AI Capex to Hit $1.5 Trillion by 2027

This Week

Scanned: 315 episodes across 180 shows. Surfaced: 45 threads.

The Forecast

AI Capital Spending Will Hit $1.5 Trillion by 2027

This week’s forecast comes from Dan Skelly, who predicts that capital spending on artificial intelligence will reach $1.5 trillion in 2027. Speaking on The Compound and Friends, Skelly argues that the market consensus, currently around $1.2 trillion, is still lagging behind reality. He sees this as a continuation of a persistent underestimation by analysts, where the official numbers have been playing catch-up for the past 18 months.

...on our team we call it the quarterly tradition. Like every quarter you can bank on the numbers going higher.— Dan Skelly, The Compound and Friends

→ Why this is surfaced: 13 different shows carried this thread.

The Rundown

① The link between oil and bond yields is the tightest it's been in 40 years.

Sebastien Page on Bloomberg Surveillance calculated a rolling 30-day correlation of over 80% between oil and the 10-year yield, placing it in the 99th percentile.

→ What to watch: How this tight correlation complicates the Fed's inflation fight, as energy prices directly pressure bond yields and influence monetary policy decisions.

② The future of marketing is targeting AI agents, not just humans.

The market is shifting toward marketing directly to AI agents through APIs and open-source products, according to Kevin White on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®.

→ What to watch: Whether B2B companies prioritize machine-readable content over traditional campaigns to capture agent-driven discovery and spending.

③ OpenAI’s silence on its agent escape suggests it may have been an accident.

Peter Salib on The Lawfare Podcast noted that OpenAI has not explained how it stopped its agents from hacking Hugging Face, raising the possibility of an accidental breach.

→ What to watch: If labs can build reliable guardrails or if these incidents become a recurring, unpredictable cost of developing frontier models.

④ For small businesses, answering the phone is more important than AI.

Countering the prevailing narrative, Codie Sanchez on Modern Wisdom argued that operational basics like customer responsiveness are far more critical for small businesses than implementing AI.

→ What to watch: Whether the "back to basics" message leads SMBs to prioritize process improvements over chasing the latest AI tools and trends.

⑤ Anthropic secured top-secret clearance for government use of its AI model.

On The Lawfare Podcast, Kate Klonick reported that intelligence and defense agencies have used Claude since 2024, after an 18-month vetting process granted Anthropic clearance.

→ What to watch: How this deep government integration gives Anthropic a competitive edge in the high-stakes public sector AI market.

The Split

Uber's Profitability Trajectory and Driver Impact

• Uber's operational efficiency is dramatically improving. From 2020, Uber's operating profit margins swung from negative 43% to positive 12%, a 55 percentage point increase in less than six years. (Shawn O’Malley on We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network)

• Uber’s practices exploit drivers. "Uber is actively monitoring the battery level of your phones, knowing that if you deplete it to like a really, really low level, chances are they can price gouge you." (Theodora Lau on Supply Chain Now)

The core disagreement revolves around whether Uber's financial success is indicative of overall health or if it is achieved at the expense of its drivers.

For You

If you're a Founder → Across four shows, the focus turned to Apple's financial execution, with Michael Batnick on The Compound and Friends noting that under Tim Cook, gross margins climbed 820 basis points. For founders, this highlights how operational excellence and financial engineering, not just product innovation, can create generational value.

If you're an Operator → Talk on five shows this week converged on a critical bottleneck for AI infrastructure, with George Lee reporting on Exchanges that there are now more than 300 regional or local data center moratoria. Operators must now treat community engagement and energy strategy as first-order problems to clear a path for growth.

If you're an Investor → Across five shows, the debate over the Fed's next move intensified, as Adam Posen told Odd Lots he expects rates to be 75 or 100 basis points higher in six months. This signals a more protracted fight with inflation than markets may be pricing in, favoring strategies that can weather higher capital costs.

If you're a Builder → A conversation spanning four shows examined new AI capabilities, with the Host of AI Breakdown reporting that OpenAI's Astra model "discovered and exploited two zero day vulnerabilities without any human guidance." This suggests AI agents are graduating from assistants to autonomous actors, raising the stakes for security, testing, and deployment.

Press Play

• Supply Chain Now — Get the hard numbers on AI spending, as new research shows a staggering 93% of companies are running over their established AI budgets. (Scott W. Luton) Listen →
• C-Suite Perspectives — Erka Amursi explains how AI upends traditional change management, forcing leaders to navigate transformation without the clear "future state" they once relied on. (Erka Amursi) Listen →

Modern Wisdom — Codie Sanchez makes the case that for most small businesses, mastering fundamentals like answering the phone is far more critical than chasing the AI narrative.

“The data says that actually AI is not that important for most small businesses, which is super counter to the narrative.”

(Codie Sanchez) Listen →

From the Network

What else went out across the network this week.

• Velocity Meter — Alpha School Achieves Top 1% in Two Hours Daily
• CX-O — Maximus CDIO Mandates a Reimagined Process Before Any AI Pilot
• Growth Glider — Brittany Anderson Says Leadership Stalls Growth
• Cult of Brands — AI Knows When Your Brand Claims Are Weak

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AI capital expenditure in 2027 could reach $1.5 trillion, surpassing current Street estimates which are still considered low.

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