2026-07-28 — Eve of Meta/Microsoft earnings: financing keeps migrating off-balance-sheet, Nvidia becomes financier-of-last-resort

• Two same-day instances of the off-balance-sheet pattern: Meta formalized a second 80/20 asset-sale JV (BlackRock, $14B, El Paso — see meta-capex), and Nvidia emerged as a prospective ~$250-500B financing backstop for OpenAI’s 10GW Ohio site (see stargate-buildout) — the chip vendor increasingly underwriting its own customers’ buildouts.
• Meta reports tomorrow (07-29), Microsoft the same day, Amazon 07-30 — consensus has coalesced around ~$136-138B FY26 Meta capex (mid-guidance, up ~$67B YoY) with 2027 seen rising further; this week’s commentary (CNBC, Seeking Alpha, Yahoo/Motley Fool) frames Meta/Microsoft/Amazon as the next test after Alphabet’s guidance raise, with combined 2026 AI spend across Alphabet/Amazon/Meta alone put over $500B before Microsoft is even added. ⟨daily 2026-07-28⟩

2026-07-27 — THE CAPEX PICTURE: four actors, one table ⟨crawl 2026-07-27⟩

Four parallel destination crawls (findings + 167 sources in artifacts/bundles/*-capex-2026-07-27/). The comparable read:

The four cross-cutting findings:

1. The silicon split is the industry’s common non-disclosure — 4 of 4 refuse the own-chip vs Nvidia breakdown. The labs leak what the hyperscalers won’t (Anthropic: 1M TPUs and 1M Trainium).
2. The payoff layer is the weakest — backlogs and run-rates are press-corroborated; primary filings were unreachable or the mappings (e.g. $250B OpenAI → capex) simply don’t exist publicly.
3. Power is the binding constraint being solved three ways — nuclear restarts (‘27) → Gen-IV/SMR options (‘30–‘39) → and now Meta’s open gas pivot, the first break in the clean-power consensus.
4. Capex is migrating off balance sheets — Meta→Blue Owl 80%, BlackRock’s $12.5B bonds, Microsoft’s lease book: the buildout is becoming other people’s balance sheets. (Feeds ai-circular-financing-risk / nvidia-vendor-financing.)

2026-07-23 — Meta-thread opened

• Opened as a meta-thread grouping four sub-threads — google-capex, meta-capex, aws-capex, microsoft-capex — after Ben asked for the individual hyperscalers as their own threads plus “the big picture” as an overlapping parent (/steer, “figure out how to do meta-threads”). A meta-thread’s card shows its children as linked rows, not a flat re-listing of their items; its ranking score aggregates their activity. ⟨steer 2026-07-23⟩

← Backstory

2026-07-22 — The first capex verdict of the cycle

• Alphabet raised 2026 capex guidance to $195-205B (from $180-190B), the first of the four hyperscalers to report this cycle — GOOGL fell ~5% after-hours despite a revenue/Cloud beat, reading as “spend still accelerating, not yet proof it pays off.” Full detail in google-capex. (CNBC) ⟨steer 2026-07-23, evidence dated 2026-07-22⟩

2026-07-20 — The question gets a date

• Alphabet/Tesla/Intel earnings framed as the first real test of whether AI revenue justifies Big Tech’s collective $725B 2026 capex plan. (Tech Times) ⟨steer 2026-07-23, evidence dated 2026-07-20⟩