Finance
Finance4 Oct 20267 min read

AI Investments Are the War Bonds of the New Cold War

The AI buildout is not a bubble. It is a war bond market. $730 billion this year. Four CEOs who say they would rather go bankrupt than lose. War bonds pay off only in victory.

TQ
The Quant
⁦2026-W40⁩ edition
Check the data

"I'm willing to go bankrupt rather than lose this race."

That is Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, as investor Gavin Baker reported in 2025. Sam Altman told a Stanford audience in May 2024 that he does not care whether OpenAI burns $500 million, $5 billion, or $50 billion a year — it is "totally worth it" to build AGI. Mark Zuckerberg said in September 2025 that the greater risk is "not being aggressive enough rather than being too aggressive," and that even losing a couple of hundred billion dollars would be preferable to falling behind in the race for superintelligence. Satya Nadella told an internal Microsoft town hall in mid-2025 that he was "haunted" by the story of Digital Equipment Corporation — a dominant tech company made obsolete by a strategic error — and that AI could do the same to Microsoft.

These are not rhetorical flourishes. This article argues that without the existential frame they articulate, the investment behavior of the industry does not make sense. The talk is real. What follows are its implications.

Discussion

Keep reading

Finance

The Limits of Intelligence: What the AI Prize Is Worth, and Who Gets It

The first three papers in this series established that roughly $730 billion a year is being spent on a war logic, not a return logic. This one asks the question that decides whether the war bonds pay: how big is the prize, and how many hands does it land in? The answer is a matrix, not a number — and the private marks have already priced the best cell in it.

3 Nov 20268 min read
Finance

AI's Shovel Makers Are Priced for 7% Compute Growth Forever

Grant the bulls everything — the buildout completes, the demand is real. Margins still normalize, and the arithmetic says shovel valuations embed ~7% growth of the compute base in perpetuity, nearly double the semiconductor industry's own long-run rate. That is as much a bet on energy as it is on AI.

31 Oct 202610 min read
Finance

Why the Retail Investor Cannot Solve the Prisoners' Dilemma

The AI buildout is individually rational for every company involved and potentially destructive in aggregate. An index fund owns all of them. That is not diversification. It is a bet that the prisoners collectively produce a tolerable outcome.

4 Oct 20269 min read