Odd Lots - James van Geelen on the Next Phase of the AI Buildout

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Money has been flowing into the AI space, with billions pouring into GPU clusters, data centers, gas turbines, and the infrastructure needed to train and deploy bigger and bigger models. So what comes next? On this episode, we speak with James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research. We talk to him about his latest field trip to one of OpenAI's new massive Stargate data centers in Abilene, Texas. We also discuss the increasingly complicated financing arrangements that are funding some of these mega projects and the energy needed to power them. Finally, we ask the question which everyone seems to be asking right now: is AI in a bubble? Read more:OpenAI Valuation Reaches $500 Billion, Topping Musk’s SpaceXFOMO Builds as Alibaba Extends $250 Billion AI-Fueled Comeback Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal. Joe. Yes. Have you ever wanted to tour a data center?

I'd love to. Part of me thinks it would be really boring, like if you actually went inside because it would just be a bunch of the same cables like over and over and over again. But part of me thinks just seeing the scale of it would be amazing. You know what I would do if I tore to Data Center is I would look at those cables and every nut and bolt and vacuum and heating thing and get every brand name I could on any little piece of equipment in the entire thing and then see are there any of these that are AI plays that the market doesn't really. You know, any random screwdriver that's being used in this operation, what is the name? Is it publicly traded? So literally picks and shovels.

Yeah, just literally. Exactly. Oh, here is a company that makes the doorstop. Are they an AI play because they're going to need a lot of door stops for all these doors? That's what I would do. Okay. So I guess the Joe hyper-scale data center ETF coming to a market near you eventually. That would be a good idea, actually.

That's a great idea. Well, today we're going to talk about some of these data centers with someone who has actually gone on a field trip and looked at them. And then we're going to talk about broader AI. Because, of course, with markets still, you know, basically at records, there's a lot of concern that valuations are getting out of hand. We've had these financing deals, which just do my head in in terms of like trying to track who's lending to who and who's buying from who and all of that. So we should talk about it. Totally. Because, I mean, two things, which is one, we know how important AI is to the stock market. Two, you know, there's all these sort of complicated financing deals.

And the number is changed by the day. So just today we got news that in the latest Open AI is allowing some of its employees to sell shares at a half a trillion dollar valuation. It just seems like it's constant fundraise, constant numbers that go higher and higher and higher every day, various estimates for how much capital expenditure is going to happen in this cycle seem to go up. I feel like what we really need to do is have one of these conversations every month and just get for real. Like we need to keep like it changes so fast and the stakes seem so high. Yeah, you definitely need frequent updates. The other thing, of course, hovering in the background is the importance of the AI build-out to the overall economy, right? And this is the question, like, is the, I think Deutsche Bank actually put out a note on this.

Is the entire U.S. economy being propped up by AI right now? Maybe that's not a problem if, you know, if the AI stuff actually gets built and materializes into real money. But you can imagine if it is a bubble, then that would be bad. The way I see it is there's essentially two ways this is going to end up. One is, it turns out it was a bubble. We have a massive recession and we all lose our jobs. And the other possibility is that AI is not a bubble. We have AGI and we all lose our jobs. And so I'm curious which of the two paths is going to happen. Well, I got to say, there are some alternate possibilities. Did you see the Dallas Fed chart? I haven't seen that one. So it showed GDP per capita. And one line was like for AGI and it just goes. Straight up. It's just literally vertical. Yeah. But then the other line is, what if the robots take over the world and kill everyone? And that line went straight down.

So, yeah. So. Okay, okay. Lots of good outcomes here. Yes. All right. So we have the perfect guest, someone we've spoken to before who writes absolutely phenomenal research about AI and actually digs into literally the nuts and bolts of everything. We're going to be speaking with James Van Geelan. He is the author of the Satrini. newsletter. James, thanks for coming back on. Thanks for having me. I feel like the last time we were here, we were also discussing whether AI is a bubble or not. Yeah. We get to do it again. We'll just keep doing it. One day it'll be right, right? Analysts going on field trips is one of my favorite genres of research. Explain to us how you managed to do this. So drones have become

very commoditized. The likelihood of anything in the world being more than a 10 mile radius from someone with a drone is extremely low. And we kind of use that to our advantage because we've been sitting in front of a screen watching green numbers go up and up and up. And it's not my fault that they named it Stargate. It kind of lends itself to not taking it as serious as one otherwise might. And someone, I've read a tweet that said, well, where's the proof? There probably should be proof, right? So we looked at some satellite images and we went, okay, a year ago, this was dirt. And now there's this thing and it's the size of lower Manhattan. Wow.

