Melanie “Mel C” Chisholm, best known as Sporty Spice from the Spice Girls, has married model Chris Dingwall, wearing dresses designed by her longtime friend and former bandmate Victoria Beckham across two separate wedding ceremonies held on opposite sides of the world.

The couple first married in a legal ceremony in Australia, Dingwall’s home country, before holding a second ceremony at a friend’s lakeside property in Cumbria, England, on July 18. Both wedding looks were designed by Beckham, whose involvement came together through a chance dinner conversation just days before Chisholm departed for the Australian leg of the celebrations.

A last-minute favor between old friends

Beckham described how the dress arrangement came about in an interview with British Vogue published July 19. “I was actually having dinner with Melanie and asked her what she was up to,” Beckham said. “She very casually told me she was leaving for Australia in two days and getting married!”

According to Beckham, Chisholm had already ordered one of her designs for the occasion but ran into a last-minute problem. “When I asked what she was wearing, she mentioned she had actually ordered one of my dresses but that it didn’t quite fit, and she didn’t have time to get it altered before leaving,” Beckham said. “I happened to have that exact dress in my own wardrobe and offered to lend it to her.”

From a borrowed dress to a custom design

The dress that traveled to Australia with the couple was an ivory slip dress, which Chisholm wore for the Australian ceremony. When the time came for the second ceremony in Cumbria, Beckham took the opportunity to go further, transforming the simpler design into something more elaborate for what Chisholm described as a low-key, relaxed, romantic and chic lakeside celebration.

Reflecting on having Beckham’s design as part of her wedding, Chisholm offered a nod to a familiar wedding tradition. “Victoria’s dress was my something borrowed,” Chisholm said. “It was very special, having her there.”

How the couple met

Chisholm, 52, and Dingwall first connected on the dating app Raya roughly three years ago before meeting in person for their first date in Australia. Chisholm described an immediate connection between them. “The spark was immediate,” she said. “I was 49 when I met Chris and I was in a really good place. We had a date in Australia, and it’s been difficult to separate us ever since.”

Chisholm is also mother to a 17-year-old daughter, Scarlett Starr, from a previous relationship with ex-partner Thomas Starr.

A surprise proposal in Mallorca

Dingwall proposed to Chisholm while the couple was vacationing in Mallorca last July, a moment Chisholm said caught her completely off guard despite how naturally their relationship had developed. “It was beautiful, just the two of us,” she recalled. “He couldn’t believe I was surprised but I was floored.”

Even though she hadn’t anticipated the proposal in the moment, Chisholm said her decision to accept came easily. “I just knew immediately it was the right thing to do,” she said, reflecting on a broader sense of self-assurance she has found later in life. “I’ve had this awakening in my 50s—I’m very comfortable in my skin. I thought, you know what, this is a part of my story. When you’re my age you’re like… I actually want to experience all of the things.”

Part of a broader wave of 2026 celebrity weddings

Chisholm and Dingwall’s wedding joins a lengthy list of celebrity marriages that have taken place throughout 2026. Among the most high-profile was the wedding of pop star Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, who married in a star-studded ceremony at Madison Square Garden on July 3, with roughly 1,000 guests in attendance, including officiant Adam Sandler, and custom Dior looks designed by Jonathan Anderson.

Other notable 2026 celebrity weddings included supermodel Paulina Porizkova’s marriage to television writer Jeff Greenstein in Italy, held in front of 100 close friends and family members three years after the couple matched on a dating app. The pair described their celebration in a statement to Vogue, saying they were warmed by feeling they had gotten exactly the wedding they wanted, and exactly the partner they had always dreamed of.

Additional celebrity unions this year included “The Vampire Diaries” alum Paul Wesley’s marriage to Natalie Kuckenberg, country singer Lainey Wilson’s wedding to former NFL quarterback Devlin “Duck” Hodges in Tennessee, and “The Boys” co-stars Jack Quaid and Claudia Doumit, who married in Australia and confirmed the news during a June appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

A relationship marked by longevity within the Spice Girls circle

Chisholm’s wedding also underscores the enduring friendship between the members of the Spice Girls, one of the best-selling girl groups in music history, more than two decades after the group first rose to global fame in the late 1990s. Beckham, who performed in the group as Posh Spice, has continued to build a prominent career as a fashion designer since the band’s height, making her direct involvement in Chisholm’s wedding wardrobe a meaningful full-circle moment linking the group’s pop culture legacy to Beckham’s ongoing work in the fashion industry.

