Every gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep
‘Cause every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep

Kenny Rogers, The Gambler.

I don’t know Masayoshi Son, and I don’t need to. But my guess is that the SoftBank founder and CEO can’t be having a good start to his week. The stock of his flagship, SoftBank, is deflating faster than a balloon stuck in powerlines after a New Year’s party. He has bet big on OpenAI as his all-in wager. Whether he is right or wrong remains to be seen.

SoftBank’s shares dropped as much as 12.5 percent. Reports emerged that OpenAI and Oracle had scrapped plans to expand a flagship data center in Texas. Bloomberg reported the expansion fell apart over a combination of financing difficulties and shifting demand. The news undermines two core assumptions behind the entire Stargate Project. That alone should be reason to dig into every data center announcement and follow the money trail.

SoftBank’s credit default swaps widened. In plain English, the bond market is now charging more to insure against the possibility that SoftBank cannot pay its debts. The people who lend SoftBank money are getting nervous. Not a big surprise.

S&P, the credit rating agency, which already had SoftBank at junk, cut its outlook to negative earlier this month. A downgrade could raise borrowing costs precisely when SoftBank needs to borrow more than ever. These are legitimate problems. It also makes you wonder how SoftBank will meet its commitments to OpenAI in April 2026. I wrote about this last week, but even I didn’t know how much was up in the air.

I often refer back to my essay, The Announcement Economy, mostly because that is what we are living in. The details get lost in the bombast of headlines, and the media herd moves on to the next thing. Meme is the news, if news itself isn’t the news.

Let’s turn back the clock to January 2025. Stargate was announced with pomp and show that could rival Mardi Gras. President at the podium, Son and OpenAI’s Sam Altman flanking him. Big words, bigger promises. The beautiful future. Elon Musk, seemingly a sore loser for not being invited to the party, didn’t like it a bit. He said SoftBank “has well under $10 billion secured.” Altman fired back, called him wrong, and invited him to the Texas site. That Texas site is now the one being abandoned. Musk had obvious self-interest in undermining the project. He was also, turns out, right.

This is a good time to ponder the overall data center announcement frenzy. There is a level of insanity in all the news that keeps coming, and it deserves its own moment of skepticism.

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I just read this New York Times piece about Nscale, a UK-based data center startup founded in 2024 that just raised $2 billion at a $14.6 billion valuation, with Nvidia backing and Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, and Susan Decker joining the board. The company barely existed two years ago. Its founder previously sold health supplements and worked in coal mining. Now he’s building “the engine of superintelligence.” Haven’t we seen this movie before? Different cast, similar theme with a charming, charismatic fundraiser and a board with more white shoes than an NBA star. Read the story and decide for yourself.

The irony of the name should not be lost on anyone. In model railroading, N-scale means 160 times smaller than the real thing. The real thing being a hyperscaler like Google, whose CEO told investors the company plans to spend up to $185 billion on infrastructure in 2026.

The data center buildout echoes the late 1990s fiber frenzy. Companies strung cable across continents for bandwidth nobody needed, on the assumption that demand would only go up and that the underlying technology would not change fast enough to matter. Both assumptions proved wrong. The chips will get faster. The models will learn to do more with less. The Excel chart pointing up and to the right rarely survives contact with Moore’s Law.

These are physical products, as much as they might seem like digital ones. You can’t put up walls faster than a query on ChatGPT. Neither can you get energy sources revved up on demand. Physics is physics, and atoms are atoms. It just doesn’t make for a good announcement.

Nscale is a UK company. Like everyone else, the UK is feeling left out of the AI buildout frenzy. Just like they did in the fiber buildout days. Don’t be surprised if you see more such announcements about upstarts raising billions from other parts of the world. No one wants to be left out of the announcement party.

The scale of the announcements is staggering. US data center construction starts hit $77.7 billion in 2025, a 190 percent increase over the prior year. The four largest hyperscalers are on track to spend north of $500 billion on infrastructure in 2026 alone. But announcements and reality are two different things.

The numbers bear this out. I recently pointed to a report by Sightline Climate that is tracking 190 gigawatts across 777 large data centers announced since 2024. As I noted in a recent post, of the 16 gigawatts slated to come online this year, only 5 gigawatts is actually under construction. Last year, 26 percent of expected capacity slipped. Sightline’s estimate is that 30 to 50 percent of the 2026 pipeline won’t materialize. Look, if hyperscalers are building their own data centers, we know they can. They have the money. They have customers. They have the domain expertise. They can even spin up their own power sources. Others feel more like Milli Vanilli. They sound good. But is it for real?

I am an AI believer. But boy, the green gas coming out of the announcement engine makes me blanch.

