personal_noteS – Page 2

US data center transaction valuation

Transaction date	Assets	Buyer / capital partner	Seller / contributor	Stake acquired	Transaction value	Capacity	Implied price per GW
Jun. 29, 2026	Three Northern Virginia hyperscale facilities: two in Manassas and one in Sterling	Digital Realty	Blackstone-affiliated funds	Blended 64%: 80% of two sites and 50% of one	US$3.5bn equity consideration; US$7.8bn 100% gross asset value, including assumed debt and remaining capex	0.288GW	US$27.1bn/GW on gross asset value
Jul. 28, 2026	Meta El Paso campus, Texas	BlackRock/GIP/HPS funds	Meta contributes land and construction in progress	BlackRock 80%; Meta retains 20%	US$14bn total fitted-infrastructure development cost; Meta contributed US$2.3bn of assets and BlackRock contributed US$4.9bn cash at closing	1.0GW	US$14.0bn/GW
Oct. 21, 2025	Meta Hyperion initial campus development, Louisiana	Blue Owl-managed funds	Meta contributes land and construction in progress	Blue Owl 80%; Meta retains 20%	US$27bn total development cost; Blue Owl initially contributed about US$7bn cash and Meta received a US$3bn distribution	~2.0GW initial phase	~US$13.5bn/GW
Oct. 1, 2024	New Equinix xScale campuses across the U.S.	GIC and CPP Investments	New-build JV with Equinix; no conventional seller	GIC 37.5%; CPP 37.5%; Equinix 25%	More than US$15bn of total investable capital, including future debt	More than 1.5GW	~US$10bn/GW, based on headline figures
Apr. 15, 2024	Equinix SV12x, San Jose, California	PGIM Real Estate	Equinix contributes/develops project	PGIM 80%; Equinix retains 20%	US$600m JV/project capitalization	>0.028GW	<US$21.4bn/GW
Oct. 15, 2025	Aligned Data Centers platform across North and South America	AIP, MGX and BlackRock’s GIP	Macquarie-managed funds and co-investors	100% equity	US$40bn enterprise value	~5GW operational and planned	~US$8.0bn/GW

民谣黄金时代

the year when the song become widespread / well-known

2012 – 董小姐 – 宋东野

2013 – 天空之城 – 李志

2014 – 南山南 – 马頔

2015 – 奇妙能力歌 – 陈粒

2016 – 成都 – 赵雷

2017 – 消愁 – 毛不易

2018 – 盗将行 – 花粥

2017 已经被资本主导的选秀节目影响

2018 之后已经被抖音/短视频影响/接管，因为要受众最大的话，最流行的不一定是最初的那种民谣了

Model pricing comparison

Meta’s pricing is amazing – it targets eliminate Claude’s gross profit if Muse Spark capability can catch up.

Model	Input ($/1M tokens)	Output ($/1M tokens)
Meta Muse Spark 1.1	$1.25	$4.25
Claude Sonnet	~$3	~$15
Claude Opus	~$5	~$25

With cached input.

Model	Input ($/1M)	Cached Input ($/1M)	Output ($/1M)	Cached discount
Meta Muse Spark 1.1	$1.25	$0.15	$4.25	88%
Claude Sonnet	$3.00	$0.30	$15.00	90%
Claude Opus	$5.00	$0.50	$25.00	90%

However, compare that with DeepSeek.

Model	Input / 1M	Cached input / 1M	Output / 1M
DeepSeek V4 Flash	RMB 1 / $0.15	RMB 0.02 / $0.003	RMB 2 / $0.3
DeepSeek V4 Pro	RMB 3 / $0.44	RMB 0.025 / $0.0037	RMB 6 / $0.89

Zhipu could see some trouble…

Model	Input / 1M	Cached input / 1M	Output / 1M
Zhipu GLM-5.2	RMB 8 / $1.18	RMB 2 / $0.3	RMB 28 / $4.13
Meta Muse Spark 1.1	$1.25	$0.15	$4.25
DeepSeek V4 Pro	RMB 3	RMB 0.025	RMB 6

Also recall that I was mentioning the bifurcation in AI models and AI infra.

