alleyway_admiral

Stocks, current events, everything else. Polyglot/Septalingual, Equal opportunity offender. *Retweets are not endorsements*

[Kyle Chan @kyleichan]

Rumors that chili maker Lao Gan Ma laid off 500+ workers due to AI have gone viral in China.

Beneath Beijing’s positive messaging, many ordinary Chinese people are worried about AI and jobs.

Lao Gan Ma recently touted a new AI-powered chili inspection system that uses high-speed industrial cameras that significantly outperform manual inspection.

A stat about the company using this AI system to reduce human inspectors from 600 to 48 went viral on Chinese social media. The iconic, family-run company pushed back.

But if you look at the data, the company has reduced headcount from 2,912 to 740 in the past few years while earning record revenues.

Original story: https://t.co/QsDlHYrTep

[Abhilash Jain @AbhilashJain17]

funny how the # of customers hitting us up for neocloud capacity (even at large volume) is at an all-time high while neocloud stocks are at rock bottom

wild divergence between fin bros and tech bros

one side is pretty wrong. time will tell which :)

[Shantanu Goel @shantanugoel]

Cohere says qwen inventoried the files and uploaded data onto alibaba server.
Either they are are idiots who can't read or this is intentional libel?
Because "inventory"? Qwen checking which upload tools exist for it to upload a test payload (harmless dummy text) to test the rule it was asked to write.

[alleyway_admiral @westsideguy3]

@CleansedTweets maybe time for the white picket fence

[alleyway_admiral @westsideguy3]

Contango

[Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha]

Gavin Baker says the compute market is now in contango per Silicon Data and his portfolio companies are shocked at how much more they have to pay for clusters in 2027

“You know, Silicon Data, which I do think is, my firm is an investor in them, but I do think they’re the most authoritative data source. Carmen Li, the founder, stood up at GTC and said that the compute market is now in contango. It’s not just that the spot market is tight. If you want a cluster a year from now, you have to pay a lot of money."

"And then this is maybe another discontinuity between public and private markets. But just the number of companies we have in our portfolio who are like, okay, we got a cluster of 4,000 Blackwells, and we got it in May or June ‘26, and we wanna bring on another cluster of 4,000 in September 2027, and they’re shocked by how much more they have to pay in the future."

"And it’s not like everybody is unaware of this. Everybody’s aware of the supply that’s coming on. But even with all of that supply coming on, it is hard for the companies in our portfolio to find compute even well into ‘27. So for, you know, all the commodity experts who are focused on backwardation and what that implied, I got news for you. We’re not in backwardation anymore.”

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Verizon's CEO said today that SpaceX will need at least 4-6 years and $300B-$500B to fully build out its @Starlink Mobile U.S. carrier network:

"Their service just can't compete with a terrestrial network. In suburban and urban areas, where 98% of our revenues are, we're somewhere between 100x–1,000x more efficient than they are. We know exactly what they're going to do. We know who they're talking to on towers. There's no magic wand. There's no secret sauce. There's no shortcut.

They're going to look at 65,000–80,000 macro sites. They're going to need backhaul, RAN, and a tremendous amount of spectrum. It's going to take a minimum of four to six years to fully build that out. It's going to cost hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, I assume somewhere between $300 billion and $500 billion.

Then they need to build retail, customer service, back office systems, et cetera. All of that gets them basically the same network and same capabilities and same cost structure as what we have today. Then sometime over the next four to six years, they have the possibility of becoming the sixth, not the fourth, the sixth competitor in the market.

You can be sure over these next three to five years or six years, we are not going to be standing still. Four to five years from now, we will be two to three generations better than where we are today. We will have high-speed broadband gig-plus coverage across the country with our millimeter wave. We are ahead of most people and already experimenting with what 6G applications will look like."

(via Verizon's Q3 earnings call earlier this morning)

[nic carter @nic_carter]

call me crazy but I think the Anthropic S1 could be the neocloud bottom

this whole thing began when the market puked about Ant's Q3 run rate leak; their economics have now been demonstrated to be rock solid. GPUs including older vintages trading at ATHs if you actually look at the data. agentic driving record token use. think this entire drama is overdone.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

Obama wrecked him.

