The Outthinking Investor with Daleep Singh
Aug 11, 2026 · 38 min · 10 segments
The AI-driven capex cycle might be the biggest investment story of the past century. The five largest hyperscalers were on track to spend around $800 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025, and as a…
Daleep SinghHost
It's not exaggeration to say the AI CapEx cycle is the biggest investment story of the past century.
The five largest hyperscalers, they're on track to spend almost eight hundred billion dollars on AI infrastructure this year.
And as a share of US GDP, AI-related CapEx already exceeds the peak of the late nineties internet boom.
It dwarfs the CapEx spend on the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, the Apollo space program, and the shale revolution.
They represent anywhere from twenty-five to fifty percent of the cost of an AI training cluster.
The same chips that power frontier AI models also guide precision munitions, power satellite comms, and determine whether a military can see and act faster than its adversary.
The national security stakes are potentially existential, and whoever controls the leading edge of chip production, therefore, doesn't just have an economic edge, they have an overwhelming strategic advantage, and it's why governments have been in a race to shore up their supply chains.
Every major economy at roughly the same time has decided that leaving the chip supply chain to market forces is an unacceptable liability for national security.
And here's the problem: legislating industrial policy to shore up supply chain resilience and executing are two very different challenges.
He was the person charged with turning more than fifty billion dollars of US taxpayer money into functioning fabs while operating inside a massive federal bureaucracy against the clock.
He's now a distinguished fellow at Princeton Center for Economic Policy, and his research focuses on developing a principled framework for industrial policy.
It's not exaggeration to say the AI CapEx cycle is the biggest investment story of the past century.
The five largest hyperscalers, they're on track to spend almost eight hundred billion dollars on AI infrastructure this year.
And as a share of US GDP, AI-related CapEx already exceeds the peak of the late nineties internet boom.
It dwarfs the CapEx spend on the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, the Apollo space program, and the shale revolution.
They represent anywhere from twenty-five to fifty percent of the cost of an AI training cluster.
The same chips that power frontier AI models also guide precision munitions, power satellite comms, and determine whether a military can see and act faster than its adversary.
The national security stakes are potentially existential, and whoever controls the leading edge of chip production, therefore, doesn't just have an economic edge, they have an overwhelming strategic advantage, and it's why governments have been in a race to shore up their supply chains.
Every major economy at roughly the same time has decided that leaving the chip supply chain to market forces is an unacceptable liability for national security.
And here's the problem: legislating industrial policy to shore up supply chain resilience and executing are two very different challenges.
He was the person charged with turning more than fifty billion dollars of US taxpayer money into functioning fabs while operating inside a massive federal bureaucracy against the clock.
He's now a distinguished fellow at Princeton Center for Economic Policy, and his research focuses on developing a principled framework for industrial policy.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.