Everyone posts the AI headline. I post the math underneath it. Who's paying, for how long, and what has to go right. Not investment advice.
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Meta books about $31B of operating lease liabilities. Its 10-Q lists $355.7B more in data center and energy leases signed but not started: 11x, up $77B in one quarter.
Number to watch: that footnote in the next 10-K. Another Q3-size jump means the build is still accelerating.
Worth putting next to the hyperscalers, who sold $270B of debt and equity this year to fund the same buildout.
Supply side supports this too. Morgan Stanley's 2028 power shortfall estimate went from 36 GW to 70 GW in under two years, and that's after implied supply nearly doubled. Price per watt doesn't come down while that gap keeps widening.
Shaun Maguire's model gets SpaceX to $30B per GW in 2028 partly by assuming it buys distressed GPUs from builders that miss their timelines. That part of the efficiency won't show up in any capex line until other projects slip.
The high case is 8x the chips but only 2x the RAM. So the CPU number is really a guess about how good Meta's software gets at the end of the day. Memory number is just a headcount of agents.
The wild part of Shaun's $731B: almost none of it is orbital.
Orbital compute is $31B of his 2028 revenue, about 4%. The rest is terrestrial. In his Q4 2028, the model adds about 0.5 GW a month in orbit versus about 1 GW a month on the ground.
Elon wrote Friday night that orbital compute deployed per month "probably exceeds terrestrial around the end of 2028 and then far exceeds it in 2029." Shaun says orbital really shows up starting in 2029.
So the crossover Elon is describing sits mostly outside this model. The $731B barely counts it yet.
Number to watch: nameplate compute in SpaceX's Q1 2027 10-Q. 4.0 GW or more puts the 2028 ramp on Shaun's schedule. nitter.gq/shaunmmaguire/status/2…
Input #2 says it all. $40B/yr of revenue on $30B of capex per GW means a GW pays for itself in 9 months of revenue. What's the contract length behind that $40B?
And capex is just the part we see. Meta's Q3 10Q shows $356B of data center, energy and network leases signed but not yet started, up $77B in one quarter. None of that is in the $202B yet, liabilities are still arriving.
Stocks spent October selling the AI trade. Credit kept lending.
The number that matters most isn't a market cap. It's in Meta's 10-Q: $355.7B of data center leases signed but not yet started.
By my math, that's 4x its bond debt. nitter.gq/KobeissiLetter/status/…
