🇺🇸🇮🇶 US forces exit Iraq by tomorrow after 20+ years, ending a presence where 4,500 Americans died.

Iran-backed groups call it "a historic victory" and "a crushing defeat for the American project."

Iraqi security officials warn the withdrawal is premature.

The last US soldier killed in Iraq died in July during a drone detonation near Erbil.

Seven of 18 US service members killed in this year's Iran war died in Iraq.

🔗 Clash Report

🔋 🇺🇸 🤖 The AI revolution is running into a power bottleneck:

US data center IT power demand is projected to surge +755% from 2025 levels, reaching a record 78.57 gigawatts by 2029.

This year alone, demand is expected to jump +95% to 17.96 gigawatts, and then another +97% in 2027.

This comes as US data centers are set to require 97 gigawatts of power in the 2026 to 2028 period.

Meanwhile, only 21 gigawatts are under construction, and 19 gigawatts of grid capacity are available, leaving a potential 57-gigawatt shortfall.

The gap is widening as increasingly powerful AI systems require far more electricity, while power supply is struggling to keep pace.

At the same time, more complex servers built around Nvidia’s Vera Rubin and Rubin Ultra architectures are expected to push IT power demand 5x from 2025 to 2028.

The AI buildout is running into a significant power constraint.

📎 KobeissiLetter

🛢 🌐 📉 80% of global oil production now comes from post-peak fields.

Just 10% comes from fields that have yet to reach their peak... we are barely looking for new oil fields.

The Iran war is exacerbating this problem.

Normally, elevated oil prices lead to an increase in CapEx spending.

This time, Big Oil sees this clusterfuck going on and decides to return more cash to shareholders rather than investing to grow production.

Over the medium to long term, this will lead to lower production levels and higher oil prices.

📎 Lukas Ekwueme

🇺🇸🛢 The Trump administration on Tuesday offered to lend up to 40 million barrels of crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the Energy Department said, as fuel prices remain near record highs seven months into the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The barrels are the last tranche of the 172 million the US pledged in March to an International Energy Agency release of 400 million barrels coordinated among about 30 countries. The same 40 million barrels were offered in June, but companies agreed to borrow only about 500,000.

The release is structured as an exchange, not a sale: companies borrow the oil and later return it with additional barrels as a premium. Bloomberg says bids are due on October 6.

The reserve held 283.8 million barrels as of Sept. 25, its lowest level in 44 years, according to Energy Department data.

🔗 DropSite

🤖 The AI buildout is becoming the largest infrastructure boom in US history:

AI infrastructure spending is projected to average 3.63% of US GDP annually from 2025 to 2032, far exceeding the investment intensity of previous major infrastructure booms.

By comparison, railroads averaged 2.24% of GDP from 1870-1890, highways 1.13% from 1956-1973, while telecom and fiber averaged 1.1% from 1996-2003.

This comes as total investment in data centers and related AI infrastructure is projected to reach $10.3 trillion over this period.

The spending is driven by the rapid construction of data centers and the infrastructure required to support increasingly large AI systems.

However, this expansion is consuming scarce labor and electricity, increasing costs for other businesses and crowding out other investment.

The scale of the AI investment is extraordinary, but so is the economic risk if the spending fails to generate sufficient returns.

🔗 Global Markets Investor