I spent last week at a 1,200-acre testing ground in Lockhart, Texas, watching an excavator dig with nobody in the cab, and two days after I got back, BlackRock took an 80% stake in a $14 billion Meta data center while Moody’s told six of the biggest technology companies on earth that their spending has grown large enough to threaten their own credit ratings. All three converge on the same question: who actually owns the infrastructure this AI boom is standing on?
Key Takeaway 1:
Fully autonomous excavators are closer than you think. After a day on the ground with Bedrock Robotics in Texas, the operators closest to these machines are the ones most relieved to see them coming.
Key Takeaway 2:
BlackRock now owns 80% of Meta’s $14 billion El Paso data center, with roughly 90 cents of every dollar borrowed. Meta becomes the anchor tenant of its own campus, and the question of who your ultimate client is just changed.
Key Takeaway 3:
Four hyperscalers reported in the same fortnight and got opposite verdicts. Microsoft added $450 billion in a single day, the biggest one-day gain any company has recorded, while Alphabet and Meta both fell on the same spending story.
“Wall Street used to lend money to the AI build. This week it started owning the buildings.”
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Read the full edition here: http://bricks-bytes.beehiiv.com/p/your-data-centre-client-is-changing-what-we-saw-in-a-place-called-proto