[Sonali Basak @sonalibasak]

APOLLO'S SPACEX BET: @elonmusk's firm in a regulatory filing this morning disclosed that Apollo will be responsible for buying and leasing GPUs, with roughly a five-year lease term totalling $40 billion.

It's another really large affirmation of the AI buildout, even if the industry is facing rotations more largely. It also shows you how much dry powder is still on the sidelines for just a single-issuer deal, with one major credit counterparty (though wouldn't be surprised to see Apollo syndicate the deal). Think this is really just the tip of the iceberg with how much private capital will continue to flow in.

[junkbondinvestor @junkbondinvest]

Meta is raising up to $95bn of equity to fund AI spending, ~$35bn of common and pref now plus up to ~$60bn through an ATM.

Bondholders should like this.

$META

[alleyway_admiral @westsideguy3]

@RT_com More compute

[Venkat Raman @venkat_systems]

PS: Grok has been a failure. Elon IPO got saved by NeoCloud business as he's good at it and rented GPUs to anthropic. Elon is trying to play monopoly to tank market and stocks of NeoClouds, so that he can buy up more supply for cheap. He's extremely good at financial engineering and building things fast by pushing through red tape

[Jim Liu @jiahanjimliu]

Putting Together What @elonmusk is Saying/Doing

AI Demand
1. Just yesterday, Elon said "Agentic demand is growing faster than I’ve ever seen anything grow" (1).
2. His actions match "I've been personally spending a lot of time in Memphis, often 4 days a week" (2). $SPCX's biggest goal in terms of revenue next year will be bringing 10GW of compute online.

Financing Availability
1. Now Elon is saying "debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers".

Conclusion
Elon basically sees AI as the biggest opportunity in the coming years and is doing whatever he can to bring compute online. Now he is saying no one else besides him and hyperscalers will be financed to do it.

So I ask you: Is this how America works? The biggest business opportunity of our time only available to the richest man and the richest companies? Is this Elon's patriotic vision for America?

[Nick Sortor @nicksortor]

🚨 BREAKING: Conservative Flávio Bolsonaro is REFUSING to concede Brazil's Presidential election, saying he'll file to ANNUL the results

"I will NOT accept that the rules were changed mid-game ONCE AGAIN by Lula's FRIENDS on the Supreme Court."

He's blasting the Supreme Court justice who extended voting by HOURS -- who also happened to be Lula's former PERSONAL LAWYER

"It's IMPOSSIBLE to recognize the elections in the context in which these things happened."

[Jim Liu @jiahanjimliu]

$SPCX will not do any Neocloud acquisitions.

Neoclouds are pointless to @elonmusk. Makes sense since SPCX has better inference stack than any Neoclouds and Tesla has been doing electrical distribution and liquid cooling for 2 decades.

[Stephen King @StephenKing]

Elon Musk is afraid of Talarico because he [Musk] has a lot of business in Texas. It has nothing to do with principles or programs; for Musk, it's all about the Benjamins.

[Serenity @aleabitoreddit]

I've always defended X as the only platform to be on for financial discourse.

But it's getting harder to when the owner constantly amplifies narratives of collapse… of companies whose interests conflict with his own at $SPCX or $TSLA.

Would people be comfortable if $NVDA Jensen Huang owned $META?

And then the timelines were dominated by his amplified narratives of $AVGO failing?

I can't see how that would be healthy for grassroots discussion.

[alleyway_admiral @westsideguy3]

Let’s clap for your rear end

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

NEW: We have Donald Trump praising Nicki Minaj’s ass LIVE on national television. Absolutely incredible. “She’s got one hell of an ass. Stand up for us Nicki!” LMAO 💀💀💀

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@aaronburnett Agentic demand is growing faster than I’ve ever seen anything grow

[Daye @dayetweets]

Buried in $SPCX's 10-Q:

$561M of that record Q3 profit isn't rockets. It isn't Starlink.

Boring Company raised a new round in September, so SpaceX marked up its stake in Elon's tunnel company and booked a $561M unrealized gain.

No cash changed hands.