So it's in Texas, right? It's in Abilene, Texas. And I mean, this is actually one of the smaller ones. I mean, if you look at Louisiana, Meta's Hyperion, it would start, the footprint would start at the top of Central Park and it would go down to Soho. Wow. So. That's why they call it hyperscale. So just to be clear with Stargate, this is like the thing that like Trump and Oracle and probably SoftBank is in the middle. Like what is this complex? Who's behind it? This thing that you went and toured and got some drone footage.

So it's essentially a mix of, you know, Oracle, OpenAI. There's some involvement from Invita. There's Saudi interest with MGX. There is some financing involved. And it is just one of, uh, currently five data centers that are planned with a half a trillion dollars of investment. That's why we went and looked at it because when you really think about it, this represents probably the largest infrastructure build out and effort since World War II. Where are they getting the energy from? So that's the best part. That was the first thing we saw on the drone is you fly over it and they just built their own natural gas plant.

And going, like Joe, great idea, just going and looking at all the, but you got to look at the big stuff too, right? And without, I mean, without power, these are just kind of, you know, hunks of metal. So you have outside of Stargate Abilene 10 natural gas turbines. And the interesting thing is these aren't like the really good natural gas turbines. Because if you wanted, so natural gas turbines fall along simple cycle, combine cycle. These are simple cycle. They're each 35 megawatts, which is very much on the lower end. Half of them are from G. Renova. Half of them are from a company that Caterpillar on is called solar turbines. And the reason why they're not, you would think, oh, you're spending half a trillion dollars on these things. You could probably get the best thing ever, but that'll take you seven years. Oh, right. Because there's a natural gas turbine shortage. By the way, there's a headline So there is a headline, an article on the Bloomberg today by Matthew Griffin. The hunt for winners in the artificial intelligence gold rush has landed on an unlikely target.

Old line industrial equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. So you got to look at every one of these brands that's supplying it. And Caterpillar is up a lot. It's up today. And the stock is done very well. So, okay, Caterpillar. Who else? What else do you see besides these big turbines when you go?

out and tour this facility. So that stock is a rocket. So that's at 46. Do you see any people? Like security guards? You see so many people. Huh. And I mean, it's there, I don't know.

You've seen like Silicon Valley and there's that scene where there's like one guy in the data center and he's like, yeah, you know, night and day don't really matter much down here. And it's just one guy running. But in the buildout, I mean, there are every single HVAC technician or guy that knows how to lay fiber or guy. that knows electrical or plumbing, within a hundred mile radius of Avaline, they're all there, right? There's 7,000 people working on building this, and this is just one site. And, yeah. So people have been talking about the picks and shovels phase of AI investment for a while now,

but it seems like stuff is still getting built and it has further to run. My kind of favorite, we can, you know, and I'm sure we will discuss whether this is a bubble or not, at the end of the day, the money is getting spent. And my favorite kind of setup in the market is you have something that has a multiple that reflects kind of a wrong reality or doesn't really fully integrate a secular theme. And then you have a cycle that's really bad. So whether it's kind of the robotics supply chain goes throughout the automotive cycle. And if you guys are aware, that's been a nightmare.

And then you have some of these, a lot of these companies took really significant drawdowns when Trump got elected. Because the, this isn't really tech capex. It's much more similar to like LNG terminal cabex. That kind of entails the same companies that were benefiting from the IRA. Oh, interesting. So everyone sold them. And now it turns out, it's kind of like the horseshoe theory, right? Yeah. No, that's super interesting. Like it's just these sort of like old line industrials and they did. very well under the Obama administration because of all the factories and all that stuff that we talked about. And then it's like, okay, we're pulling the plug on this. But now there's just this title wave of money. By the way, Caterpillar was a $334 stock on April 2nd, right before Liberation