With both ceremonies now complete, Chisholm and Dingwall’s wedding closes out a significant personal chapter for the Spice Girls star, whose international two-part celebration, spanning Australia and England, reflects both the couple’s transcontinental relationship and Chisholm’s continued close bond with her former bandmate more than 25 years after the group first became a global phenomenon.

North East Chamber of Commerce CEO John McCabe has written to Andy Burnham to congratulate him on his new role

The leader of the North East’s biggest business membership group has called upon new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to help unlock better outcomes for regional communities. North East Chamber of Commerce CEO John McCabe has sent a letter to Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP on behalf of members to congratulate him on his new role as UK PM.

And the letter urges the Government to commit to six practical actions to unlock the full potential of the North East and help build a stronger, fairer and more competitive United Kingdom.

The Chamber, which has 1,800 members, says the action points align with its Unlocking the North East Economy policy plan and are centred around skills, net zero and energy security, connectivity, exporting, healthier communities and inclusive growth.

In the letter, Mr McCabe tells how the Chamber welcomes the PM’s ambition to establish a ‘No. 10 of the North’ and hope it becomes a genuine gateway into Government for businesses, communities and leaders from every part of the North, building on the success of Darlington Economic Campus.

He says: “Working alongside North East Mayor Kim McGuinness and Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen, we have shown how business and devolved leaders can work together to unlock investment and deliver better outcomes for our communities. We encourage your government to build on this approach by giving mayoral combined authorities the long-term funding certainty and flexibility they need to drive investment, improve productivity and support good growth across every region.

“Businesses continue to face significant pressures following increases in employer National Insurance contributions, the National Living Wage, inflation and energy costs. More than ever, employers need confidence, certainty and stability to invest, recruit, innovate and grow.

“The North East is a region of ingenuity, creativity and resilience. We are home to world class advanced manufacturers, internationally successful exporters, pioneering clean energy industries, leading universities and Further Education colleges and ambitious entrepreneurs. We stand ready to work with your government to help deliver the good growth that you have rightly placed at the heart of your agenda.

“The North, including the North East, stands ready to play an even greater role in our nation’s success. Our employers want to work with your government to invest, innovate, trade and create opportunity. Together, we can unlock the full potential of our region, strengthen the wider North and build a more prosperous, inclusive and internationally competitive United Kingdom.”

Meanwhile, North East Mayor Kim McGuinness called upon the new Prime Minister to hand greater powers to regions, allowing local leaders can do more to tackle the cost of living, create jobs and improve opportunities for young people.

In a letter, Ms McGuinness says she wants greater devolution, to give regions the capability to deliver faster action and tangible results to help local people.

In the letter, she states: “The people of the North East are incredibly proud of their local identity. We have a strong record of working together to get things done. If the people here begin to see more of their hometown improving, their bills coming down and their children finding opportunity close to home, they won’t simply believe in devolution. They’ll believe politics can work again.

“You are the first prime minister in British history who genuinely believes in using devolution to tear down the barriers to local growth. If we get this right, we will finally show people what take back control looks like. The North East is ready to work with you on this.”

Shares of IREN Limited surged 17.02%, or $5.72, to $39.34 Monday morning, as the Australian AI cloud infrastructure company raised its year-end revenue target following a wave of new multiyear customer contracts, snapping a weeks-long losing streak for the volatile stock.

IREN, formerly known as Iris Energy and in the midst of transitioning from a Bitcoin mining company into a vertically integrated AI cloud infrastructure provider, said it now expects more than $4 billion in annualized run-rate revenue by the end of the year, up from its previous target of $3.7 billion. The company attributed the upward revision to new customer contracts secured with leading AI developers.

New contracts drive the upgraded outlook

According to reporting from Benzinga, the higher revenue target follows approximately $2.8 billion in new multiyear customer contracts, adding to what the company describes as a growing pipeline of demand that continues to exceed IREN’s currently available and planned data center capacity. IREN said it remains actively engaged across its 2026 and 2027 expansion pipeline as it works to scale infrastructure to meet that demand.

Notably, the newly announced contracts include customer prepayments covering roughly 45% of the associated GPU capital costs, a structure that helps reduce IREN’s near-term funding requirements as it continues building out its infrastructure footprint. The contracts carry a weighted average term of approximately four years, reflecting sustained long-term demand from both hyperscale cloud providers and enterprise customers seeking dedicated AI computing capacity.

