Jon Gray explains how a cheap 2021 data-center buy fanned out into land, steel, cooling, contractors, LLMs, and Blackstone's biggest theme "So the data centers, which have become our biggest theme today, came about, we bought a data center business, we privatized it in 2021." "At the time we did it because we thought it was inexpensive, we thought cloud migration was happening, and yet we noticed the big hyperscalers were starting to come for very large orders." "This was the early days of training, and we were like, huh." "And we're like, well, what if we went out and bought some land and ordered some steel and got ahead of this?" "And what if we started doing it in other geographies in Europe? Same sort of thing." "And then you say to yourself, interesting, well, what's inside the data center? And what about if we bought some cooling? And what if we bought electrical equipment? And what if we bought contractors?" "And by the way, maybe the large language models that are doing all this, maybe we should invest in those too." "And you begin to fan out against this neighborhood, because you say there's a bunch of things in here." "And sometimes the things that are one or two derivatives off may be less expensive." "Had you invested in memory chip companies 12, 18 months ago, it would have been one of the greatest investments of all time."

Vertically integrated consumer products businesses built on AI are the unassailable businesses of the future Everyones talking about the "HALO" trade - heavy assets low obsolescence The public SaaS sector sell off feels a bit overbaked at this point - but its not random. The tools that anthropic is putting out are mind boggling. But reality is you can't vibe code a monster energy ($MNST +10% YTD). In many ways you can't vibe code legacy SaaS either, but AI is a tailwind for consumer brands and a headwind to SaaS. Consumer products brands are heavily incentivized to adopt AI because they are very low operating leverage businesses, and those dollars in OpEx matter ALOT. They'll race to save 50% on a hire by deploying AI In the short term, theyre motivated by saving money - but in the long term should be motivated by actually building Ai-native machines that conduct business in some of the biggest markets in the global economy If you can build a consumer product business on top of AI and owned manufacturing, you can become completely unassailable. I believe this is the most defensible business model in today's economy. Optimize your supply chain with AI, reduce headcount and pass savings onto customers, create more effective marketing with AI. Better products for cheaper that are making MORE profit that are MORE scalable in these massive markets. Physical world atoms have always been a constraint of scaling these businesses - AI has the potential to unlock that

The World No. 1 Magnus Carlsen got kicked out of a Chess tournament for wearing JEANS “Fine. I'm Out, Fuck You.” nitter.siddz.com/utsav__45/status/18727…

NEW on Frank/JP Morgan: Frank founder Charlie Javice was arrested last night in New Jersey. Javice faces fraud charges from the SEC and Justice Department, where a criminal investigation is underway through the Southern District of New York: forbes.com/sites/alexandrale…