prefshares

Thank you @PrefShares for engaging with a constructive and thoughtful response. (anyone curious to read my original piece, go here: mbi-deepdives.com/aws-vibes/) Let me take your points in turn. Retail. I like Amazon’s retail business too, and I agree there are losses buried in ex-AWS. But the profit engine in core retail today is advertising, and I think it’s fair to say ads carries a question mark right now. Consumer agents on one side, the FTC case, the auction-mechanics issues or the bid shading possibilities I’ve written about on the other (see here: mbi-deepdives.com/amzn_ads/) My base case is still that Amazon figures it out, but it’s not unreasonable to wonder that there is a legitimate fat tail risk to Amazon’s ability to COMPOUND core retail profits which can (should?) weigh on the multiple we may want to put on these profits. Also on $WMT, I haven’t met an $AMZN shareholder yet who thinks WMT is attractive at ~28x LTM EBIT. Okay, let me now get to AWS. Cost curve. On the $NVDA discount, I think the argument runs into NVIDIA itself. The hyperscalers are the only customers also building chips to displace it, so NVIDIA has every reason not to hand them a structural cost advantage, and it hasn’t: equity in the neoclouds, capacity backstop, or direct financing for OpenAI to buy gigawatts with no hyperscaler in between…Jensen has made it abundantly clear he doesn’t want to operate in a world where Hyperscalers call the shot. Whatever discount the hyperscalers get, NVIDIA likely hands back to the marginal producer in cheaper capital and risk sharing. Power is a few percent of a gigawatt-year’s revenue, so cheaper PPAs are worth maybe a point or two, and unlikely to be a needle mover for overall economics. And cost of capital advantage is shared by all Hyperscalers, and also an advantage that is directly being largely negated by NVIDIA with their balance sheet support to neoclouds. I do agree it’s not obvious to me either why neoclouds have a DURABLE advantage over hyperscalers. But the capacity they’ve bult and are building is pretty real. If AI demand disappoints or we hit a digestion period, the neocloud equities will get obliterated but the gigawatts stay, get repriced, and pressure everyone, hyperscalers included. The concern again is that NVIDIA has an obvious interest in keeping its buyer side VERY fragmented. Short-term margins. No argument there. Everyone selling compute today is making money hand over fist. The question is whether 2026 is representative of medium and long-term economics. If it is, AWS isn’t $1.3T; it’s comfortably over $2T. Bedrock as a capital-light royalty. Not sure I agree with your framing, and I think the simplest way is to follow the token. When an enterprise buys a Claude token on Bedrock, it’s generated on a Trainium chip, in an AWS data center, that AWS paid for. That chip is already in my gigawatt count. So whatever AWS keeps on that token I don't see it as a royalty on someone else’s capital, it’s just a markup on its own. Capital-light royalties do exist in AI, but they accrue to whoever owns the weights: Anthropic earns one when $GOOGL sells Claude through Vertex or $MSFT sells it through Foundry (their chips, their utilization risk, Anthropic’s cut). More importantly, let’s notice who will set the royalty rate. The enterprise pays roughly Anthropic’s list price on Bedrock, so AWS’s cut comes out of Anthropic’s margin and Anthropic, which can serve the identical token through its own API, Vertex or Foundry, decides how big that cut is (if not today, they will over time). A royalty where the payer sets both the product price and the royalty rate SHOULD/WILL be a thin one. Enterprise / other AI. I agree with all six of your points. Those points are why that bucket earns ~2 points over its cost of capital in my model rather than zero. I know 2 points may seem a little low, but the invested capital in that bucket is $468B in 2035, so that’s ~$10B a year of economic profit. I’m hesitant to extrapolate to much more. All six advantages are more or less shared by AWS, Azure and GCP, so they’re a moat against neoclouds and the labs’ direct APIs, but probably not much against each other. The neoclouds know serving hyperscalers and labs isn’t durable, which is precisely why they’re trying to move into this segment as well. And the labs themselves are building first-party products for the same customers. Five to ten points of excess return on a ~$500B base would be $25–50B a year of rent on an input with growing number of alternatives. I’ll admit I am far from certain where that shakes out (could be anywhere between 1 and 5 points IMO). Core cloud. Fair it’s hard to separate from AI, and AI is clearly helping it. That’s why core grows ~21% in 2026 in my model, well above the ~13% it had slowed to before AI, when optimization was the story. My model still triples the core to ~$360B by 2035. But yes, reasonable people can land above me here. The key point I was trying to drive home is the exercise actually helped me tone DOWN my own bearish “vibes” on AWS a bit once I realized market is actually fairly skeptical about AWS capex being value additive. The objective of making the assumptions explicit is to see if I perceive any vehement disagreement with what the market is underwriting. Following the exercise, I just realized I do not have such strong disagreement. Market and I are more or less likely on the same boat in evaluating AWS long-term future. Thanks again. Always a pleasure to have diligent readers.