Making Cents Sense

There are ambitious corporate investments, and then there is Masayoshi Son. Whenever I think the artificial-intelligence spending boom has finally reached a number large enough to make everyone involved reconsider their life choices, SoftBank shows up with another zero. This time, SoftBank Group is heading into the high-yield bond market looking to raise more than $11 billion, with the money helping finance its enormous push into artificial intelligence and, more specifically, its increasingly concentrated bet on OpenAI. And when I say “high-yield,” I am using the polite Wall Street terminology. We are talking about junk bonds. Lots of them. SoftBank is marketing approximately $10 billion of dollar-denominated debt along with €1 billion, or roughly $1.1 billion, of euro-denominated bonds. If completed at that size, the transaction would rank among the largest corporate high-yield bond offerings ever. That's impressive. It's also slightly terrifying. Because beneath all the exci...

All financial figures and market prices in this article are based on information available as of August 26, 2026. This article reflects my personal analysis and is not individualized financial advice. When I look at Alphabet, I see one of the strangest valuation debates in the market. On one side, I see a company with dominant global platforms, extraordinary margins, rapidly growing cloud operations, a fortress-like balance sheet, and an advertising engine capable of producing tens of billions of dollars in cash every quarter. On the other side, I see an increasingly capital-intensive artificial intelligence race that is forcing Alphabet to spend money at a pace that would have sounded almost absurd a few years ago. Both versions of the company are real. That is what makes Alphabet difficult to value. It is no longer enough for me to say that Google Search is a great business and slap a historical price-to-earnings multiple on the stock. I have to determine how much of Alphabet’s curre...

I have owned, watched and analyzed enough technology stocks to recognize the familiar stages of an artificial intelligence investment story. First comes amazement. Then comes excitement. Next comes a corporate presentation containing the word “AI” so many times that I begin to wonder whether the accounting department has been replaced by a chatbot. Finally, investors ask the only question that matters: Where is the money? Amazon is moving beyond the presentation stage. AWS is not merely experimenting with artificial intelligence or adding a cheerful assistant to an existing product. Amazon is spending extraordinary amounts of money to build the infrastructure, chips, models and software that it believes will power the next generation of computing. The scale is breathtaking. It is also mildly terrifying. Amazon expects to invest approximately $200 billion in capital expenditures during 2026. That is not a typo caused by an analyst falling asleep on the zero key. The company is spending ...

Whenever I study Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, I feel as though I am examining the industrial equivalent of the person in a group project who quietly completes everyone else’s work while the louder participants argue over the presentation. TSMC does not design the world’s most famous processors. It does not sell smartphones, build artificial-intelligence models, or manufacture graphics cards under its own consumer brand. Instead, it manufactures the advanced chips designed by many of the companies receiving all the attention. Apple dreams up a new processor. Nvidia designs another computational beast capable of making data centers glow like small artificial suns. AMD prepares its next attack on the server market. Qualcomm develops another mobile platform. Broadcom expands its custom silicon business. Then everyone eventually arrives at TSMC’s door carrying blueprints and extremely large purchase orders. That arrangement has made TSMC the dominant pure-play semiconductor f...