US hyperscalers drawdown from peak

Company	Peak close	Subsequent bottom close	Peak-to-bottom drawdown
Oracle (ORCL)	$328.33 — Sep. 10, 2025	$140.27 — Jul. 2, 2026	−57.3%
Microsoft (MSFT)	$542.07 — Oct. 28, 2025	$352.83 — Jun. 25, 2026	−34.9%
Meta (META)	$790.00 — Aug. 12, 2025	$525.72 — Mar. 27, 2026	−33.5%
Amazon (AMZN)	$274.99 — May 6, 2026	$227.01 — Jun. 25, 2026	−17.4%
Alphabet (GOOGL)	$402.62 — May 13, 2026	$337.39 — Jun. 26, 2026	−16.2%

Technically meta was not a hyperscaler.

FCF turning negative and shifting to memory makers is the biggest concern.

The AI death, zoombies, and unsustainables

Some of the notable AI services have been sunset, both in the US and in China.

In March 2026, Sora shutdown was officially announced. The consumer web and app experiences were shut down on April 26, 2026, while the developer API will end on September 24, 2026.

In Sep 2025, 秒鸭相机 (owned by Alibaba) has dissolved the team and news broke out in May 2026.

Baidu’s 文心一言 / Yiyan / Ernie Bot commercialization (membership-based) has not worked; Baidu announced the sunset of paid membership in Feb 2025 and began refund in Apr 2025. The chat function of frontier LLMs in China is basically free for all, but the paid subscription had previously cost about RMB 59.9 per month.

Yiyan service itself has been moved/remade/rebranded.

There are many more.

e.g. in China

Product	Company	Type	Date/status	What happened
Glow	MiniMax	AI companion	March 2023	Removed following complaints involving sensitive content and privacy. It never returned under the Glow name; MiniMax later launched 星野. (21 Economic Net)
Trik AI	Xiaohongshu	AI image generation	Late 2023	Shut after controversy and litigation over artists’ work; Xiaohongshu subsequently launched 奇域AI. (36Kr)
未伴	Tencent Music/QQ Music	AI companion and social app	June 2024	Removed amid regulatory scrutiny of AI-companion content. Mainland services were discontinued rather than merely renamed. (21 Economic Net)
腾讯翻译君	Tencent	AI translation	March 13, 2025	Web, app and mini-program all ceased operating. Translation functionality increasingly became part of 元宝 and Tencent’s larger products. (36Kr)
万物追踪	MiniMax	AI information monitoring	Around April 2025	Entered public testing in January 2025 and was comprehensively delisted less than three months later. (36Kr)
鹿班智能设计	Alibaba	Automated advertising/design	June 30, 2025	All services ended after Alibaba had already stopped purchases and renewals. (36Kr)
奇域AI	Xiaohongshu	Chinese-style AI images	June 30, 2025	Standalone service closed; some functionality was transferred to Xiaohongshu’s 镜构 mini-program. (36Kr)
腾讯智影	Tencent	AI video and digital humans	June 30, 2025	Officially described as a platform “renovation,” but login ended, user data was cleared and its official account was later cancelled. This is best treated as an effective indefinite closure. (36Kr)
异世界回响	Soul	AI character companion	Around September 2025	Reported withdrawn/stopped as Soul reduced its standalone AI-companion experiments. The exact final server date was not clearly published. (36Kr)
狸谱	Independent startup	AIGC anime and fan-art community	October 31, 2025	Officially ceased operation despite reportedly reaching around one million monthly active users during its peak. (36Kr)
冒泡鸭	StepFun/阶跃星辰	AI role-play companion	November 5, 2025	Formally stopped operating after exceeding six million cumulative downloads, according to third-party app data cited by Chinese media. (36Kr)
讯飞写作	iFlytek	AI writing	November 30, 2025	Officially terminated; users were instructed to export their content before closure. (36Kr)
XEVA / X Eva	Xiaoice/小冰	AI clones and companionship	November 30, 2025	Ended all operating services. (36Kr)
Wow AI	Meituan	AI friend and character chat	December 18, 2025	Servers closed and users could no longer access their accounts. (36Kr)
纸飞机AI	ModelBest/面壁智能	AI companion	Reported exited in 2025	Included in the 2025 shutdown census, although no precise public server-closure date was located. (36Kr)
momoAI	清杉信息	AI companion	Reported exited in 2025	Listed among discontinued or withdrawn AI-companion products; detailed closure documentation is limited. (36Kr)
我在AI	有零科技	AI companion	Reported exited in 2025	Reported as withdrawn or no longer maintained; no clear public final-service notice was found. (36Kr)
AiU 爱哟	Zhipu AI/智谱	AI companion	Reported exited in H2 2025	Standalone companion experiment was withdrawn as Zhipu concentrated resources elsewhere. Exact date is unclear. (36Kr)
Lumi 噜米	禹幻科技	AI emotional companion	Reported exited in H2 2025	Included in the companion-app withdrawal wave, but its final backend-shutdown date was not publicly documented. (36Kr)
梯子AI	Baidu	AI search	March 4, 2026	Shut after operating for roughly six months; its site and app-store listings disappeared and functions moved into the 文心 app. (Sina Finance)

