Writes Second Order by TKN — a plain-English map of AI infrastructure and semiconductors for non-specialist investors. Focus: who gets paid, where money sticks, and which step is stuck. Not investment advice.
Explained
Contracted power is the electricity a neocloud has signed rights to, not the power its GPUs are using. CoreWeave had 4.2 GW contracted in August 2026 but 1.5 GW active at 30 June; the gap is where revenue waits.
Singapore
Digital Core REIT is buying 2.5% of a Singapore data hall that valuers put at S$3.5 billion, about US$64 million per megawatt. Old leases there pay far below today’s market. But the hall sits on a 30-year JTC land lease, and about a fifth of its value assumes that lease is renewed.
Analysis
Vertiv's customers have paid $4.1 billion for power and cooling gear not yet delivered, and orders doubled. At $232.50 the price needs its factories to keep pace, not the orders. Who gets paid first, three scenarios, arithmetic shown.
Semiconductors
Advantest builds the automated testers that check AI processors and memory before they ship. Demand is outrunning its factories, and the DRAM inside each tester is getting scarce, so building testers is the step that binds.
China
Naura, China’s biggest maker of chipmaking machines, says orders keep growing, but its third-quarter sales rose just 1.3% because some parts are in short supply. Customers are paying ahead and the machines are waiting. The stuck step is one small part.
Explained
AWS is still the biggest cloud, but Azure and Google Cloud are growing faster. All three now hold more than $560 billion of signed backlog each and all three say the same thing: they cannot add capacity as fast as customers sign for it.
Wire
Alphabet now guarantees $48.0 billion of other companies' data centre rent, up from $16.9 billion at the end of 2025. If a tenant defaults, it pays and takes the halls. Lenders are financing buildings on Google's name, not the tenant's.
AI Data Centers
Hut 8, a former Bitcoin miner, now builds AI data center campuses in Louisiana and Texas and leases them for 15 years: 949 MW signed, $26.6 billion of base-term contracts, $7.5 billion of project bonds and no hall handed over until 2027.
Catalyst
Amazon's leases signed but not yet started rose $27.7 billion in a quarter to $164.9 billion, while AWS backlog reached $578 billion. The landlords, builders and equipment makers behind AWS hold years of signed work that pays out only as each building is handed over.
Explained
A clean room is a sealed room where air is filtered so few particles land on a wafer. New chip supply waits on these rooms: Samsung says it secures clean rooms first and adds tools later, so 2027 capex buys little 2028 output.
US
Digital Realty signed a record $627 million of yearly contracts in the third quarter, and its pile of signed contracts that have not started reached $1.85 billion. New deals now take 17 months to start paying, and fewer leases started than planned. The stuck step is the handover date.
Analysis
Samsung printed ₩107.4 trillion of operating profit and holds ₩197.6 trillion of net cash. 2027 HBM is sold out. If new clean rooms stay empty into 2028, where does the cash stick?
