First, a special welcome to those of you who joined us (or upgraded) during our Gumshoe Gives Back campaign that started this week, with half of all new member signups and upgrades going to charity — that runs through Thursday next week, so it’s not too late… tell all your friends, give some gift subscriptions, we’d love to build our membership rolls a little bit to support Stock Gumshoe’s ongoing development, and help some important charities.

Well, there’s that whole AI thing, sure… and maybe Oracle (ORCL), after soaring higher last quarter and getting spanked this quarter for essentially the same reason, is the canary in the coal mine, alerting us to the fact that there might be some constraints on how much money investors are willing to throw at AI CapEx (their deal with OpenAI that promises hundreds of millions in future revenue was the spark for the rise last quarter, and I think the spark for the fall this week was the worry from Oracle investors about whether OpenAI will be able to raise that money to pay Oracle, and whether Oracle will earn a margin on it).

And today a second canary started to look a little pale and unsteady on its feet, as Fermi (FRMI) took a huge hit from the loss of one of their major contracts. That’s the firm which plans to build a huge data center campus in Texas, and to also build a fleet of AP1000 nuclear power plants to power those data centers, (big ones, not SMRs, though that’s years off, and the initial wave of power plants will be natural gas-powered).   They came public a few months ago as the ultimate story stock, with political connections (former Texas Governor Rick Perry is a co-founder, and they went so far as to name their facility the Donald J.Trump Generating Plant), and with lots of tentative deals, but no actual revenue… and the word this week was that one of their major deals, for a tenant to spend $150 million, had fallen through. We don’t know who, but it’s a little jarring to the market that in this world of “gotta have more data centers and more power,” someone actually pulled out of spending on one of these projects.

And it was super jarring to Fermi itself, of course, as the stock was ...