Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news, and analysis.

Good afternoon. Today is Monday, May 11th, and I'm your host, Kim Con. Our top story, so far, Wall Street is increasingly nervous about hyperscalor CAPX.

The combined capital expenditure of Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet,

and Meta was just over $200 billion in 2024. Two years later, it's on track to approach

$700 billion. Free cash flow with those four companies slipped to about $200 billion last year,

down from $237 billion in 2024 as the AI buildout accelerated. The question investors are asking,

what happens if the economy turns? History offers a partial answer from an unlikely source.

By 1930, AT&T's Bell system was spending $585 million annually on construction, the largest

private infrastructure program in American history. Then the Depression hit.

GDP collapsed, unemployment reached 25%, and corporate America retrenched.

Bell did not.

Telephone installations declined, but infrastructure investment continued.

The dividend held at $9 a share from 1929 to 1942,

uninterrupted through the worst economic catastrophe in U.S. history.

The mechanism was simple. Stopping was more dangerous than continuing.

A network only has value if it keeps expanding.

The moment bells stopped building, it risk losing the monopoly logic that justified its existence.

That logic has a modern echo.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently described AI as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, where the current growth is unprecedented and the future growth even bigger.

That's less a growth forecast than a statement about competitive risk.

Hyperskaler CAPEX now amounts to roughly 2.2% of US GDP, and executives have been clear.

The danger is not over-investing, but being

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