Big Tech going from $40B in buybacks to $49.7B in net issuance is the most underreported story of the AI cycle — they're not reinvesting profits, they're asking investors to fund the bet.
The companies that once paid you to own them now need your money to stay competitive.
⚠️US Big Tech has flipped from returning massive cash to shareholders to demanding capital from investors:
In 2023, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle were buying back as much as $40 billion of their own shares.
That has now reversed, with the group reaching a record
Only 7% of Gen Z parents want their kid in trades, and yet trade skills are what AI cannot replace at current capability levels.
The mismatch between where parents want their kids and where the floor on job security actually sits is going to become very obvious very fast.
$18.8 trillion in semiconductor market cap with 62% in US stocks is the clearest evidence that "investing in AI" and "investing in American tech" have become the same sentence.
The entire global stack for building intelligence is priced in dollars.
Here are the top 10 largest semiconductor companies from around the world
Nvidia $NVDA: $5.0T
Taiwan Semiconductor $TSM: $2.1T
Broadcom $AVGO: $1.8T
Samsung: $1.1T
SK Hynix $SKHY: $885B
Micron $MU: $964B
AMD $AMD: $817B
Intel $INTC: $487B
Applied Materials $AMAT: $445B
Lam
Anduril at $100 billion is the clearest signal yet that defense AI has entered the same valuation territory as consumer AI.
The difference is the customer has a single buyer and a budget that doesn't compress based on quarterly earnings.