If you see skepticism in my recent writing about physical infrastructure, it’s because sometimes you have to follow the dollars. In my earlier pieces on the $110 billion funding round and the announcement economy, I laid out how the headline numbers didn’t really add up. The structure hasn’t changed. SoftBank is seeking a new $40 billion loan, the largest dollar-denominated borrowing in its history, to meet its OpenAI obligations. Son is doubling down.

To fund the earlier rounds, Son sold SoftBank’s entire Nvidia stake for $3.3 billion. Those shares would be worth well over $150 billion today. He traded one of the great unrealized gains in modern investing history for a 13 percent stake in a company that remains unprofitable, whose flagship data center partner just backed out citing weak demand, and which S&P now considers a liability on SoftBank’s own balance sheet.(1)

Son may still be right. Yahoo Japan, Alibaba, ARM. He has been early and right before. He has also been early and spectacularly wrong — see WeWork. But the structure underneath, borrowed money, illiquid assets, a portfolio more than half locked up, means the margin for error is far thinner than any announcement headline ever suggested.

It isn’t money until it’s money. And it isn’t infrastructure until someone actually needs it. Uses it. And pays for it. As Kenny Rogers put it:

You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away and know when to run
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealing’s done

Footnote #1 (added on 3/10/26): I can see how my awkward sentence gives an impression that Son’s Nvidia sale funding OpenAI. The point I was making was that he has hyperactive style of a a gambler, and this is how he has ended up with OpenAI, and not with $150 billion if he knew how to hold them. Clearly my sentence structure could have been better.

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Why I wrote this piece

• SoftBank’s bet on OpenAI is starting to weigh SoftBank’s shares have nearly halved in four months as questions grow over the scale of its OpenAI exposure. The FT’s Lex column has some strong words. (FT)
• SoftBank Seeks Record Loan of Up to $40 Billion for OpenAI Stake The largest dollar-denominated borrowing in SoftBank’s history, a 12-month bridge loan underwritten by JPMorgan and others, to fund commitments already made. (Bloomberg)
• The AI Data Center Boom’s Newest Billionaire Nscale, founded in 2024 by a former health supplements seller and coal miner, just raised $2 billion at a $14.6 billion valuation with Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, and Susan Decker on the board. The Times loves an outsider-looking-in story. (New York Times)

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March 9, 2026

Verily

What's happening today is today. All day.

Also, it's absurd that Indiana is mostly in the Eastern time zone. This time of year, the sun rises at four hours before noon and sets eight hours after noon. 

And fast moving storms from southwest to northeast tend to produce tornadoes.

There's a long arc of thunderweather moving lengthwise to the northeast from Texas and across Chicago right now. ORD is all delays. Good view of the action on Windy. Good view of the delays on FlightAware's MiseryMap.

Apparently, yes

Ted Gioia: Is Spotify Enabling Massive Impersonation of Famous Jazz Musicians?

Also, AI Actress Tilly Norwood Drops a Video—and It's Cringe on Steroids "At least Skynet was honest about trying to erase humanity…"

Bzzz

Marginal Revolution: A Fly Has Been Uploaded. It begins, "n 2024, the entire neuronal diagram of the fruit-fly brain–some 140,000 neurons and 50 million connections–was mapped. Later research showed that the map could be used to predict behavior. Now, Eon Systems a firm with some of the scientists involved in the fruit-fly research and with the goal of uploading a human brain has announced that they uploaded the fruit fly brain to a digital environment. The digital fly appears to behave in the digital environment in reasonably fly like ways–this is not a simulation, the fly’s “sensors” are being activated by the digital environment and the neurons are responding.

I didn’t really want to do a quick breezy review of something that has touched me at a deep emotional level. (John Gruber nails it in his review of Neo.)

Yes, I am talking about the new MacBook Neo. I can’t remember when I used the words “cute” and “want” about a computer in the same breath. The iBook, maybe? That machine was a little cuddly, colorful, weird thing that made you feel something. Then Apple went serious. Silver. Graphite. Pro. Aspirational. Expensive. And along the way we all forgot that computers could make you smile just by looking at them. Just as none of the cars make you smile and giggle. They are a boring interpretation of a truck or a Tesla.

Then came the Neo. $599. The fun is back. Citrus yellow. Indigo blue. Blush pink. Colors that say, be happy. It’s okay to be silly.

I have had a review unit for four days. Used it. Held it. Caressed it. It looks like a MacBook. It works like a MacBook. It feels like a MacBook.

Everything about it is a MacBook. Except it isn’t.

Four days in, the question stopped being “is this enough?” It became something simpler. What is this, exactly? What is a machine, really? What does it need to be?

First, it’s the name. It is stuck in the crevices of my mind. Neo comes from the Greek neos. It does not simply mean new. Neo means renewed. It means the return to the generating principle after drift.

As it happens, I have been spending time in philosophical texts, ancient and modern. One concept I came across in my reading adventures was Neo-Platonism. Developed by Plotinus in the third century, it was not merely a new version of Plato. It was a return to first principles, a deliberate stripping away of accumulation to recover what was essential. The Neo-Platonists believed all of reality emanates from a single perfect source, The One, and that understanding flows from returning to that source rather than moving further from it.