Some have become “zombies”.

Product	Company	Condition as of June 30, 2026
胃之书	Independent team	Had gone at least five months without an update by late 2025; user-feedback groups were reportedly nonfunctional or muted. No formal shutdown announcement, but it appeared close to natural abandonment. (36Kr)
AskXBOT	澜码科技	The company experienced unpaid wages, staff reductions and severe financing problems. AskXBOT appeared stalled, although the company website remained accessible, so it cannot be called a clean server shutdown. (Sina Finance)
Vega AI	Independent team	Included in the Chinese-media census of delisted or long-unmaintained AI applications. I found no reliable official closure notice or exact date. (36Kr)
开搜AI	快搜-related team	Listed as delisted or long-term unmaintained, but public evidence is insufficient to establish a precise final shutdown date. (36Kr)
晓象	Startup project	Reportedly encountered major operating and financing problems. Its product activity appears substantially stalled, but evidence does not support a precise “servers shut on X date” claim. (36Kr)
小星星AI陪练	星星趣弹	Included in the 2025 inactive-app census, but third-party download pages continued to appear. I would label it unconfirmed/inactive, rather than fully closed. (36Kr)

Many can be found in the US.

Product	What it did	Shutdown date	What happened
Huxe	Turned emails, calendars, webpages and prompts into personalized AI audio briefings/podcasts	May 28, 2026	Removed from the app stores and stopped functioning. The founders said the team was moving on and would discontinue the product. (TechCrunch)
Rewind	Mac app that continuously recorded and made users’ screen and audio history searchable	December 19, 2025	Following Meta’s acquisition of Limitless, the Rewind app’s screen and audio capture was disabled. Limitless’s Pendant service continued for existing users in supported regions, so only Rewind and other non-Pendant functionality were sunset. (Limitless)
Yara AI	AI mental-wellness and therapy-style chatbot	By November 2025	The founder voluntarily wound down the service, citing concerns that AI chatbots were not safe enough for people experiencing serious mental-health situations. Its website now carries a farewell notice and directs users to other resources. (Yara AI)
Dot by New Computer	Personalized AI friend, confidante and companion	October 5, 2025	New Computer sunset Dot after its co-founders decided to pursue different directions. Users were given one month to export their conversations and other data. (TechCrunch)
Woebot consumer app	CBT-based mental-health chatbot	June 30, 2025	The direct-to-consumer Woebot app was retired; existing accounts became inaccessible. Woebot Health itself did not entirely disappear and continued working on institutional and provider-oriented applications. (Woebot Health)
Builder.ai	Claimed to use AI to make developing apps and websites easier	Operations collapsed in May 2025	The Microsoft-backed company entered insolvency after financial problems, debt defaults and frozen or seized cash left it unable to continue operating normally. Its main U.S. entity subsequently filed for bankruptcy in June. (Financial Times)
Humane Ai Pin services	Screenless wearable assistant for AI queries, calls, messages and cloud-stored content	February 28, 2025	Humane sold key assets to HP and switched off its servers. Calling, messaging, AI responses and cloud access stopped working, leaving most Pins substantially unusable. (The Verge)
Coqui AI commercial operations	AI voice generation, speech synthesis and voice cloning	January 2024	The startup and its hosted commercial services shut down amid funding and monetization difficulties. The underlying open-source TTS code survived through community forks, so the technology itself did not vanish. (GitHub)
Artifact	AI-personalized news reader created by Instagram’s co-founders	Wound down during 2024	Artifact announced that its market opportunity was insufficient and began winding down its app. Its core news reader remained alive longer than originally planned, before Yahoo acquired its technology and incorporated elements into Yahoo News. (Medium)
OpenAI AI Text Classifier	Website that attempted to identify whether text was written by AI	July 20, 2023	OpenAI withdrew it because of its low accuracy rate. It was a particularly clean example of a product being shut down because the underlying AI simply did not work reliably enough. (OpenAI)
Neeva consumer search	Subscription-based, ad-free search engine that added generative-AI answers and citations	June 2, 2023	Neeva could not attract enough users to make the consumer search business sustainable. The search website closed, user data was deleted and the company’s technology and team subsequently moved to Snowflake. (Search Engine Land)

