The weightless era of software is over. This week the AI buildout slammed into the physical world: concrete, copper, electricity, water, and capital. We map the paradox of record wealth at the top of the stack and intense friction everywhere else.

Alphabet announced an $80 billion equity raise, its first major stock sale since the 2004 IPO, to fund an estimated $180 to $190 billion in AI compute capex for 2026, with Berkshire Hathaway taking a $10 billion private placement. Broadcom posted a record fiscal Q2 of $22.19 billion, AI chip revenue up 143%, and Marvell shipped the first 102.4 Tbps switch that Jensen Huang called the next trillion-dollar company.

SoftBank overtook Toyota to become Japan's most valuable company after pledging 75 billion euros for 5 gigawatts of AI data centers in France. The bill for the combined ~$700 billion buildout is landing on workers: 2026 tech layoffs have reached roughly 142,000, and employment for developers under 26 has dropped nearly 20% since 2024.

GitHub Copilot switched to token-based billing, with power-user bills jumping from about $29 to $750 and outliers hitting $3,000. NVIDIA and Microsoft launched the RTX Spark to run 120-billion-parameter models locally, Anthropic filed confidentially for a roughly $1 trillion IPO, and Ohio suspended its data-center tax break as a citizen petition aims to ban hyperscale data centers. Community consent, water, and energy are the real bottlenecks.

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