Rung 09 / Who is paying, and how

Capital Structure

Who is financing the buildout, and how the money is actually structured.

3
Sources
2
Concepts
2
Entities
PaperReport3AnalysisNews
A stack of machined steel coins with one copper coin on top, on paper.

In scope: neocloud financing, SPVs and vendor financing, circular and related-party deals, depreciation schedules and useful-life changes, contracted backlog and RPO, inter-layer double counting. Out: what is being built (datacenters), what it costs to run (inference-economics).

Stepped tiers of financing with a single copper seam at the debt/equity boundary.
NeocloudsRPODepreciationVendor financing

This rung has no compiled overview yet. Until it does, the base is best read across the stack rather than down one rung.

Start here

  1. 01
    LLM Inference Prices Have Fallen Rapidly but Unequally Across Tasks

    Start at the number the whole base chases: what a token costs, and how unevenly that price has actually fallen.

    inference-economics
  2. 02
    Memory-Centric Computing: A Paradigm Shift for Sustainable and Efficient Systems

    The reason the price falls the way it does — the bottleneck is moving data, not doing arithmetic on it.

    hardware
  3. 03
    AI Hyperscaler Capex 2026: Why Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon Are All Spending at Once

    Where the money physically lands once the bottleneck is priced: buildings, land and power, committed years ahead.

    datacenters
  4. 04
    Speculative Decoding Meets Quantization: Compatibility Evaluation and Hierarchical Framework Design

    How the cost is actually cut in software, and what the two cheapest tricks do to each other when you stack them.

    serving
  5. 05
    Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models

    The demand side: the systems wrapped around the model are what decide how many tokens the price applies to.

    harnesses