Another week of âmoney is big, everyone is buying turbinesâ. KKR just closed its largest ever infra fund at $19B, aimed at digitalization, electrification, and industrial growth. Days later, NVIDIA announced a financing platform alongside Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to mobilize over $500B of 3rd party capital for AI compute buildouts. NVIDIA states the GPU âAI factoryâ is now âan investable infrastructure asset classâ with contracted cashflow, a deep secondary market, and protected residual value beyond 6 years. (!!)
There is a staggering wall of money pointing at a single direction. For those of us in the mid market and earlier stage, how do we play into this mandate?
Iâm writing this from Hawaii, and thereâs a good swell running all week, producing clean, pumping wave sets. The locals and the pros are sitting right on the peak, taking almost every decent wave. Sitting in front of a set this good, where do you want to be? I believe you donât have to sit on the peak to get a great ride. The peak is the GPU cluster, the 500MW size data centers, and youâre not going to out paddle megafunds for it. Iâd love to find and surf the sweet shoulder: the underfunded, certification-gated, critical-path chokepoints. My thesis is capital doesnât blindly trickle down the value chain. Itâll systematically push execution risk down into every layer of it. A $500B platform does not have time to diligence a 40-person relay engineering shop in Ohio. Yet the campus delivery schedule slips without that team. Thatâs the spot.
Take licensed, experienced labor as another example. The hyperscalers know this is a critical path bottleneck, and they are investing in training programs to fix it. Meta launched Americaâs Workforce Academy with $115M committed this year for free 5-week programs covering tuition, housing, and stipends with guaranteed jobs on completion, partnering with CBRE and Associated Builders and Contractors across Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and Texas. Google put a $10M grant into the Electrical Training Alliance, IBEW, and NECA. Microsoftâs Datacenter Academy now runs across 50+ community colleges. But here is the reality: that $265M of combined training money seems tiny against the $335B in combined 2026 capex projected for Alphabet and Meta alone. The gap will stay wide for years because you simply cannot microwave a journeyman electrician or a certified commissioning agent. That is why fragmented regional commissioning and testing firms are such an attractive roll up opportunity right now.
Same story in the hardware. HV transformers at 100+ weeks. Generator step-ups at 100+. Switchgear 52-80. The domestic refurb and secondary markets for this gear are on the critical path.
Other possible shoulder spots for small, less established players:
Be the schedule counterparty, not the builder. Owning scarce delivery slots and inventory, procurement relationships, and sell certainty itself can be financeable.
Buy the certified operator. In commissioning/testing/protection, the barrier is people and certifications, which can be acquired via roll-up.
Sub-tier into the EPC, then move up. Smaller players enter as a specialized sub to the tier-1 EPC (whoâs overwhelmed), prove execution on one hyperscaler campus, and use that reference to become a preferred vendor.
And look, if you surf, you know reading the waves, picking the right shoulder, and being in position when the wave arrives is genuinely hard, and most days you either paddle too early or too late. But thatâs the work. Hereâs wishing we all get a little better at finding that spot, and wishing we all enjoy a good ride. :)
