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brianletort.aiD. Brian Letort, Ph.D.

Biweekly market intelligence

Power, Models, and Moats

October 17, 2026No. 4

Structural movement across the AI value chain, for people who allocate capital and capacity.

Complete issue archive.

Eleven pillars swept every cycle — power, land, construction, workloads, networking, chips and memory, models, distribution, data, policy, and capital. Public sources only, explicit transaction states, and a coverage audit that prints its own gaps.

The eleven pillars

Swept every cycle, audited in every issue

  1. 01Power
  2. 02Land
  3. 03Construction
  4. 04Workloads
  5. 05Networking
  6. 06Chips and memory
  7. 07Models
  8. 08Distribution
  9. 09Data
  10. 10Policy
  11. 11Capital

Published issues

4 issues · newest first

  1. No.04

    2026-10-04 to 2026-10-17 · October 17, 2026

    Credit is the control point: FERC hands firm power to the states, chip vendors become lenders, and the agent gets a directory entry

    In two weeks FERC kept PJM's large-load registry and struck the wholesale instrument that would have decided which data centers get curtailed, leaving firm service to be priced contract by contract in utility deals that carry 90% minimum bills and nine-figure security. Three hyperscalers contracted most of the nuclear uprate pipeline the NRC expects to see this decade under a rule that no longer exists. Chip vendors are now the lenders of record for the labs, the foundry says it checks customers' financing before adding capacity, and memory pricing power showed up as a record Samsung quarter on flat bit growth. In software, the list price stopped being the unit of model pricing and the enterprise fight moved to which directory the agent lives in and whose meter runs when it acts.

  2. No.03

    2026-09-20 to 2026-10-03 · October 3, 2026

    Who counts the load: regulators, hyperscalers, and lenders fight over the unit of AI demand

    In two weeks, FERC, Texas, and Maryland each committed to making data centers pay their own way without agreeing on what a data center is. Hyperscalers answered with bilateral nuclear and gas contracts the regulator's own rules do not count as new supply, lenders priced GPU paper on offtaker credit rather than silicon, and frontier labs cut token prices in ways that raise tokens per job. The control points this cycle are measurement and accounting, not megawatts or benchmark scores.

  3. No.02

    2026-09-06 to 2026-09-19 · September 19, 2026

    The AI stack is repricing around power, orchestration, and governed context

    This cycle's durable signal is not one model release. Capital is moving toward power-ready sites, network control, custom silicon, governed enterprise data, and the operating layers that turn increasingly capable models into repeatable work.

  4. No.01

    2026-08-22 to 2026-09-05 · September 5, 2026

    The Collateral Is the Contract

    Six GPU-backed facilities priced this year separate cleanly into two bands, and the variable is not the hardware. It is who signed the offtake. Power still decides whether a data center can exist; a rated counterparty now decides what it costs to build.

Methodology

What survives into every issue

  • Every issue audits all eleven pillars and publishes the thin ones rather than hiding them.
  • Transactions carry an explicit state: rumored, reported, agreed, signed, approved, closed, challenged, or abandoned.
  • Strategy dossiers require an alternative explanation alongside the inferred strategy.
  • Consequence chains carry falsifiers, and investor cases carry tripwires. No price targets.
  • Factual charts are native data layers with source, unit, period, and method. Generated art never renders numbers.