Day, which is sort of where we should benchmark things. Now 486 at an all-time high. What are so the other companies you see out there? Yeah, for real. Like, preferably the ones that haven't gone up yet, right? Yeah, but seriously, like, who else is getting a piece of this action. So something that I want to make sure I mention just to frame this whole thing. If you look at the building site plans, they have the names of all the data halls, and they are literally each called ludicrous building. So it's ludicrous building one, ludicrous building two. Wait, is it ludicrous with a K? No. That would be great. I mean, ludicrous spelled correctly is also fantastic. The competent, I mean, really,

I would encourage anyone to go and look at this video because the, the, it's, it's just a, there is such a disconnect between looking at green numbers going up like, like caterpillar going. Okay, cool. Yeah. And then you see it. And it is mind blowing. I mean, they have rows of dry and adiabiotic coolers that are, you know, hundreds and hundreds for the liquid cooling loops. And then you have the kind of all the HVAC, the power genera.

and transmission. We compiled a list of basically 200 companies, 50 of which were high confidence in kind of seeing as part of this build-out. And the interesting thing is you have these multinational OEMs. The scale of this project is so large that you can call one of them and say, okay, we want to go with Mitsubishi heavy or we want to use Eaton for this thing. And they will say, yeah, okay, well, we can do 60% of it. I mean, the biggest companies in the world are, they're just fighting. They don't have to fight with each other because the pie is so big. How scarce, you know, there's all this around the country, there's been all this tension. Like, is there going to be enough energy for data centers? What about the water? What about the

politics? People, we see these town halls where the locals do on a data center. How scarce are locations like Abilene? I mean, there's a lot. lot of empty space in Texas. Could you see, are there more Stargates or more Abilene's out there waiting where the companies can just say, you know what, we're just going to build our own infrastructure, we're going to build our own natural gas plant, and we're just going to do it in the desert in Texas where we don't have to worry about Nimbies or local politics or anything. Is that the future for a lot of this stuff? Yeah, there's already another facility that's planned in Shackleford, Texas, which is not too far from Abilene. Abilene is already planning on expanding by another 600 megawatts. I mean, that's how

we're measuring data centers now is just in megawatts and gigawatts. In Louisiana, that's where Meta's building Hyperion. You have some unidentified or unannounced Midwest facility that'll probably be in Ohio. Basically, yeah, anywhere that you can get the gas, anywhere you can get the power, anywhere that there's the land. There was one planned in Indianapolis. And it's interesting you bring up water because we wrote about water a little while ago as well. And we were basing our projections off of what the water consumption of like existing data centers were. The advancements in liquid cooling have changed that a lot.

So there was a huge kind of uproar about, well, this data center is going to use so much water. And if you look at it, this was in Indianapolis. And if you look at it, it's about the same amount of water as a thousand households. Because it's all closed loop liquid cooling now. The water just gets recycled and filtered back. So it's really just something. where the constraint is still power and getting these kind of turbines and it's and it's going to increasingly become a thing where it's behind the meter power generation.

They're just going to build their own power plants. They're not going to rely on the grid. You guys remember what happened in Texas and 21 with Erica? Yeah. You cannot underwrite that as a data center. Like, you just can't be offline. So that's kind of where we're headed is that this power and energy kind of, bottleneck is the bottleneck. One of the more interesting things we ran across is you look at

XAI's data center. And we went through a lot of the filings of all these different data centers. They're permitted for 1535 megawatt turbines. And there's thermal imaging of the site that shows they're using 35. Hmm. G. E. Vernova, another one. That was a 330. You're just typing tickers now. Yeah, that was a $330 stock on April 2nd. That's a $609 stock. Okay. I got Siemens Energy. Thank you, Joe. Oh, he's doing it. You can keep going.

All right. I have kind of, this isn't an essential question. Okay, wait, I got it. I knew this is going to happen. Siemens Energy was a $56 stock on April 2nd. That's 108. That's a straight lineup. Okay.