A volatile stretch for the stock

Monday’s rally arrives after a particularly difficult period for IREN shares, which had finished lower in 19 of the previous 22 trading sessions amid a broader rotation out of AI infrastructure and so-called “neocloud” stocks. The shares had fallen roughly 17% just last week alone, part of a steeper decline that saw the stock drop more than 40% over the trailing month and nearly 19% over the trailing week, even as the stock remained up substantially, by as much as 147.89%, over the trailing 12 months.

Heading into Monday’s session, IREN’s 14-day Relative Strength Index had fallen deep into oversold territory at a reading of 30, according to Schaeffer’s Investment Research, a technical signal that some traders interpreted as suggesting the stock was due for a rebound, potentially amplified by a short squeeze among traders who had bet against the shares during the recent decline. Monday’s rally brought the stock’s year-to-date performance back to roughly breakeven, following a run earlier this year that had briefly pushed shares toward $70 before a sharp subsequent reversal.

A broader transformation into AI infrastructure

IREN’s strategic pivot from Bitcoin mining toward AI cloud services has been central to the stock’s dramatic swings throughout 2026. The company’s AI Cloud Services revenue grew 94.2% quarter-over-quarter during its fiscal third quarter, even as the company has deliberately wound down portions of its legacy Bitcoin mining operations to focus more heavily on AI infrastructure.

That transformation has been underpinned by several major partnerships and acquisitions. IREN has secured a $9.7 billion contract with Microsoft and a $3.4 billion, five-year contract with Nvidia covering deployment of Blackwell-generation GPUs through IREN’s AI Cloud platform. As part of that broader partnership, Nvidia also holds the right to purchase up to 30 million IREN shares at $70 per share. The company additionally closed its acquisition of Spain-based Nostrum Group, adding approximately 490 megawatts of secured grid power capacity along with a development pipeline and a data center team of more than 50 employees to IREN’s overall platform.

IREN has also continued to strengthen its leadership team amid the expansion, recently appointing Eric Hammersley as chief information security officer and elevating its chief capital officer to also assume the role of chief financial officer, expanding oversight of the company’s financial operations, reporting and strategic planning as it scales its infrastructure buildout.

Wall Street remains broadly bullish despite the volatility

Despite the stock’s sharp swings, several Wall Street analysts have maintained bullish outlooks on IREN. Jefferies initiated coverage of the stock with a Buy rating and a price target of $79, citing the company’s substantial powered land bank and vertically integrated GPU cloud strategy as key structural advantages within the broader AI infrastructure market. Macquarie has maintained an Outperform rating with a $90 price target, while Freedom Broker recently upgraded the stock to Buy with a $58 target. The average analyst price target across covering firms currently stands at approximately $79.11, implying substantial potential upside from Monday’s trading levels even after the day’s sharp gains.

As of June 30, IREN reported approximately $7.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet, providing the company with meaningful financial flexibility as it continues funding its capital-intensive AI infrastructure expansion.

With IREN’s next scheduled financial update expected around August 27, investors are likely to continue closely monitoring the company’s progress toward its newly raised $4 billion annualized run-rate revenue target, along with further updates on its expanding data center capacity and additional customer contract announcements. Given the stock’s history of sharp swings tied to sentiment around the broader AI infrastructure trade, IREN shares are likely to remain a closely watched, high-volatility name within the sector heading into the second half of 2026.

UK businesses are being asked to cut the carbon footprint of workforce travel while the information they need to do it arrives after the room has already been booked, new research suggests.

Just one in four (24 per cent) UK business decision-makers can easily compare carbon data before booking workforce accommodation, according to workforce travel management platform Roomex. A further 33 per cent can see the information for only some of the available options, while 38 per cent receive it after the booking or not at all.

The findings, published in Roomex’s The Accommodation Visibility Gap report, point to a quietly absurd state of affairs: many firms are dutifully measuring accommodation emissions after employees have travelled, yet lack the data to reduce them at the moment it would actually make a difference.

For the trades, construction firms, engineers and field service businesses that keep mobile teams on the road, this is not a fringe concern. Workforce accommodation is essential or important to 71 per cent of organisations, enabling workers to reach sites, projects and customers.

Carbon rarely tops the checklist

The research is refreshingly honest about where carbon sits in the pecking order. Cost, location, availability or project urgency take priority over carbon impact in 85 per cent of organisations at least some of the time.

Nearly two-thirds (63 per cent) say bookers need approval, or simply cannot select a lower-carbon option, if it costs more, is further from the worksite or both.

That will ring true for owner-managers already juggling tight margins. But the pressure to account for travel emissions is not going away. With tougher sustainability reporting rules approaching, larger customers are increasingly pushing carbon disclosure requirements down their supply chains, and smaller firms that cannot produce credible numbers risk losing out on contracts.

