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AA Alex Altmann On The Compound and Friends

“The capex number can't go any higher, 1.2 trillion for next year, 1.4 for the year after. Maybe it moves by 100 billion here and there, but we're kind of at terminal point now. I just don't see where the revenue is going to come from. S&P top line, $17 trillion. It's about $5.5 trillion of profits. And we're going to say, all of a sudden, we're going to magic a trillion dollars.”

The Compound and Friends · October 2026

“The capex number can't go any higher, 1.2 trillion for next year, 1.4 for the year after. Maybe it moves by 100 billion here and there, but we're kind of at terminal point now. I just don't see where the revenue is going to come from. S&P top line, $17 trillion. It's about $5.5 trillion of profits. And we're going to say, all of a sudden, we're going to magic a trillion dollars.” — Alex Altmann, The Compound and Friends

Context

Altmann, who runs tactical equity strategy at Barclays, had just said AI needs about a trillion dollars of revenue by the end of 2028 to pay for the data center build-out. Here he explains why he turned cautious on the AI trade.

Transcript

The Compound and Friends Around 57:41 into the episode
Alex Altmann

And right now, our run rate for then is going to be somewhere around about 400, right?

Josh Brown

Okay.

Alex Altmann

It's just we're not there. We need to plug that gap. And so, you know, we went out to Asia. We really just went to the lion's den, spoke to a bunch of investors out there and were like, hey, this is our whole roadmap. This is basically where the capex is. The capex number can't go any higher, 1.2 trillion for next year, 1.4 for the year after. Like maybe it moves by 100 billion here and there, but we're kind of at terminal point now. I just don't see where the revenue is going to come from. SP top line, $17 trillion. It's about $5.5 trillion of profits. And we will say, all of a sudden, we're going to magic a trillion dollars. The cumulative revenue of Apple and Microsoft, two of the most successful tech companies in history since 1990 to today, right, has been $9.8 trillion inflation adjusted, right? Not even $10 trillion. Meanwhile, SpaceX are telling you that their TAM's 30, right? So the TAM of the universe. In fairness,

Josh Brown

their TAM is every dollar ever spent on human capital

Alex Altmann

in the universe. Ever again. Not just on Earth. So it's the GDP of America. Have to

Josh Brown

adjust for Pluto, Neptune.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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