Okay. Clearly, someone's making money. Like, how big are the walls of these things? And what does security actually look like? Because, you know, we talk about people being upset about higher energy prices. I understand that maybe some of the, some of them are building out their own energy capacity, but, you know, in a populist mindset, people might still be upset at AI, still upset that AI is going to take jobs and things like that. They could become targets, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, apparently security isn't tight enough to shoot down a drone yet. Oh, of course, yeah. But when you talk about the walls, like the interesting thing is everything in this data center has, you can't just build it like a house. everything needs to have the right anti-corrosion, insulation. You can't just be losing heat. You're already spending so much money on cooling. So everything in the building envelope is also kind of the most expensive thing it could be. And I assume it's like a sealed envelope, I guess. Yeah, exactly. And the opportunity of just how big is this going to be? If you actually believe that the people that are building this, and this is kind of an interesting dynamic,

of the hyperscalers are in somewhat of a prisoner's dilemma. We can't speak to whether they actually believe or not, but the party line is we're building machine god. And if we're building machine god, then that's kind of a religious zealotry. So three years ago, most of these hypers were making net zero by 2030. That is not happening. There's no way that's happening. Maybe they buy carbon off it, but that's not happening. Because if you need to do it now, you're using natural gas. And then you say, well, once we create machine god, machine god will fix it. Right. And you can justify a lot of stuff. Wait, okay. So let's talk about is AI in a bubble? Because when we're conversing about buildings that are literally called ludicrous and we're talking about machine god will

solve all our problems. Sounds a little bubbly. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff you look back on and say, oh, yeah, that was the top. I know that we have to talk about this, and that requires some numbers, so I have some notes. But the interesting, I mean, you can make a case for either side. And it kind of hinges on not so much what AI looks like in the future, but more where we are in the cycle. If the question is, is AI bubble? Yeah, probably. It's a new technology. It's exciting. Every single time The railroads, the, you know, dot com, if it's not a bubble, it will be. And it probably is already. But where are we in the bubble?

That's the interesting thing for investors. So if you look at kind of, where are we in the financing side? When we had the dot com bubble, the big thing, are you guys familiar with dark fiber? No. So essentially, they were building out this kind of infrastructure for the internet. And the conviction of the day was the internet's going to be the biggest thing in the world, correct. And 97% of the fiber that was laid was called dark fiber because it wasn't lit up. It was just laying there because eventually we're going to need it.

That's not the case right now. Every single time that one of these data centers comes online, you're at 100% utilization. There's no dark fiber. And we're continuing to need more. I mean, I don't know if you guys saw Sora 2. more than 70% of the content that we consume is video. So a video model makes a lot of sense. It's also way more compute-intensive.

And the final form of AI is not chatbots. It's going to be video. It's going to be robotics, which use video models. So that's kind of like the bullish side. But I totally see, I have some numbers here. So we've had some of these circular deals. And so far, I mean, there's hundreds of billions of dollars for this. Most of the financing is structured much more like toll roads or LNG terminals.

The meta-Syperian was $29 billion. 26 billion of that was Pimco on debt and then Blue Owl with $3 billion of equity, an off-balance sheet arrangement, which also was pretty popular during the dot-com bubble. Then you have stuff like GPU collateralized SPVs. Corweave had as a $7.5 billion blackstone SPV. There's like an $11 billion GPU-backed loan market now, which compared to the infrastructure thing I can get, that, it's like those GPs are going to be worth like they will depreciate. So yeah. That's that's that's ABS right. That's like asset back securities. Okay. Yeah. But when you look at the where we just saying,

where are we in the cycle? Well, there's been, there's been, there's been a, there's been a a lot of these off-balance sheet arrangements, but in terms of that prisoner's dilemma that we spoke about where nobody's going to back off because then maybe they risk not creating machine god, the debt to equity ratio on most of the hyperscalors is not crazy. Oracle has the highest, but they still have a lot of room to lever up in pursuit of this goal. The interesting kind of dynamic of Nvidia finances its customers and then its customers by Nvidia GPUs and then, you know, that, yeah, that's a bubble dynamic. That's, that's visible circular financing and, and, but the demand is real. Well, this is my, this is, I guess the question,