Keith Watson, president at Roomex, said: “Businesses are being asked to reduce the carbon impact of workforce travel without always having the information they need to do it. The research shows that carbon data is often missing, difficult to compare, or only available after accommodation has been booked. By that point, the decision has already been made.

“Businesses need clear, comparable carbon information while they are weighing up cost, location and availability. That allows them to choose a lower-carbon option where it works for the job.”

Measured after, decided before

The report calls on businesses to connect accommodation search, booking, approval and reporting data, so that carbon can be considered before a room is booked rather than only totted up afterwards.

The problem echoes a wider pattern. Research has repeatedly shown that most UK SMEs do not know their business carbon emissions, and the travel sector has only recently begun producing more accurate carbon calculations for journeysthat let firms compare options with confidence.

Hotel stays count as Scope 3 emissions under greenhouse gas accounting, and the government publishes official conversion factors for company reporting that include a figure per room per night. But averages after the fact are no substitute for comparable numbers at the point of booking.

Roomex helps businesses centralise workforce accommodation booking, improve cost control and bring reporting into one place. Through its partnership with SQUAKE, it also supports CO2e estimates for accommodation, allowing organisations to view carbon impact alongside the practical information used to manage stays.

For SME owners, the takeaway is simple enough. Nobody expects carbon to trump cost on every job. But if the data only turns up once the invoice does, greener choices were never really on the table.

Amy Ingham

Amy Ingham is a reporter at Business Matters, covering UK business news with a focus on breaking news, business policy, late payments and insolvency. She joined the magazine in 2026 after completing the NCTJ Diploma in Journalism at Harlow College’s journalism school. Her recent reporting includes British Steel’s nationalisation and its impact on SME suppliers, the decline in late payments by large firms, and Insolvency Service director disqualifications. Reach her at aingham@cbmeg.co.uk.

Driehaus Capital Management LLC is a privately held investment management boutique based in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1982, the firm manages active equity and alternative investment strategies on behalf of institutional investors. To promote diversification, DCM offers strategies across: US Growth Equities, Life Sciences, International Growth Equities, Emerging Markets Equities and Global Equities. Note: This account is not managed or monitored by Driehaus Capital Management, and any messages sent via Seeking Alpha will not receive a response. For inquiries or communication, please use the firm’s official channels.

More widely, Burnham has also said he would publish a 10-year plan for the country and the economy later this year, likely to detail his wider plans on decentralisation, devolution, and rebuilding Britain.

Ordinarily, you might expect a significant infrastructure programme with such plans, but Burnham also wants to fund the Defence Investment Plan, a multi-billion, multi-year spending commitment for the UK military. How will he square this?

In addition, his first priority going through the doors, he said, would be a national plan to end rough sleeping.

He made a similar pledge in Greater Manchester, but some early progress went in reverse in recent years. When I questioned him about this in February, he said more funding and powers from central government were needed to deal with the recent rise. As his first act as PM, he has now released funds to address it from within the housing budget.

Long term, he said the answer is mass council house building. This will take years to feed through.

Welfare is another critical test. Here, I’m told, Burnham expects to show he can make progress on what he called “sustainable reform”. This will lean heavily on Alan Milburn’s review, which is likely to recommend significant job support funds and mental health assistance for young workers in order to reduce welfare bills.

This is likely to be delivered by local mayors who know what works in their regions. Burnham hopes to show the markets he can deliver the welfare reform that eluded former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer.

This is the new PM’s conundrum. He faces the same manifesto and borrowing rule constraints as his predecessor, yet he clearly wants to do more. He says his rewiring of Britain will help the economy grow, but many of these solutions could take years.

And the recent rapid turnover of prime ministers and chancellors shows, even thinking a few years ahead might feel like a luxury.

Shares of Cipher Digital jumped 14.41%, or $2.53, to $20.09 Monday morning, as the AI infrastructure and bitcoin mining company’s stock rallied alongside a broader risk-on move across high-beta artificial intelligence and crypto-adjacent names, while the company approaches a significant near-term milestone tied to its major data center lease with Amazon Web Services.

Cipher Digital, formerly known as Cipher Mining before rebranding in February 2026, develops and operates industrial-scale data centers used for both bitcoin mining and high-performance computing hosting across sites in the United States. The company has increasingly positioned itself as a hybrid infrastructure provider, developing purpose-built data center facilities for hyperscale cloud tenants while continuing to operate power capacity dedicated to bitcoin mining at select locations.

