The Price of Thinking · Indicators · The Return on Thinking

The Return on Thinking

Loading… · source & methodology

Weekly ticker (P0). The earnings and benefit dials, and the map, arrive with the versioned methodology — this page publishes only directly observed numbers, each with its source.

1Financing headroom — capex vs own cash flow

Trailing four quarters. Above 1.0, building consumes more cash than the whole company generates. Firm-level: mostly non-AI cash paying for AI machinery — cross-subsidy capacity, not AI self-financing.

CompanyCapex, 4qOperating cash flow, 4qCapex ÷ cash flow
Source: SEC EDGAR XBRL company facts (10-K/10-Q); quarterly values derived from year-to-date figures.

2Data-centre construction

Monthly spending on building data centres in the United States — the durable share of the build-out.

3GPU rental prices

What an hour of a top-end AI chip rents for on the open market. Falling prices would be the first hard evidence of overcapacity; this archive builds weekly and cannot be backfilled.

4Rates

The cost of money — one ingredient of what the AI machinery must earn each year to justify itself.

Sources: US Treasury daily yield curve (10 Yr); FRED (fredgraph.csv): DGS10, BAA10Y when reachable.