Preview: The bill, our best estimate of it, and the map: where each dollar of the AI buildout actually lands.

What you're reading: We built Luniter because we love science and want to know what's coming next, and which companies are actually building it. We track 200 of them. Every Monday we pick the one story from that world we think is worth your time and explain it in plain English. It takes about ten minutes. If you're new here, welcome.

Part I of III: The Hyperscaler Bill

When someone is handing out two billion dollars a day, you would expect the businesses receiving it to rise.

Last week was the loudest of the earnings season, and the companies writing the checks came out of it fine. Microsoft and Amazon both rose hard the session after they reported. Alphabet, which reported the Wednesday before, fell almost 7 percent on its own print and spent the following week climbing back.

The companies receiving the checks split. Vertiv, which builds the power and cooling systems inside data centers, fell 17 percent the day it reported. EMCOR, which wires those same buildings, rose 19 percent one day later on its own report. Same buildout, same week, opposite verdicts.

Why the market pays some recipients and punishes others is the question of the next two Mondays.

Where does the money actually go? Microsoft's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, gave the cleanest answer of the week, in one sentence:

That is the first slice of the map. Two thirds of the spending is silicon: the processors everyone writes about, priced in fast, replaced often, the covered story. The other third builds the physical world around them, and that third is where this series lives. Almost nobody itemizes this part. So we did.

None of these companies agree on what counts as spending. In April, Microsoft expected about 190 billion dollars of calendar-year spending; in July it said about 175 billion, and explained the gap itself: leases reclassified, nothing cut. Meta counts its finance leases in, the same kind Microsoft just moved out. Amazon counts the cash that leaves the door. Alphabet gives only a range, one it has raised twice since February. Four of the five keep calendar-year figures we can line up honestly, so we add those and only those. Our best estimate of the four-company bill: about 730 billion dollars this year. Call it two billion dollars a day. Oracle is the fifth, and it sits on its own row: its reporting of this spending is even less standard than the rest.

The strain is already visible.

Alphabet's finance chief, Anat Ashkenazi, described its debt going from "about 16 billion dollars" to "about 100 billion dollars" in twelve months, and that same quarter Alphabet spent about 6 billion dollars more in cash than it brought in. Its reported profit still looked enormous, but 99 billion dollars of the quarter's income was gains on stakes it holds in other companies, more than double what its operating business earned. The filing does not name the company behind most of that gain, beyond calling it private; outside reporting identifies it as Anthropic, which also rents its computing from Google. The investor, the vendor, and the beneficiary of the markup are the same company.

Amazon, over the past year, has spent 7.6 billion dollars more in cash than it brought in. Microsoft, meanwhile, expects to stay cash-positive through the fiscal year it just began; Alphabet expects its own cash flow to stay under pressure. Whoever wins the buildout, the years of paying for it have started.

Now walk one dollar of that estimate through our model, rounded to keep it readable.

About 67 cents is the silicon. We gray it out on the chart and leave it to the hundred other sources covering it.

About 18 cents is electrical work: substations, switchgear, transformers, backup generation, and miles of conductor, the gear that turns a field with a grid connection into a machine that can drink power all day. It is the single biggest line in the build.

About 7 cents is cooling: the pipes, pumps, and chillers that carry the heat back out. Every watt that comes in as electricity leaves as heat, so this slice exists because of the last one.

About 5 cents is the building you can actually photograph, the steel-and-concrete shell. The famous part of a data center is nearly the cheapest part; the wiring costs almost four times the visible building.

The last 3 cents are design, engineering, and fees. Land and the grid hookup are folded inside these shares rather than listed beside them.

These are modeled shares, built from construction-cost studies and the companies' own disclosures, not any single company's line items; the chart carries each source and its basis. Put our estimate underneath the map and the electrical slice alone runs on the order of 130 billion dollars this year. That number is why next Monday's letter exists.

The map says where the money goes. It does not say how firmly anyone can claim it. So we sort every claim on this money into three rungs and call it the lock-in ladder. CONTRACTED at the top: signed work, dollars attached. FRAMEWORK in the middle: reserved capacity, terms to come. ANNOUNCED at the bottom: press releases.

The honest risk in our position is that the market already ran this test last week, and some of those record order books are worth less than they look. The ladder is how we check: next Monday we walk the biggest slice of the map, the electrical work, down these rungs, and the week after, a slice nobody has billed yet.

Today's reading comes from the very top. Microsoft's contracted backlog grew 84 percent in a year — which is 25 percent once you set aside a single customer, OpenAI. Microsoft also funds OpenAI, so part of the top rung's biggest number is its own money coming back as orders. If the money keeps flowing at this pace, the top of the ladder gets paid first, because signed work cashes and announcements may or may not.

Alongside the scores we run the Opinionated Machinery (a rules-based, fully simulated portfolio system, published in the open). This earnings week resulted in a rotation rather than an exit: in its largest book it sold Astera Labs, SiTime, Coherent, and KLA on its cool-down rule and bought Lumentum and Lam Research the same week — all six had already cooled, and what separated them was the action signal, which had fallen below the machine's line for the four it sold and stayed above it for the two it bought.

Coherent and Lumentum both make the lasers that move data inside these buildings; KLA and Lam both sell the machines that make the chips.

We said last Monday we would keep watching Nucor. In June it guided to between $4.70 and $4.80 a share; last week it printed $5.04. That is two strong quarters back to back, and the chart shows what they did to our numbers: the growth reading and the action signal have each stepped up twice, once after each report.

Scorecard — Nucor (NUE)

The picture in one line: strong growth at a fair price, second on our ranking list.

Nucor's quarter is what the top of the ladder looks like after conversion: not a backlog, not a promise, a printed result. The market paid the recipients whose claims convert. That is the split from the top of this letter, resolved.

Sterling reports after the close today; its report belongs to next Monday. Next Monday: the electricians.