Issue 004 is here — the weekly business newsletter brought to you by Pretus. The free platform that helps you master the finance recruiting cycle with AI-driven interview prep for IB, CRE, WM, AM, & more + networking, behaviorals, and an exclusive ecosystem with 1 on 1 coaching and insights you can’t get anywhere else.

Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are on pace to spend over $300 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone. Add Google and the number hits over $600 billion, up 77% from last year's already record-breaking numbers.

What makes it a finance story: more than 60% of that spending is going into power infrastructure, cooling systems, and data center construction, not chips. The constraint has shifted from semiconductors to electricity. Every dollar of that $602 billion needs land, power, water, and physical infrastructure, which means the story ripples into real estate, utilities, and industrial construction, whether those sectors are ready or not.

Who's winning: power utilities, data center REITs, CRE desks, industrial construction firms. Who's getting squeezed: anyone competing for the same power grid capacity, from manufacturers to municipalities.

None of these companies can afford to slow down. Falling behind on AI infrastructure means losing the race for the next decade of compute. The spending has no clear end date, and the firms that understand where it's flowing will be ahead of the ones still calling it a tech story.

Deal activity is picking up. PE dry powder is at record levels, credit markets are open, and large deals are moving: Electronic Arts, Walgreens, and Dayforce have all been taken private recently. Megadeals now account for over half of total deal value in 2026.

The big picture — broad volume is still uneven. Middle market activity is recovering gradually, and geopolitical uncertainty has kept some sponsors on the sidelines. The capital is there. It’s just not flowing equally.

When an interviewer asks you to walk through the M&A environment, that’s the answer.

The Ivy League is having the worst summer in recent memory.

The Trump administration has frozen close to $3 billion in federal funding to Harvard after the university declined a settlement that would have given the federal government unprecedented say in academic operations. Harvard posted a $112.6 million operating deficit in fiscal 2025, its first shortfall since the pandemic. A new 8% endowment tax kicks in this year, with Harvard potentially owing $368 million annually and Yale $276 million. Stanford, Princeton, and MIT face the same rate.

The pattern isn't random. Federal funding clawbacks, admissions scrutiny, and endowment tax pressure are hitting the schools with the largest endowments and the most political exposure. Hiring freezes, grant uncertainty, and research budget cuts follow. The instability doesn't fall equally across everyone inside those institutions.

13.72M Barrels per day is the EIA's current projection for full-year 2026 US crude production. More than any country has ever pumped in a sustained period. The US set an all-time monthly record in October 2025 at 13.86 million barrels per day and has stayed near those levels since.

OPEC's leverage as a global price-setter is shrinking. When the US can produce this much, a cartel cutting supply to move prices is a fundamentally different proposition than it was a decade ago. The geopolitical calculus around energy, who has power, who can apply pressure, and how oil flows through global markets, is being rewritten.

Forward this to someone who needs it. More next week.

— Clip’d by Pretus