A key AWS revenue milestone approaches

Central to Monday’s rally is the approaching first phase of Cipher’s 300-megawatt capacity delivery under its long-term lease agreement with Amazon Web Services. That first phase was scheduled to begin delivering capacity in July 2026, with rent payments under the agreement expected to commence the following month. The lease itself spans 15 years and carries a total value of approximately $5.5 billion, representing a structural shift for Cipher toward generating meaningful, recurring revenue tied to long-term hyperscaler commitments rather than relying primarily on the inherent volatility of bitcoin mining economics.

Analysts have pointed to that transition as a significant factor in reducing the company’s overall earnings volatility going forward, given the stability that long-term hyperscaler lease revenue can provide compared with the fluctuating economics tied to bitcoin mining, which remain sensitive to cryptocurrency prices and mining difficulty adjustments.

A high-beta stock tied to broader sector sentiment

Cipher Digital’s stock carries a beta of approximately 3.75, according to Investing.com, meaning the shares tend to move with significantly greater volatility than the broader market in either direction. That characteristic has made the stock particularly sensitive to shifts in overall risk appetite toward AI infrastructure and cryptocurrency-adjacent investments, with Monday’s rally reflecting a broader risk-on tone across similarly positioned high-beta names in the sector.

That pattern of amplified volatility has been evident throughout the stock’s trading history in recent months. Cipher shares climbed as high as roughly $30 in mid-June before falling sharply to around $20 by early July, a decline compounded at the time by a Form 144 filing disclosing a planned insider sale, which traders said added near-term selling pressure to an already volatile stock. The shares then staged a partial recovery in early July following a series of positive analyst updates and a successful debt offering, before continuing to experience the kind of sharp swings characteristic of high-beta infrastructure stocks tied to the broader AI investment cycle.

Wall Street has grown increasingly constructive

Despite the stock’s volatility, several Wall Street analysts have grown more bullish on Cipher’s prospects in recent weeks. BTIG raised its price target on the stock from $25 to $35, citing rising demand for power-rich data center sites and AI-focused high-performance computing contracts as key drivers of its more optimistic outlook. Rosenblatt has reiterated a Buy rating on the stock, describing the recent pullback in high-performance computing names as overdone and characterizing Cipher’s valuation as increasingly attractive at recent trading levels. Morgan Stanley has also maintained an Overweight rating on the stock, with a price target of $42.50, though the firm more recently trimmed that target slightly to $47 from $48.50.

A debt offering to fund continued expansion

Cipher has also continued to raise capital to support its infrastructure buildout. Stingray Compute, a subsidiary of Cipher Digital, priced $810 million in private senior secured notes carrying a 6% interest rate and maturing in 2031, with proceeds earmarked to complete the company’s Stingray data center project and shore up broader financial reserves. That notes offering was well received by the market, with Cipher shares jumping in the sessions immediately following the pricing announcement.

Regulatory headwinds in New York

Cipher’s operations have not been entirely insulated from regulatory developments affecting the broader data center industry. New York recently imposed a statewide moratorium on hyperscale data center development, a policy that has drawn public criticism from President Donald Trump, who described the move as a “terrible decision” that could hamper continued growth in AI infrastructure investment within the state. It remains unclear how directly that moratorium might affect Cipher’s specific operations, though the broader regulatory uncertainty has added another variable for investors tracking data center-focused companies operating across multiple U.S. states.

Financial performance reflects the ongoing transition

Cipher’s financial results continue to reflect the company’s transitional period as it shifts more heavily toward AI infrastructure hosting. Over the trailing twelve months, the company generated $223.9 million in revenue with a gross margin of 63.7%, but reported an operating loss of $421.6 million, reflecting the substantial upfront capital investment required to build out its expanding data center footprint ahead of generating full-scale recurring revenue from long-term hyperscaler contracts like the AWS lease.

With rent payments from the AWS agreement expected to begin in August, investors are likely to watch closely for confirmation that Cipher’s first phase of capacity delivery proceeds on schedule, given the significance of that milestone in validating the company’s broader transition toward stable, long-term infrastructure revenue. Combined with continued sensitivity to broader sentiment swings across AI infrastructure and cryptocurrency-adjacent stocks, Cipher Digital is likely to remain one of the more closely watched high-volatility names in the sector as it works to scale its hyperscaler partnerships in the months ahead.

February 2009: in the middle of the biggest financial crisis since the depression of 1929, this bull market was born. Today, it is in its 17th year. Despite COVID, Trump’s trade war against all his allies, high oil prices (over 100 USD at times) due to the Middle East war with Iran, it is alive and kicking.

