Buy-Side Insights — October 20, 2025

What’s on tap today:

Market insights

• Meta’s going big on data center capacity without the capex strain — a $14B contract with $CRWV and a $30B SPV show the plethora of options to finance compute.

• Doing the math on the $100B NVDA–OpenAI deal — The key is getting the financing with OpenAI as the tenant. For every $10B of equity NVDA invests, we estimate a 70% ROI driven by OpenAI purchases of NVDA equipment for the data centers.

• Distributed power is filling the power gap for data center expansion — +29% for $LBRT ( ▼ 3.31% ) on the print as they expand their generation capacity. Anything downstream of AI Capex is getting contracts and the stocks are responding.

• Cocoa prices dropped 50% — a margin tailwind for chocolate companies.

People & capital opportunities

• New episode: From Fidelity PM to Entrepreneur: Kasen's Buffett-Inspired Bet on Chocolate. Kasen provides us with his 4 keys to a compounder.

• Job board — emerging-manager paths, open seats, and new candidates to review

AI in equity research

• There are over 100 AI equity research start-ups. DM me which you use and let’s compare notes.

• Ken Griffin at the Robinhood conference: AI improves productivity but doesn’t help hedge funds outperform.

Partner spotlight

• AlphaSense hits $500M ARR and buys Carousel to power AI-driven excel.

• S&P Global acquires With Intelligence for $1.8B, or 13.8x revenue of $130M. Forecasting a high-teens growth rate of 17.5% — consistent with anecdotes — implies a 11.8x and 10x EV/Rev next year and next two years, respectively.

In the pipeline:

• Digging into the Turnaround at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory $RMCF ( ▲ 1.78% ) with the CEO, Jeff Geygan. We’ll explore the steps he has taken to turn-around this iconic chocolate company. And how cocoa price declines from a historic spike are an emerging tailwind for margins and profits.

• Hunting AI alpha outside Silicon Valley in $NBIS ( ▲ 5.35% ) 
  I sit down with Sinan Xin, founder of Amber Road, to dig into his largest position — Nebius, NBIS, a $33B AI infrastructure player spun out of Yandex. The stock is EPS/FCF negative and still up 4–5x this year as backlog surged. We unpack why this could be the AWS of the next cycle — and why some of the best AI opportunities may not come from Silicon Valley.

• Don’t miss “Decoding the AI Infrastructure Ecosystem” — a live webinar with the top Semi industry expert, Doug O’Laughlin, President of SemiAnalysis, hosted by Michelle Brophy, TMT DoR at AlphaSense on Tuesday, October 28th at 12 PM ET. 

• Also, Arjun Murti will be joining me for an AlphaSense sponsored webinar to discuss energy transition, data center energy demand, and where we are in the oil price bottoming cycle. Stay tuned for details.