The Computomatix Times

Breaking: Michael Burry says the AI boom is running on one giant loop and time is running out

Here's his breakdown:

1. Burry shared a report from Wall Street lender Ares tracking $573B of AI financing from the last 12 months

2. All of it runs through just 8 companies: Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Broadcom and Nvidia

3. They lend to each other, guarantee each other's debt and buy from each other, so one company's loan is backed by another company's promise to keep spending

4. Every deal depends on one thing: AI spending never slowing down

5. If AI revenue disappoints for even one season, the guarantees could all get called at once, right when the companies backing them are at their weakest

6. Burry says it's the same circular financing that turned the 2000 telecom fiber boom into a bust

Burry claims the stock market in the first stage of grief and the crash is soon

The US Navy just paid $2.9 billion to a company that has never built a submarine. Here's why they had no choice.

America has exactly two shipyards that can build nuclear subs. Electric Boat in Connecticut. Newport News in Virginia. The Navy needs two Virginia-class boats a year from them. They deliver 1.1.

Then it gets worse. Under AUKUS, America promised to sell Australia 3 to 5 Virginia-class submarines starting in the early 2030s. We signed a deal to export a product we can't build fast enough for our own fleet.

And the number behind all of it comes from the Navy's own intelligence office. China's shipbuilding capacity sits around 23 million tons a year. America's is about 100,000 tons. 230 times larger. One Chinese shipbuilder, CSSC, built more commercial tonnage in a single year than every American yard combined has built since World War II.

Both incumbent sub yards carry backlogs stretching past 2040, and the supplier base behind them shrank by thousands of companies after the Cold War. You cannot order your way out of that. There was physically no third option to call.

So the Navy invented one. Anduril adds $3.7 billion of its own money, breaks ground on the bones of Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point, once the largest steelworks on earth, shuttered in 2012, the yard complex that fed the fleet that won WWII. Hiring starts in 2029. Operations in 2030.

Four years from announcement to first output, and in American shipbuilding that counts as a sprint.

This is genuinely incredible: Huawei survived the most aggressive assault against a single company in modern history and is coming out the other side with the U.S. licensing its technology.

And ironically in the exact domains - 5G, AI, compute, networking - that the U.S. tried to cut Huawei out of.

Left: Texas's grid only maxes out about 200 hours a year, roughly 2% of the time.

Right: New data centers that agree to cut back during peak hours can skip the wait for more capacity. US grids could add 100 GW of them without building a single new plant.

a16z's @rmcentush on how flexible data centers get onto the grid sooner: a16z.news/p/why-texas-is-making-data-centers

A dad just signed a $40.4 billion personal guarantee so his son could buy Hollywood.

In 14 months, the Ellison family bought Paramount for $8 billion, then won a bidding war against Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery at roughly $111 billion. Warner Bros, Paramount, CBS, HBO, CNN, DC, Nickelodeon, and TNT Sports now sit under one roof. Next week the combined company takes the name Skydance.

Netflix should have won. Warner's board had already signed an $83 billion deal with them and rejected the Ellisons twice, because the money sat in a revocable family trust the board called "illusory."

So Larry Ellison, 82 years old, answered with an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion. One signature.

For scale, Larry has sold about $4.7 billion of Oracle stock this entire century. The guarantee was almost 9x everything he's cashed out in 25 years, backed by his 1.16 billion Oracle shares.

The merged streamer launches with around 207 million subscribers and $70 billion in projected annual revenue. And through Oracle, the family also holds 15% of TikTok's US entity.

Harry Potter, Top Gun, Batman, SpongeBob, Game of Thrones, CNN, CBS News, and a piece of TikTok's algorithm, all of it now answers to one family.

.@Valon just raised a $150M Series D at a $2.3B valuation. Within six months of selling software, they signed over $200M in deals.

(And they're hiring!)

How the seven-year-old company got there:

- Mortgage is $13 trillion of consumer debt running on a system built before the internet, and no servicer will trust a new platform. So Valon became one.

- Co-founder Andrew Wang read every federal and state regulation, 18 hours a day for six months, and turned it into code.

- They ran their own servicer on the software until it hit 3x the industry's efficiency, sold that servicer to a larger mortgage company, and now sell the software to everyone else. One of the biggest servicers in the US is moving 4 million loans onto it, nearly 10% of the market.

Valon is hiring deployment strategists in NY and SF. Read more about their open roles: a16zjobs.substack.com/p/valon-just-raised-150m…

@xlindadu @wangandrewd