It is all but natural that investors wonder whether things have gone up too high too fast and is it time to sell and wait for the market to correct before getting back in.

We wish we knew but we don’t. So, what do we do?

We think the most rational thing to do is to remember the fundamental reasons for owning equities in the first place: equities reflect economic growth over time and are the best proxies for business in general. Well-managed companies will outgrow their competitors and provide us with a better than average return in the long run. If chosen well, patience is your best ally. Financial reports on companies are your best tools and newspapers, newsletters from marketing sources and especially social media, if misused or misleading, are your worst enemy.

Then there is the concept of compounding effect of money:

• When you own shares of a company in a regular, non-tax-sheltered account, and it appreciates in value, for every dollar of appreciation, you will have to pay the government capital gain taxes of around 25% if you sell it. However, if you keep it for 20+ years, you will only owe it on paper until you sell it. In other words, the government “lends” you the tax money you owe them interest free until you sell your shares. Moreover, if you happen to lose money on an investment, you get to deduct your losses against other gains. Do you think you can get a deal like this one from the banks????
• If you happen to buy well-managed companies that can reinvest their profit to grow their market share, the likes of Alimentation Couche-Tard (ANCTF), CGI (GIB), Microsoft (MSFT) and many more, the compounding effect of your capital would be mind-boggling if you can take a long-term view. For example, Couche-Tard’s return on equity (ROE) averages annually over 20% in the last 15 years, CGI’s average ROE is over 15% in the last 10 years and Microsoft’s has been over 25% in the last 25 years!

In short, you were “borrowing” money interest free from the government and investing it in companies that were compounding it at an above-average rate.

Combining these 2 compounding magic tricks will justify not taking the short-term prognostics from the so-called experts even when the trajectory for the future will certainly not be a straight line.

The AI Boom versus the late 1990s Dot-Com Boom: similarities and differences

As mentioned in our last quarterly letter, the current AI frenzy is reminiscent of the late 1990s dot-com boom. Both eras feature a tectonic, technology shift, heavy capital deployment into foundational infrastructure, and narrow stock market concentration. However, examining the underlying corporate data reveals several significant differences.

The most significant divergence between the two eras lies in the fundamental cash-generation capability of the market leaders.

The Dot-Com Boom (1995–2000): The internet boom was built heavily on “speculative demand.” The median Nasdaq technology company at the peak in 2000 was entirely unprofitable. High-profile IPOs were backed by eyeballs and clicks rather than revenue, creating an ecosystem highly vulnerable to a sudden credit freeze.

The GenAI Infrastructure Cycle: Today’s infrastructure buildout is funded by the most profitable, cash-rich corporate balance sheets in economic history. Market leaders like Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft, Alphabet (GOOG), and Meta (META) generate hundreds of billions of dollars in positive free cash flow annually. For instance, Nvidia achieved a $5 trillion market valuation backed by trailing 12-month revenue of $215.9 billion and a massive 53% operating margin.

All frenzies will end with pain and this one will not be different. Our job is not to predict the timing of a correction but identify signals that indicate “wretched” excess and problems to come.

Four things are worth watching:

• Free Cash Flow inflection: between Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, they have committed over USD 725 Billion in capital spending in 2026 and promise even more in the years to come. Amazon is projected to turn cash-flow negative this year. If AI capital expenditure (CapEx) begins to exceed operation cash flow in these 4 hyperscalers, funding will have to come from capital markets and will put pressure on valuations and yields.
• As of now, no hyperscaler has even tempted to offer insight into their AI-specific operating margins, separately from their broader cloud revenue. Markets have so far accepted backlog growth as a proxy for AI returns. The price of tokens, the measuring unit for the future profitability of the business of data centres, has declined 90% since 2023 while the total capex spend has roughly doubled since last year. Here lies the structural paradox in the AI economy: data centre builders are spending double the capital to build infrastructure, while the “unit of value” they sell (the token) is rapidly deflating due to hyper-commoditization. For additional context, a token is a small unit of text analyzed or generated by an AI model. The more a company uses AI, the more tokens it consumes. For data centres to remain highly profitable in the long term, token consumption volume must grow exponentially faster than the hardware depreciation costs. Yet, Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels recently made several comments on the rapidly climbing cost of AI through uncontrolled consumption of tokens (“tokenmaxxing”):

“We see a shift happening between the cheaper open source models and the bigger expensive models… Cost is a very important part of your architecture, you need to take that into account.”

“Do you really need to have the biggest, highest-end model to solve this? The answer is no, you don’t.”

