
Alberta, It's Time to Build
Welcome back everyone.Two weeks ago I wrote that Thursday was a warning, not the flush. The flush coincidentally came with a face and a situationally ironic name.Leopold Aschenbrenner and his Situational Awareness fund. Market Update📈📉The AI trade compressed for five straight weeks, names down 40, 50, 60 percent from their highs in a straight line. Meta was down 10 percent on the year at the lows, Microsoft down 20, Amazon and Google flat while the Nasdaq held up 13. The proximate cause was sitting in plain sight: the Nasdaq topped the day of Kevin Warsh’s first FOMC meeting. Long-term inflation expectations barely moved, but real rates, the way markets price long-duration assets, jumped about fifty basis points. Warsh is a balance-sheet hawk. He wants the Fed out of the mortgage and long-Treasury market, less forward guidance, and real price discovery. The longest-duration trade in the market, the AI buildout, paid the toll first. Meanwhile, for the first time in a year, the index’s built-in AI hedge failed: the capex payers got punished and the capex receivers didn’t rally enough to catch the tape.Then came the capitulation event. Situational Awareness, one of the most followed AI-concentrated funds in the world, blew up. Roughly $46 billion of equity levered about three times, north of $125 billion of gross exposure, concentrated in exactly the photonics, memory, and GPU capex-receiver names that had been cut in half. When your book drops 50 percent on three turns of leverage, the banks don’t wait. Ken Griffin flew back from Monaco for a day, bought the public equity book for somewhere between $20 and $30 billion depending on who’s reporting, and flew back to his vacation. One of the largest hedge fund bailouts in history, done between dinner reservations.Forced selling from a leveraged whale is the kind of thing that marks bottoms, and so far it has. The capex receivers have rebounded hard. Microsoft went from down 20 on the year to up five. Meta recovered. Amazon just became the fifth $3 trillion company on earth after an incredible AWS quarter. And in the great rotation tell, Apple, which spent a year as the safe haven for people who wanted tech without AI, gave the crown of world’s most valuable company back to Nvidia.Here’s why I think the rebound has fundamentals under it rather than just short covering. GPU rental prices have doubled in the past year. If these were bad investments being depreciated into a glut, the rental market would be telling you. Instead the infrastructure is in such demand that the hyperscalers are demonstrably under-earning on the assets they already own. Microsoft and Amazon’s quarters showed real return on the cloud investment, and the frontier labs are doubling revenue every six months. We’ve never watched businesses go from startup to a hundred billion of annualized revenue this fast. The market is having a genuinely hard time valuing it, and the next test comes when OpenAI and Anthropic hit the public markets, likely around year-end.The market is once again believing the spend is justified. Volatile bottoms don’t mean the volatility is over. But the burden of proof has flipped back onto the bears.No influencers allowedA basket store on Nantucket hung a sign that says “No influencers,” and Mel and I spent longer on it than we planned, because it’s secretly a markets story. Scarcity is the oldest luxury strategy there is. Rolex runs it, Hermes runs it, Porsche runs it, and now an expensive basket shop is running it against the very people who normally manufacture demand. When access gets democratized, exclusivity becomes the product. You’re seeing the same physics in collectibles, where a PSA-10 grade takes a $500 Charizard to $45,000. Authentication, uniqueness, and real-life experience are becoming the scarce assets in an economy of infinite reproduction. It’s why I keep a long-term bucket in portfolios for real-world experiences, the Four Seasons and airline-travel end of the consumer. It’ll never be as sexy as the picks-and-shovels trade. It also never has a Situational Awareness moment.The West, and the restMel’s framework this episode is the one I’d ask you to sit with. The left/right spectrum you grew up with, mostly an economic argument about markets versus intervention, is dead as a map. The axis that actually predicts where politicians land in 2026 is this: do you believe Western civilization is worth defending and improving, or do you believe it needs to be dismantled for something presumed better? Data centers, pipelines, billionaires, even the Billy Bishop airport fight all sort cleanly along that line, and almost none of it sorts along the old one.Her sharpest point was about the scarcity loop. An abundance mindset says the pie grows; when someone else wins, that’s evidence you can too. What a chunk of our politics runs on instead is a grift cycle: make people fearful there isn’t enough to go around, pass policies that ensure there isn’t, offer the state as the solution, collect the votes, repeat. After enough cycles, people stop believing the private sector can deliver anything, which makes the state more necessary, which makes the pie smaller. Scarcity is a policy choice. So is the exit.WestJet, and the party that walked awayThe WestJet strike resolved into a tentative deal, but the political tell stuck with me. The Trudeau Liberals spent a decade courting unions. This Liberal government watched 4,400 flight attendants shut down summer travel over unpaid ground work and had essentially nothing to say. Not intervention, not support, just indifference. Mel’s distinction matters here: the old Liberal enthusiasm was mostly for public sector unions, which grow the state, and about 30 percent of employed Canadians now belong to a union of some kind. When public sector compensation stops involving trade-offs entirely, you get what she called a hostage situation rather than a negotiation, and the public’s sympathy erodes. Ask the postal workers. The deeper irony is the one we keep hammering: the biggest thing happening for blue-collar wages in this country right now is the data-center and megaproject buildout, and the party that historically claimed those workers is ambivalent about both the projects and, apparently, the picket lines. The workers have moved. The parties haven’t caught up.Alberta, it’s time to build 🏗️This week I published the longest thing I’ve written this year, and it’s the piece I most want you to read and share. It makes the case that Alberta is about to run the last great cycle of the old energy economy and the first great cycle of the new one, simultaneously.The short version. On July 2, the Prime Minister and the Premier stood together and announced a million-barrel pipeline to the coast. Six days later Meta committed $13 billion to a one-gigawatt data center in Sturgeon County, its largest anywhere outside the United States. The pipeline is the biggest version of Alberta’s hundred-year-old model: pull energy out of the ground and ship it somewhere else to become valuable. The data center is the first serious version of a new model, where the gas stays home and gets refined into the most valuable commodity on earth right now. A data center is a token refinery. It converts BTUs into intelligence and sells it globally at software margins.The piece walks through the gas math (every gigawatt of gas-fired data center load is roughly 0.16 bcf a day of new, flat, creditworthy, in-basin demand, the structurally better customer AECO has waited decades for), why one campus becomes five (hyperscalers copy each other’s site audits, and Alberta just passed Meta’s), the TSMC-Phoenix precedent ($12 billion became $265 billion and forty follow-on projects), the Strathcona County tax lesson (industrial assessment is why Sherwood Park pays 30 to 45 percent less property tax than comparable cities, while Edmonton households just absorbed a 29 percent increase in four years), and who actually gets paid: the electricians, pipefitters, module yards, brokers, lawyers, and accountants of Edmonton, St. Albert, Sherwood Park, and Fort Saskatchewan. The commodity gets the headlines. The infrastructure gets the early returns. The services get the multiples.It closes on the Abundance argument, because central Alberta is now the closest thing North America has to a live test of Klein and Thompson’s thesis that scarcity is self-inflicted. Greenlight went from announcement to a $4.6 billion final investment decision with a four-year build. In most US markets, the interconnection queue alone takes longer. Our advantage isn’t capital. It’s the willingness to say yes quickly, and it’s measured in one number: months from application to token.Share it with your MLA, your favourite councillor, and the smartest skeptic you know.Podcast & YouTube Recommendations🎙* Four of the sharpest minds in geopolitics predicting how the world ends* A must listen from RenMac and their special guest - Stephen Moran* One of the best interviews on Consumer Trends with the CEO of Doordash Tony Xu This is a public episode. 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