if the demand is real, why are the invidias of the world financing their customers, right? Intuitively you think, okay, invidia's, the demand for chips is maxed out, right? Then intuitively you think, well, then there's plenty of money elsewhere. So do you have a guess for why NVIDIA is compelled to, you know, invest in OpenAI, invest in CoreWeave. It's been a long-time investor in Corweave and so forth. Yeah, I could take the very skeptical view or the kind of not-sceptical view. The not-skeptical view is the best thing for NVIDIA is that we accomplish AGI. So anything that it can do to get us closer to that massive, massive infrastructure that's

required for that is great for them. As quickly as possible. As quickly as possible because every year that you don't achieve AGI becomes less likely. So that is maybe the core factor. And then there's, it's good for them. And playing into that, the, because this isn't necessarily like the dot com bubble, because the dot com bubble had fiber and then it had, you know, pets.com and Amazon and all that stuff. This is all pretty much CAPX, right? Tech is capital intensive again, which means that it's, the bust won't necessarily be like the dot com bubble.

where it gives the real players time to shine. If the CAPEX spending grinds to a halt, because the market goes down, that's the worst thing in the world. So in a way, it's also in their interest, obviously, to make sure that that doesn't happen. Another question actually, but I want to ask it now because I might forget. There was a headline, I think, earlier this week, again, headlines almost every day.

Can you explain why meta, which is building out, which obviously hyperscaler, they have tons of data center capacity, why do they need to do a deal with CoreWeave? So I saw that Meta is going to pay $14 billion, some number, for capacity on CoreWeave. What do the NeoClouds bring to the table such that the legacy is like, you know what, we want some of your capacity? It's basically, I would say, anything you can do to shift that KAPX away from yourself is great, right? If you're right now, a lot of this stuff is funded from cash flow. And yeah, we're starting to see debt financing take its place.

But if you, the, the, you're running a company that's existed for a while and is one of the biggest companies in the world. And yes, you could justify taking an order in its amounts of risk to do this. But just like anyone else, if you have a goal and you can kind of shift away some of that risk to, because if, you know, if Corweed goes bankrupt, meta is not, it's not, it's not the worst thing in the world for meta. What would you be looking out for for signs of the bubble bursting or I guess the CAPEX faucet starting to turn off? So in terms of like the warning signs, first monitoring use GPU prices, I think is a great way to see what's going on. Seeing like contract renegotiations, waiver headlines from private credit. And also a big one would be any delays in delivering power, make it so that you find this thing and then it's not going to be able to work.

Right. I do think that another, you really do have to kind of index to the revenue that's being generated by the AI companies as well. And you saw OpenAI recently announced that they're basically allowing you to buy things with one click from the inside the app. And I think that that was also a big driving factor in the router where they kind of route your model to the, it's setting it up for advertising. Because the other day I asked Google a pretty simple question, and it just gave me the answer with no advertisements delivered to me.

So I think that there is the killer apps kind of are here or coming, but that has to happen fast. Yeah. The fact that the internet kind of runs on ads is an underappreciated reality of our world. And we did an episode on it way, way back in the day. Is there any way, if I wanted to get exposure to like the good stuff of AI, the actual money being spent, but then I don't like all the circular financing arrangements, is there a way to hedge that particular risk? Yeah, you could buy all the real companies that are building this kind of data center, and then you could short blue owl and the private credit companies that are doing the kind of financing aspect of it. Because if it goes bad, they have limited upside and kind of unlimited downside. And if it continues happening, the companies that are actually building it have unlimited upside. And they're still, like you said, these old line kind of industrial, like they still have a core business to go back to.

What's your take on? So Open AI announced its new SORA thing that Tracy has a code for. Meta announced its meta AI, which a lot of people is like, this is slop. And we don't need to get into a debate about whether this is all garbage. I kind of think it is, but that's not actually the question I'm interested in. The question I'm interested in is one way to view these things is, you know what, these AI videos are going to be really important sort of business revenue drivers in our pursuit to AGI.

