Bits + Bips: Is AI CapEx a Bubble? And Is Inflation Already Dead?

Unchained

The Mag 7 have committed over $700 billion to AI infrastructure, but the companies building the models may never capture the value.

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The BLS just quietly revised away 862,000 jobs, and real-time inflation trackers now peg price growth below 1%, less than half of what official figures report. 

If the Fed is steering monetary policy with stale data, investors need to ask what else the models are getting wrong. 

At the same time, the Mag 7 have committed more than $700 billion to AI infrastructure, with Anthropic alone projecting $1 trillion in revenue within five years. Is that conviction or the early stages of a debt cycle nobody is pricing? 

And then there is the institutional side of crypto: BlackRock's BUIDL fund just landed on Uniswap with $2.4 billion in assets, Apollo acquired $90 million in Morpho tokens, and AI agents are already settling micropayments in stablecoins. 

Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Christopher Perkins sit down with Truflation’s CEO Stefan Rust to ask whether the numbers we trust are telling us the truth.

Hosts:

  • ⁠Austin Campbell⁠, NYU Stern professor and founder and managing partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting

Guest:

Links:

Macro:

AI CapEx:

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More description

The Mag 7 have committed over $700 billion to AI infrastructure, but the companies building the models may never capture the value.

Thank you to our sponsors:

The BLS just quietly revised away 862,000 jobs, and real-time inflation trackers now peg price growth below 1%, less than half of what official figures report. 

If the Fed is steering monetary policy with stale data, investors need to ask what else the models are getting wrong. 

At the same time, the Mag 7 have committed more than $700 billion to AI infrastructure, with Anthropic alone projecting $1 trillion in revenue within five years. Is that conviction or the early stages of a debt cycle nobody is pricing? 

And then there is the institutional side of crypto: BlackRock's BUIDL fund just landed on Uniswap with $2.4 billion in assets, Apollo acquired $90 million in Morpho tokens, and AI agents are already settling micropayments in stablecoins. 

Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Christopher Perkins sit down with Truflation’s CEO Stefan Rust to ask whether the numbers we trust are telling us the truth.

Hosts:

  • ⁠Austin Campbell⁠, NYU Stern professor and founder and managing partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting

Guest:

Links:

Macro:

AI CapEx:

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2026-02-18 67 min
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