Every boom has a tell, and it is never in the press releases. This week the AI boom's insiders started hedging their own story: Meta announced it will rent out its "excess" AI compute while chipmakers sold off, Oracle's SEC risk factors laid bare the strain of its $300B OpenAI/Stargate commitment, and Mark Zuckerberg told his own employees that AI-agent progress "hasn't really accelerated" as expected. Yet the same week, Abu Dhabi's MGX closed a $49B AI fund and Anthropic signed a 20-year, ~$19B data-center lease.

Stephen Forte on what it means when sellers plan for surplus while buyers still pay scarcity prices — and the three moves to make before signing any multi-year AI contract: shorten and reopen, read your vendors' risk factors like a credit file, and re-run build-versus-rent every quarter.