Michael Parekh, former lead internet analyst at Goldman Sachs, is back for a conversation that opens with one of the strangest stories of the cycle: Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund going from $45 billion at peak to a forced liquidation to Ken Griffin's Citadel, days before his wedding. Michael's read is an old one: always watch the leverage. The same dynamic hit South Korea, where over five million people took margin calls after piling into leveraged ETFs on Samsung and SK hynix.
From there, Ram and Michael work through earnings season. The big three clouds are guiding $620 billion of combined capex for 2026, and Microsoft's Amy Hood dropped the stat of the quarter: 90% of Azure's growth came from customers outside the frontier labs. They debate Gavin Baker's claim that Anthropic could be a $3 trillion company (Michael's range: one to three trillion, and you'll have to trade it), why Claude's compute shortage pushes developers toward Codex and Gemini, and why Michael sees Apple's Siri AI as the reason to treat a 50-year-old company like a startup. Ram, who put on an Apple short the week before, pushes back on valuation.
The back half covers Meta going cash-flow negative for the first time since its 2012 IPO, the "Ramageddon" memory shortage and whether China's CXMT changes the game, Nvidia backstopping OpenAI and rallying 40 US companies behind open source, and a reality check on humanoid robots: the data, components, and manufacturing base to build them at scale mostly don't exist outside China yet. Michael closes with Kipling. The short version: don't lose your head.
[00:00] Intro: what's changed since February
[01:48] The Leopold Aschenbrenner blowup
[04:28] South Korea's five million margin calls
[10:48] Right thesis, wrong leverage
[14:56] Cloud earnings and the $620B capex bill
[25:47] Is Anthropic worth $3 trillion?
[30:57] How developers rotate between Claude, Codex and Gemini
[35:53] Inference demand and China's open-source models
[39:36] Edge vs. cloud, plus Qualcomm
[45:59] Apple: Siri AI, a 36x multiple, and Ram's short
[51:41] Meta's cash burn and renting compute to Anthropic
[1:01:52] Memory: SK hynix, Samsung, and China's CXMT
[1:15:26] Nvidia as lender of last resort and open-source champion
[1:22:48] Broadcom vs. Nvidia
[1:24:27] Humanoid robots: hype vs. reality
[1:34:21] Closing thoughts and Kipling's "If"
About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is the podcast from Lumida Wealth, hosted by Ram Ahluwalia. Each episode digs into where the crowd has it wrong across markets, technology, and macro, with guests who have skin in the game.