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🦔Alphabet earned $2.12 a share last quarter, well short of the roughly $3 analysts expected, even as revenue grew 25% to $127.6 billion. Google Cloud more than doubled. Capital spending hit $51.4 billion and free cash flow went negative. Alphabet bought back no stock, and it sold $12.4 billion of new shares and $28.7 billion of bonds. My Take That’s a big miss, and I don’t like the reason behind it. More than half came from an $8.7 billion paper loss on stakes in other AI companies, the same stakes that padded last quarter’s profit by tens of billions. Google invests in AI startups that rent its chips, then books gains or losses as their values move. I’ve called that circular for a while. Now it swings Alphabet’s own earnings by billions a quarter. Cloud doubled, I’ll give Google that. But Alphabet spent more on data centers last quarter than the whole business brought in, and it made up the difference by selling stock and bonds when it used to buy shares back. Management says spending goes up again next year, so I don’t see buybacks returning anytime soon. I’m sure we'll be seeing more of the big AI spenders follow Google to Wall Street for cash. Hedgie🤗

Il Consiglio dei ministri approva la manovra. Tra le misure: Irpef al 33% fino a 55 mila euro, flat tax fino a 100 mila euro e “salvadanaio” previdenziale per i nuovi nati: 100 euro l’anno fino ai 18 anni. Slitta il decreto bollette. 📰 @ultimoranet

Chancellor John Healey just handed Ukraine another £10bn while British households are still choosing between heating and eating. Zelensky said it made his day. Millions of people across Britain who are struggling with the cost of living crisis are still waiting for theirs.

Ultimately racial classifications are rather dumb - skin color is definitely a spectrum and it's not associated to specific cultures or traits in any significant way beyond those shaped by racial classification themselves. I think that most people already realize this, though.

This woman is an assistant principal. 😳 You are crazy if you relax around these animals. Never let your guard down. Always pack. Give yourself about ten yards of distance at all times. Stay ready.

🦔Bloomberg talked to more than 30 bankers and money managers who finance AI data centers, and all of them said raising money has gotten much harder in just a few months. At least 18 data center deals now have to pay lenders more than 10% a year. The cost of insuring Oracle, SpaceX and Meta debt against default hit records last week. My Take For two years the hard limit on AI was physical, mostly power and grid connections. Now money is short too. Banks are close to the most they’ll lend to this sector, and some insurers that take on part of the risk say they’re already full. Some tenants can walk away if a data center opens 90 to 180 days late, and Oracle already filed a force majeure notice to put off payments on a delayed site in New Mexico. Lenders thought a big tech tenant guaranteed the payments, and in some deals a construction delay is enough to undo that. The biggest tech companies will still get loans because lenders trust their balance sheets. The smaller GPU rental companies won’t. Expect more AI firms to sell stock for cash instead, which shrinks every existing shareholder’s slice. Chipmakers that promised to back their customers’ debt take on more of the risk, and Nvidia’s default insurance hit a record too. New deals at these higher rates also push down the price of older AI bonds, which bond funds and insurers hold for a lot of people’s retirement. Hedgie🤗