For most of the internet era, data centers were easy to ignore.

They sat in the background. Quiet, remote, and mostly invisible. If you were building a company, you focused on the obvious things: product, distribution, users, and growth.

You did not spend much time thinking about compute. It was cheap enough, available enough, and abstracted enough that it barely felt strategic. That was part of what made the software era so powerful. You could build something enormous without worrying too much about the physical infrastructure underneath it.

AI changes that.

Now, one of the most important questions in tech is no longer, what can you build? It is, how much compute can you access?

That sounds like a technical detail. It isn’t. It changes where power sits. It changes who can scale. It changes which industries start to matter again.

Because in the AI era, intelligence is no longer just software. It is infrastructure.

And once that clicks, data centers start to look very different. Not like boring utilities sitting in the background, but more like the new factories of the digital economy.

In today’s edition, we’ll explore:

— Naseema Perveen

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Late last year, a Klimt sold for the highest price ever paid for modern art at auction.

An outlier sure, but it wasn't a fluke. U.S. auction sales grew 23.1% in 2025. The $1-5mm segment even grew 40.8% YoY.

Now, the S&P, teetering on all time highs, just posted its worst quarter since 2022, oil was up 94% (briefly), and Moody's puts recession odds at 48.6%.

So, that's where it gets interesting.

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It’s also had near-zero correlation with the S&P 500 since ‘95.*

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^{*Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.}