And the other view is, look, if they were close to AGI, they would not be devoting time to the slop factories. And this is the sort of question. And I'm curious from your perspective, what do you think is the real logic behind all of this effort to create these sort of, you know, dumb like, oh, a video of an astronaut writing a horse through space with a, you know, cowboy hat on or whatever. Video models are going to become the most important part of this. You need, for example, LLMs don't really interact with the world, but we're starting to see in robotics, AI models

interact with the world. So you have these video language action models and you can structure it so that there was an interesting paper on archive recently that, and, you know, know, this is video models like V-O-3 are emergent zero-shot learners and understanders. And what that just means is you can give it basically like a second of context and then it can extrapolate about what's going on beyond that. That becomes extremely important for robotics. And you can structure these vision language action models where you have like a slow reasoning model that is kind of like your conscious mind and determines what it needs to do. And then you have like a fast model that actually does the movements and stuff. AI kind of extends into the realm of you need to generate as much data as possible.

And having video data and knowing what's good and what's bad is also very important. But yeah, to your question, Open AI probably does want to show that they're making more money. And I don't doubt that there are people there that truly believe that they're building the machine god. And I also don't doubt that they realize if they have a shot at doing that, they need the market to play along and they need to keep growing their revenues. So I think there's a lot of really good counter arguments about like not necessarily are we in a bubble, yes, is the bubble over? Like there are good arguments for that. I don't think one of the, I don't think that, oh, well, they're leaning into like kind of this slops. You know, it's a company.

They're going to do whatever they can to make money. That's capitalism. You know, one of the things I think about another reality of our current time, this is kind of related. But if we're talking about video data, YouTube. staying power has been like phenomenal, right? It's been around for decades now and we haven't really seen any successful competitors. Anyway, well, since we wanted to talk about stocks that are going up, I know. That's another one. People kind of forgot that video takes up a lot more storage than text does. And if we're going to start just like throwing out the slop on video,

the part, basically one of the only areas of semiconductors that has gotten ignored has been storage. Not like memory like, like RAM and stuff, but like hard drives and solid state discs, like Western digital and, you know. Okay. So, Seagate. Yeah. That's what we're talking about. So this was a, this was a $84 stock in late March. And now it's a 254. That's where you're going. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a crazy. There's a crazy charge. But it has gotten attention, but you think it could go up more.

I think so. And I think that to illustrate that dynamic, that's going to keep happening. Basically, you just keep looking at stuff where there's people say, oh, well, you know, there's a glut of X. And that's why this isn't going to win from AI. And then eventually the glut of X doesn't matter. That's what happened to Invidia in the beginning of all this. There was a glut of crypto GPUs.

And now nobody, like, when's the last time you heard someone be bearished on Nvidia because there's too many crypto miners? Sand disk was $48 in April 2nd. That's $126 stock. Pretty crazy. These are just the tools that just store, just basic. Yeah. Yeah, crazy.

It is. And it's, I guess you could be worried by that or you could say this isn't, this isn't like Nvidia doubling in a month necessarily, right? It's just people discovering, I think it's a good barometer, which is important in a bubble, that people are still paying very close attention. And you start to get worried when everybody just goes into the Cisco of it all. But these are real companies that have real products. Of course, there's some silly stuff that's happening.

But it's not only silly stuff. It's not 2021 with the, you know. Yeah. I don't need to. So speaking of on the ground research, or maybe I should say in the sky research, when it comes to robotics, you had a robot dog, right? Yeah. One of those, like, really advanced ones.

We got a Unitary Robot dog. It is super impressive. It's also incredibly creepy when it stands up on its hind legs. Yeah. Have you seen the video? Yeah, I saw your video of it. Yeah. It's, and Unitary, we went and visited Unitary too. And it's, I've seen Boston Dynamics, you know, a spot robot, which is actually more impressive. Also could probably murder you. Like, and the interesting thing about Unitary is, yeah, this, the robot kind of feels. like a weapon, it's very heavy and stuff, but it's, even their humanoid, like, it can't lift more than eight pounds. And also, unitary is not focused on, like, making the brain. They just want to make the hardware. And you go there and, and they were like, where's your LIDAR from? Oh, well, we needed this specific thing, so we just made it ourselves. Okay, what about your actuators? Well, we made those ourselves, too. Anything that they don't make themselves, they get within a 90-kilometer radius of their headquarters. Where's their headquarters? It's in Hangzhou.

