Six pools of capital finance the AI infrastructure buildout: hyperscaler cash flow, REITs, OEM balance sheets, structured debt, sovereign, and PE. Part I of The Investment Layer.
An installed base generates maintenance work whether or not the manufacturer does it. Two conditions decide who captures the annuity: the customer's capability gap, and defensibility against independents. Seven positions across the AI infrastructure chain.
Shortage is not the same as pricing power. Ten commercial positions across the AI infrastructure chain, sorted by the two conditions that determine whether scarcity converts to margin: how expensive escape is for the buyer, and whether qualified rivals decline to undercut.
vendors across 6 stacks. Capacitors, wide-bandgap, thermal, interconnect, on-package delivery, modular DC. With a weighted diligence rank you can re-weight live. Filter by geography, size, public/private. Download as CSV.
Skid architectures, BESS integration, MV switchgear, busway and rack topologies for the modular hyperscale datacenter build.
How the AI datacenter building gets built: modular skids, BESS, UPS, busway, rack enclosures. Where PE has deployed and where returns compress.
IVR magnetics, thin-film substrates, high-density capacitors and the qualification-gated architecture of on-package power delivery.
How 48V becomes 0.8V at the chip die: multi-phase POL, IVR, on-package power delivery, and why the foundries hold the strategic value pool.
Where the market essay named the vendors and quantified the lead times, this piece explains the physics. Why voltage steps up, how a 400-tonne transformer moves 300 MW at 99% efficiency, why SF6 became standard and why it is being phased out.
Grid interconnect is the binding constraint on AI. Transformer lead times doubled since 2023. Hyperscalers now build own generation to escape 4-7 year utility queues.
Where the market essay named the vendors, this piece explains the physics. What a farad actually is, why HSCs beat batteries on 10-second pulses, why MLCCs derate under DC bias, and why a fifty-cent film cap decides whether an 800VDC rack survives its own noise.
Where the market essay named the vendors, this piece explains the physics. What 1,000 W/cm2 at the die actually means, how a hundred-dollar coupling either saves or destroys a rack, and where cooling is going next.