A 4x levered AI fund handed its entire public book to Citadel. The S&P 500 crossed $70 trillion days later.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, Patric put a date on the next one:

"We're 15 months away from that Palantir moment, 100%."

Physical automation. His argument: Asia already won the hardware game, so the money is with whoever actually deploys the machines. Which, quietly, is a contractor business.

Dustin doesn't buy the humanoid hype. Martin wants to know who gets hurt when the music stops.

New Bricks, Bucks & Bytes out now.

#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #bricksbucksandbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #vc #ai

Our Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

Chapters

00:00 Teaser

01:00 The AI fund that had to sell everything

04:04 Who is Leopold Aschenbrenner?

06:54 The S&P 500 hits $70 trillion

10:04 Without data centers, GDP is barely growing

13:04 Can regulation actually stop a crash?

15:53 Why the market might never crash again

24:34 Nobody is funding the physical economy

25:53 Asia won robot hardware. The Palantir moment is next

31:04 Tax the robots, retire at 55

34:39 Retraining workers for the robot economy

We asked Scoreboard AI's Charles Ma what the single most expensive mistake contractors make at buyout is. His answer:"Outsourcing their understanding of the project to their trade partners."Charles was employee #1 at Versatile, one of construction tech's most well-funded bets (over $100M raised). Now he's building Scoreboard AI to fix a much quieter problem: scope gaps that get buried in project documents and don't surface until the crew is standing there waiting for a fix.In this episode we get into:- What Versatile got right, and where the product fell short of the ROI it promised- Why Charles thinks "AI wrappers are dead" in preconstruction- How hard bid, GMP, and design-build buyout processes each create their own scope gap risk- Why Scoreboard has deliberately stayed away from flashy fundraise announcementsFull episode is live on Bricks and Bytes Youtube Channel#bricksandbytes #bricksbytes #aec #construction #constructiontech #ai #vc

Chapters

00:00 - Teaser

01:00 - Quickfire Round

02:32 - Inside Versatile: the early days and the Chase Center project

09:27 - Is construction tech overhyped or underhyped right now

11:10 - Why Scoreboard has avoided the flashy fundraise playbook

16:43 - The perverse incentives of VC-backed construction tech

20:21 - Do "AI wrappers" win the current land grab

26:02 - Why Charles believes AI wrappers are dead

28:25 - What a scope gap actually is, and why it happens at buyout

32:55 - Hard bid vs. GMP vs. design-build: where the gaps creep in

36:50 - Measuring the real cost of scope gaps

41:51 - How Scoreboard AI actually works

43:21 - Show your work: building trust in AI outputs

48:59 - Pricing philosophy: running Scoreboard like a Costco

51:26 - Expansion beyond the US

52:41 - What's working in go-to-market right now

54:08 - Will AI ever run preconstruction end-to-endOur Sponsors:

BreadCrumb- 50,000+ projects globally. All running safer, faster, with Breadcrumb. - breadcrumb.co

Aphex is the multiplayer planning platform where construction teams plan together, stay aligned, and deliver projects faster – check out aphex.co

Archdesk - “The #1 Construction Management Software for Growing Companies - Manage your projects from Tender to Handover” check archdesk.com

This week's briefing covers three things that are already changing the shape of construction, one of them from a dirt road in Texas at 4am.

Bedrock Robotics was founded by the team behind Waymo's driverless technology. They do not build new excavators. They take the ones contractors already own, fit them with sensors and a computer, and the machine digs on its own. This week we filmed a full documentary with them at Proto Town, a 12 acre test site near Austin where some of the most advanced hard tech companies on earth go to build things they cannot build anywhere else. The operator who has spent his career inside these machines watched one run without him and his answer was relief. The people closest to autonomous equipment are not the ones campaigning against it. The contractor running them on live sites across Texas today says productivity is up, revenue is up, and his crews are happier.

Then BlackRock. On Tuesday Meta and BlackRock announced a $14 billion data centre campus in El Paso. BlackRock owns 80%. Meta leases its own building back, operates it, and manages the construction. Roughly 90 cents in every dollar is borrowed. Wall Street used to lend money to these builds. It is now the one that owns them. That changes who your actual client is on the biggest programmes in the market.

And then the numbers behind the whole cycle. Over the past fortnight the four biggest data centre customers on earth all opened their books. Moody's tallied what six technology companies will spend on this build this year. $785 billion, heading for a trillion next year. Their word for it was unprecedented. When a ratings agency uses that word, it means they have never had to grade anything like it.

The question is no longer whether the work can be built. It is who is paying for it, and whether they can keep on paying.

Drop your answer in the comments of this week's LinkedIn post.