Metacritic Capital • 13 implied HN points • 23 Feb 26
- Hyperscalers are three different businesses at once: Traditional IaaS (sticky, high‑margin cloud services), Token Factories (LLM inference APIs sold by token consumption), and AI mega‑deals (capex‑heavy long‑term GPU/data‑center contracts with labs).
- Token Factory work is commoditizing and price‑sensitive: customers can swap models or providers quickly, so serving costs and model access drive competitiveness more than platform lock‑in.
- AI mega‑deals change growth quality and valuation: hosting labs can boost revenue but often yields lower, fixed IRRs, so investors must model revenue, capex, and margins separately for each business and run a DCF.