Vogels’ comments are part of a broader corporate reckoning regarding token efficiency. Within Amazon itself, the pushback against uncontrolled token spend hit a boiling point when Senior VP Dave Treadwell sent a memo to staff demanding they stop “using AI just for the sake of using AI.” Amazon actually had to kill an internal developer leaderboard that tracked token consumption because employees began “tokenmaxxing” – pointing AI agents at pointless, repetitive loops just to climb the rankings, running up massive, empty cloud infrastructure bills for the company. Similar stories have leaked from Uber (which reportedly burned through its entire annual AI tooling budget in just four months) and Meta, proving that buyers across the board have suddenly become deeply sensitive to the raw cost of token transactions.

• There is a lot of circular financing going on in the computer chip industry, not dissimilar to the same scheme during the dot-com era in the telecom industry: as an example, Nvidia invests in OpenAI (OPENAI); OpenAI commits to purchasing Nvidia GPUs; Microsoft funds OpenAI; OpenAI runs on Azure. The OpenAI-Nvidia commitment alone is estimated to account for as much as 13% of Nvidia’s projected $272 billion in 2026 revenue. This is precisely the structure by which Lucent and Nortel financed telecommunications carriers in 1999, equipment makers were lending customers the money to buy their equipment, and it ended badly, in waves of bankruptcies from the carriers and revenue collapse at the suppliers. It could happen in AI…
• While memory chips, GPUs, and skilled engineering labour are the visible bottlenecks of the AI cycle, electricity is the quieter one. Power supply constraints are already delaying data-centre projects in Virginia, Ireland and parts of Texas. Not only could the demand prove uncertain, we have to ask whether the supply also could prove impossible.

While the dot-com boom was a bubble of speculative valuation — unprofitable companies trading on astronomical multiples of non-existent earnings, the generative AI cycle is a bubble of capital expenditure. The risk today is not that the market leaders will go bankrupt; the risk is that they are building a $725 billion infrastructure footprint that may take a decade for enterprise adoption and monetization to fully justify, leaving them vulnerable to an aggressive capex correction if returns fail to materialize fast enough.

Assessing the current landscape and areas of uncertainty…

First, (almost) everyone believes artificial intelligence has the potential to be one of the biggest technological developments of all time, reshaping both daily life and the global economy.

We also know that in recent years, economies and markets have become increasingly dependent on AI:

• AI is responsible for a very large portion of companies’ total capital expenditures.
• Capital expenditures on AI capacity account for a large share of the growth in U.S. GDP.
• AI stocks have been the source of the vast majority of the gains of the S&P 500.

Further, it’s important to note that whereas the gains in AI-related stocks account for a disproportionate percentage of the total gains in all stocks, the excitement AI injects into the market must have added a lot to the appreciation of non-AI stocks as well.

Yet, many questions linger:

• Who will be the winners, and what will they be worth? As Warren Buffett pointed out in 1999: “The automobile was the most important invention, probably, of the first half of the 20th century… If you had seen at the time of the first cars how this country would develop in connection with autos, you would have said, ‘This is the place I must be.’ But of the 2,000 companies, as of a few years ago, only three car companies survived. So, autos had an enormous impact on America but the opposite direction on investors.”
• What’s a share in an upstart worth? IPOs indicate obscene valuations that the market is willing to pay for companies that have no revenues to show for, let alone profits. The mentality of “lottery-ticket thinking” seems to be pervasive on anything with AI in its name.
• Will AI produce profits, and for whom? For vendors? Or users?

Derek Thompson, an American journalist, podcaster and author, wrote in one of his newsletters with some terrific historical perspective:

“The railroads were a bubble and they transformed America. Electricity was a bubble, and it transformed America. The broadband build-out of the late-1990s was a bubble that transformed America. I am not rooting for a bubble, and quite the contrary, I hope that the US economy doesn’t experience another recession for many years. But given the amount of debt now flowing into AI data centre construction, I think it’s unlikely that AI will be the first transformative technology that isn’t overbuilt and doesn’t incur a brief painful correction. AI Could Be the Railroad of the 21st Century. Brace Yourself”.

Conclusion?

Sometimes, we find writings that can be so insightful that we would rather reprint them as is instead of trying to paraphrase. We should give credit where credit is due. Howard Marks in Oaktree Capital Management has one of the best conclusions and bottom line regarding AI:

“…But do I have a bottom line? Yes, I do. Alan Greenspan’s phrase, mentioned earlier, serves as an excellent way to sum up a stock market bubble: “irrational exuberance.” There is no doubt that investors are applying exuberance with regard to AI. The question is whether it’s irrational. Given the vast potential of AI but also the large number of enormous unknowns, I think virtually no one can say for sure. We can theorize about whether the current enthusiasm is excessive, but we won’t know until years from now whether it was. Bubbles are best identified in retrospect.

