC - The SEC has approved in-kind redemptions for crypto ETFs, enabling a feature sought by Bitcoin and Ethereum fund issuers. Read more
JPMorgan Chase nears a deal to take over Apple’s credit-card program - An agreement would be one of the biggest credit-card deals ever, cementing JPMorgan’s status as the largest credit-card issuer in the U.S. It would serve to bring two of the country’s most influential companies closer together, giving the bank a loyal base of Apple customers to whom it can pitch more financial products, and giving the Apple a sprawling consumer franchise to help it sell and finance more gadgets. Read more
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Microsoft Edge is now an AI browser with launch of ‘Copilot Mode’ - Edge users will be presented with a new tab page where they can search, chat, and navigate the web with Copilot’s assistance. The idea is that the AI can become a helper that can understand what the user is researching, predict what they want to do, and then take action on their behalf. Read more
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SEC debuts ‘Project Crypto’ to bring U.S. financial markets ‘on chain’ - The SEC announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize securities rules and regulations to allow for crypto-based trading. The proposal comes one day after the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets released a long-awaited report with recommendations for the SEC and other federal agencies to build a framework to boost U.S. dominance in digital asset markets. Read more
Select Financings
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Tako - Brazil based payroll and workforce management platform raised $18m in Seed funding led by Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Read more
Wingspan - New York based payroll platform for contractor management raised $24m in Series B funding led by Touring Capital. Read more
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