A trillion dollars in capex this year buys roughly two years of AI supply.

That sentence does almost all the analytical work in this piece. Once it lands, the noise about circular financing, the bubble debate, the off-balance-sheet vehicles, and the IPO scramble all snap into the same picture. We are not in a cloud-capex cycle. We are not in a web-investment cycle. We are in a computer-rebuild cycle, and the physical infrastructure — as explored in the economics of AI compute infrastructure — required to rebuild a computer at planetary scale costs more than the public market is yet prepared to price.

Three layers of analysis: the abstraction (why this is a second computing revolution, not a web cycle), the market map (the financing machine that funds the rebuild), the playbook (three capital cascades and what to watch in each), and what comes next (the wildcards that will push 2026 capex past the trillion-dollar mark and the IPO window that will test the whole thesis).