While the parallels to past bubbles are inescapable, believers in the technology will argue that “this time it’s different.” Those four words are heard in virtually every bubble, explaining why the present situation isn’t a bubble, unlike the analogous prior ones. On the other hand, Sir John Templeton, who in 1987 drew my attention to those four words, was quick to point out that 20% of the time things really are different. But on the third hand, it must be borne in mind that behaviour based on the belief that it’s different is what causes it to not be different!

Today’s situation calls to mind a comment attributed to American economist Stuart Chase about faith. I believe it’s also applicable to AI (as well as to gold and cryptocurrencies):

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.

Here’s my actual bottom line:

There’s a consistent history of transformational technologies generating excessive enthusiasm and investment, resulting in more infrastructure than is needed and asset prices that prove to have been too high. The excesses accelerate the adoption of the technology in a way that wouldn’t occur in their absence. The common word for these excesses is “bubbles.”

AI has the potential to be one of the greatest transformational technologies of all time.

As I wrote just above, AI is currently the subject of great enthusiasm. If that enthusiasm doesn’t produce a bubble conforming to the historical pattern, that will be a first.

Bubbles created in this process usually end in losses for those who fuel them.

The losses stem largely from the fact that the technology’s newness renders the extent and timing of its impact unpredictable. This in turn makes it easy to judge companies too positively amid all the enthusiasm and difficult to know which will emerge as winners when the dust settles.

There can be no way to participate fully in the potential benefits from the new technology without being exposed to the losses that will arise if the enthusiasm and thus investors’ behaviour prove to have been excessive.

The use of debt in this process – which the high level of uncertainty usually precluded in past technological revolutions – has the potential to magnify all of the above this time.

Since no one can say definitively whether this is a bubble, I’d advise that no one should go all-in without acknowledging that they face the risk of ruin if things go badly. But by the same token, no one should stay all-out and risk missing out on one of the great technological steps forward. A moderate position, applied with selectivity and prudence, seems like the best approach.

Finally, it’s essential to bear in mind that there are no magic words in investing. These days, people promoting real estate funds say, “Office buildings are so yesterday, but we’re investing in the future through data centres,” whereupon everyone nods in agreement. But data centres can be in shortage or in oversupply, and rental rates can surprise to the upside or the downside. As a result, they can be profitable… or not. Intelligent investment in data centres, and thus in AI – like everything else – requires sober, insightful judgment and skillful implementation “.

Of note:

Alphabet (Google’s parent company) replaced Verizon in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) on June 29, 2026, representing a significant change to one of the United States’ main indices. While it makes a major splash in financial headlines, the actual mechanical impact on portfolios and the market is more nuanced.

The Dow is a price-weighted index, meaning a company’s influence is determined entirely by its absolute dollar share price, not its total market cap.

Before the change, Verizon was trading at roughly $47 USD per share, meaning that it was only 0.5% weight in the index, therefore its daily movements have little to no impact on the index.

Because Alphabet’s Class A shares (GOOGL) trade at a much higher price of ~$355 USD per share as of writing this, it immediately commands roughly a 4% weight in the index. This places it among the top 10 most influential companies in the Dow, meaning a big day for Google can move the index quite a bit.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hasn’t been strictly industrial for some time, but this specific swap marks the end of an era:

Bumping Verizon means the Dow has officially eliminated its last dedicated traditional telecommunications constituent. S&P Dow Jones Indices explicitly noted that Alphabet’s vast digital footprint better represents the modern “Communication Services” landscape.

Alphabet becomes the fifth “Magnificent Seven” mega-cap tech stock to be placed into the exclusive 30-member club, joining Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Nvidia.

Historically, the Dow was viewed as a boring, stable, value-oriented safe haven during tech selloffs. By swapping stable dividend-payer Verizon for a relatively volatile growth company like Alphabet, the index ties its fate even closer to the tech sector. If market anxieties regarding massive AI capital expenditures flare up, the Dow will now feel those shocks much more than it used to.

Ultimately, the move cements Google’s status as a foundational pillar of the American corporate world, even if it makes the nightly Dow report a little more tech heavy.

Have a good summer!

– Alain Chung, CFA, Chairman and CIO, on behalf of the Claret team.

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Editor’s Note: The summary bullets for this article were chosen by Seeking Alpha editors.