Social paradox

Excerpt from recent readings of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows by Steven Pinker,

1. We try to gain status by not caring about status.

2. We rebel against conformity in the same way as everyone else.

3. We show humility to prove we’re better than other people.

4. We don’t care what people think, and we want them to think
this.

5. We make anonymous donations to get credit for not caring about
getting credit.

6. We bravely defy social norms so that people will praise us.

7. We avoid being manipulative to get people to do what we want
them to do.

8. We compete to be less competitive than our rivals.

9. We help those in need, regardless of self-interest, because being
seen as the type of person who helps those in need, regardless of
self-interest, is in our self-interest.

10. We make subversive art that only high-status people appreciate.

11. We make fun of ourselves for being uncool to prove we’re cool.

12. We self-righteously defend false beliefs to prove we care more
about the truth than virtue-signaling.

13. We help our friends without expecting anything in return,
because we know they would do the same for us.

14. We show everyone our true, authentic self—not who society
wants us to be—because that is who society wants us to be.

Large IPO’s impact on peers

PL and ASTS peaked about 2 weeks before SpaceX IPO.

Micron peaked about 2 weeks before SK Hynix ADR listing.

Samsung peaked about 3 weeks before SK Hynix ADR listing.

It’s interesting, isn’t it?

I looked it up for other similar events.

Visa was different.

Mastercard stock rose with Visa debut.

Bubble burst?

Fed rate hike in 2026?
Yes 53% · No 48%

View full market & trade on Polymarket

AI bubble burst in 2026?
Yes 19% · No 81%

View full market & trade on Polymarket

The April US inflation print

In April, CPI hit 3.8% annually and 0.6% MoM. Excluding food and energy, the core CPI increased 2.8% and 0.4%.

The 3.8% annual figure is the highest since May 2023.

However, as shelter is a big part of CPI, and Oct 2025 data is missing, there is a one-off bump here (0.6% MoM).

Normally, each housing unit in the CPI rent sample is surveyed once every six months. BLS converts the observed six-month rent change into a monthly rate.
Because October 2025 rent data were missing, the October index recorded zero rent change for that panel. When the same units were finally surveyed again in April 2026, BLS measured the accumulated rent change from April 2025 to April 2026 and converted it into a monthly estimate. BLS says the April estimate is therefore effectively based on the sixth root of a 12-month change, instead of the usual sixth root of a six-month change

Oil price is obviously rising a lot, in March/April/May.

but that has eased in Jun

Other interesting items like tomatoes.. which rose 15% MoM in April, is impacted by bad weather and US gov July 2025 17.09% antidumping duty on Mexico tomatoes.

How high can ads ARPU go?

Bilibili, a younger Chinese user focused video website generates advertising revenue at about 7.5 rmb per DAU per month, slightly above $1 ARPU per month.

That is less than half of Kuaishou, which is above 16.5 rmb per DAU per month, or about $2.4 ARPU per month.

Kuaishou’s DAU size is near 4x Bilibili, so ads revenue is nearly 8x larger.

But these are nothing compare with Meta, which commands about $30-$40 ARPU per month in North America.

So Kuaishou is only like 1/10.

Douyin is the highest in China.

Using $50bn pure ads in China and 800mn DAU gives about $5 ARPU per month.

On top of that there are e-commerce, local services, payments, live-streaming etc. so overall Douyin app ARPU is a lot higher than pure ads.

Just comparing ads revenue: Douyin DAU 3-3.5x Meta NA but ads ARPU is 15% of Meta, which will give you about 50% of Meta NA ads rev of ~$100bn.