In language, neo- signals deliberate revival. Neo-classical, neo-noir, neo-pragmatism. Each usage implies that someone looked at how far a tradition had drifted from its originating idea, identified what that idea actually was, and rebuilt from there. It is an act of editorial courage disguised as naming. When Apple called this machine the Neo, consciously or not, the argument is right there in the name.

Neo does not mean more. It means the return to what is essential.

Apple, at least when Steve Jobs roamed its corridors, knew what was essential. It has since lost some of that clarity. It has lost some of what Aristotle calls telos.

Telos is the purpose toward which a thing is directed, the end that defines what it fundamentally is. Not what it can do in a benchmark, not what features it has, but what it is for. The telos of a hammer is to drive nails. The telos of a chair is to support a seated person. Strip away the ornament, the extras, the margin-justifying additions, and you get to the thing itself.

The history of Apple’s greatest products is a history of correctly identifying the telos and ruthlessly removing everything that is not it.

The original iPod. Music in your pocket. Not a camera, not a phone, not an app platform. A thousand songs, a white brick of plastic and steel and joy. When Jobs pulled it out, nobody asked whether it was enough. The question answered itself.

The original MacBook Air. Portable computing, untethered. No optical drive, few ports, impossibly thin. Jobs pulled it out of an envelope and the argument was over. The Air was not a lesser computer. It was the laptop reduced to its essence. Jony Ive once said the best designs are the ones where you cannot imagine adding anything and cannot imagine removing anything. The Air was that.

The MacBook Neo is in that tradition. It runs on the A18 Pro, the same chip family that powers the iPhone. That detail sounds like a compromise until you think about it properly. The iPhone is the most refined personal computing device ever made. Its chip is optimized over a decade for exactly the kind of work most humans actually do. Writing, communicating, reading, browsing, thinking. Early benchmarks show the Neo outperforming the MacBook Air M1 in single-core performance. That is not a consolation prize. That is the telos.

If we had more of a philosophical tradition in Silicon Valley, we would be aware of what Heidegger called the danger of Gestell, his concept for how technology frames everything and everyone as a resource to be optimized, extracted, maximized. These days that means pushing AI into our laptops and ads into every corner of our internet experience.

Customers and reviewers alike look at a laptop and ask all sorts of wrong questions. How much RAM? What GPU? Can it run Final Cut in real time? Nobody stops to ask what they actually need it for.

The spec sheet becomes the thing. The benchmark becomes the measure. The webpage becomes a place to extract every cent. Every human relationship on Instagram an opportunity to transact. And somewhere in all that maximization, the person using the machine disappears.

Ask yourself what you need a laptop for. I asked myself the question. To write. To read. To talk to people I love and people I work with. To think. For all that, the Neo is enough.

And that’s me, someone who already has a MacBook Pro. With the exception of my multilayered editing workflow in Photoshop, after four days, I find the Neo to be enough. The only reason I keep going back to my MacBook Pro is because of Claude CoWork. I wish I could run that on this new machine.

What if everyone asked that question and found the same answer? Why worry about more cores or something hard to contemplate? What’s easy to contemplate? Four colors with color-matched keyboards. Color is not cosmetic. Color is a statement about the relationship between a person and their tool. It says this belongs to you, not to your job title or your budget category. It says computing can be personal and colorful again. (By the way Gruber is talking about color in his review footnotes. “The Neo’s citrus is a beguiling colorway. Everyone I’ve shown it to likes it,” he write. “But is it a green-ish yellow, or a yellow-ish green? In daylight, it looks more like a green-ish yellow.” His comment is about to become a meme. )

In Zen Buddhism, there is the concept of ichi-go ichi-e, meaning this moment, this meeting, only once. A tea bowl needs to be only a tea bowl. A laptop does not need to be a phone, a gaming console, a media center. The completeness of the simple thing is what gives it meaning. You do not add to it.

The MacBook Neo is a laptop. A complete, beautiful, sufficient laptop. It costs $599, but the real disruption is not the price. It is the reminder that “enough” is not a failure of ambition. It is often the highest form of design.

The name says it all. Neo means a return to the generating principle. A machine rebuilt from what a machine needs to be, with full awareness of what came before. Not less. Not a budget compromise. A renewal.

Jobs understood this. The iPod. The Air. The original iPhone’s single button. The radical move was always the same. Identify the telos, trust it, and cut everything else. Sometimes the most courageous thing you can build is exactly what is needed, and nothing more.

I really hope Apple sells a lot of it. Not that I have anything to gain from it. Except the idea that in this era of soulless hyper-capitalism, for a brief second, we can smile and experience the essence of a machine.

March 10, 2026. San Francisco

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