Nice. So it's something where you're really, that's the competition that we have stacked up against us in the U.S. versus China. And I think the interesting route that they've taken is it's super advanced. You can code on it. You can already see videos of people buying them and making them do specific things. But they made them not super, like it's not going to kill you. And that's a great way to get a bunch of training data because we don't have enough training. training data of what it's like to move around the world. We have the sum history of all human

knowledge that's been recorded for text models, but we need more data for robotics. And I think that that's like an interesting kind of thing where they're just kind of sending these out into the world so that they can get enough data to actually make it safe enough to have a robot in your house. Can anyone buy a Unitary dog? Like are they for sale online? Yeah, there's a lead time, but I can get around it if you go. Wait, how much are they? So they start at 3,000, and then we got the super advanced one that you can attach a robotic arm to, so it can manipulate its environment, and that was $8,000. And then their humanoid is 16, which is, like, less than the cost of the use time to sit there.

That's not bad. Well, 3,000, also the price for, like, a really good purebred dog, I guess. Well, that's what I was going to say. I don't know what that says. People pay a lot of money for actual dogs, so, yeah, it seems. Why are you looking at me? Why do you think I'm looking at you? Okay.

James, that was so much fun. Thank you so much for coming in and sharing with us your field trip observations. Thanks, Robin. Joe, I think maybe it's the cynical journalist in me, but I get really nervous when we start saying it's different this time. Yeah, I mean, it's always different. It's always the same as sort of, there are certainly, you know, yeah. I mean, look, it's crazy and it's a lot of money. And it's still, you know, we've been asking people on the podcast, what kind of use value are you getting out of this technology? And it's still very ambiguous. I don't know. I don't have, it's not my job to time the market. So I'm glad I don't have to have a view on all of this stuff. But I do think. I do think for, okay, what's your, okay, give us your, give us your price target. You, that's a, okay, give us your price target. I'm copping out too. Okay. I do think this is moving so fast.

Every day the numbers are so big and the stakes are so high for all of this that it does feel like we just need regular updates on the state of how much money is being spent in this area and what the eventual payoff will be. I want someone to draw a massive like infographic of all the financing deals because I think you could make a really interesting one. Yeah, you definitely could. That would probably be illuminating. On that note, I did think James's suggestion of, you know, shorting the private credit. players and then going along the actual physical hardware ones. That was interesting. Yeah.

No, it's really interesting. Also, I had not realized, I mean, it is very interesting the way booms or bubbles, whatever you want to call it. I don't like using the word bubble because that applies, whatever, booms or bubbles, the way they spread out. I just think that's extremely interesting, right? So, Nvidia takes off in late 2022 when people are blown away by chat GPT, and they say there's incredible and it's being powered by all these Nvidia chips.

And then people go on the hunt, right? For other things, it's like what else? And even still today in October 2025, that spreading out process continues. And so, okay, in the last few months, maybe it's like a caterpillar or maybe suddenly people realizing that just sort of old-fashioned computer storage is going to be very hot. But we're still in this phase where as people open their eyes to these things, the spreading out continues to this day. Right. Well, also, there's an expectation that eventually, you know, normal companies are going to benefit from it as well and become more efficient and all of that. I just remember the one question I was going to ask James, but I could just throw it out as sort of a speculative question. So he mentioned all the workers, could you ask all of the workers that are out this are that are building these things? And it does make me wonder about the sort of crowding out possibility. Like, imagine if you, imagine if you had some other business in Abilene and you're trying to hire an HVAC worker right now. Because HVAC, you know, you're like, oh, a restaurant. You're competing with like open AI. Yeah, you're like, you have a restaurant in Abilene and you're like, you know what?

I need to update my air conditioner or whatever or whatever. Yeah, there's no hope. And what are you going to do? Because all the HVAC workers are at that big Stargate operation. And I do think this is a very interesting macro question on all kinds of things, which is the degree to which all of this spending with uncertain payoffs will have a crowding out and potentially inflationary effect on the rest of the economy. Well, presumably machine god will eventually design HVAC robots, so problem will be solved. Problem will be solved. All right.

Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest James Van Gila and he's at Citrini 7.

Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armand. Dashobin at Dashbot and Kale Brooks and Kail Brooks. For more OddLod's content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLodds. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord. Discord.g.g. slash oddlots. And if you enjoy Oddlots, if you like it when we talk about the physical realities of AI, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.

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