TMT Brief · Friday, September 25, 2026

Koko: Oracle sent a force majeure notice on a data center project this week, and the stock dropped seven percent on it, per CNBC.

Max: [surprised] Seven percent for a filing most people outside real estate law have never had to read.

Koko: Because it's the first time this cycle that an AI buildout has publicly slipped, not scaled.

Max: Right. Every capex headline for two years has been bigger, faster, more gigawatts. This one says: actually, sometimes it doesn't show up on schedule.

Koko: Fast around the rest. Qualcomm and Apple renewed their chip licensing deal through April twenty twenty-seven.

Max: Locking in revenue Qualcomm needs badly, right as smartphone chipset demand softens.

Koko: And Bank of America says it's doubling its AI budget next year, even though Accenture puts sustained ROI at only twenty percent of bank leaders.

Max: Spend-ahead-of-return, just said out loud by a major bank.

Koko: Here's why this week matters for the board deck: execution risk and spend-return gaps just started showing up in the same headlines as the capex numbers. Growth stories used to travel alone.

Max: Now every big number comes with a footnote attached. That's the whole shift.

Koko: Let's actually sit with Oracle, because force majeure is a specific legal claim. It means something outside Oracle's control disrupted the project.

Max: Supply chain, permitting, power, take your pick. The market didn't wait to find out which.

Koko: Seven percent off the stock on one notice tells you how fragile sentiment is around anyone's infrastructure timeline right now.

Max: Here's my pushback though. Is this actually new information, or is it the market finally pricing in a risk that was always there?

Koko: I'd say it's new because it's disclosed. Nobody had a concrete instance to point to before this.

Max: Fair, but that's exactly why boards should read this as a template, not a one-off. Every hyperscaler and every AI infrastructure vendor has committed capacity sitting somewhere in a permitting queue right now.

Koko: So the CFO question isn't did Oracle mess up. It's what's our own exposure to the same kind of delay, and do our disclosures already account for it.

Max: [chuckles] Which is a much less comfortable question than are we spending enough on GPUs.

Koko: This is squarely a CFO and CTO conversation now. Execution guarantees, not just growth narratives, belong in the contract review.

Max: And in the next investor call, before an analyst asks it first.

Koko: Bank of America is doubling its AI budget next year. Per Accenture, only twenty percent of bank leaders report sustained ROI.

Max: So four out of five leaders in the same industry haven't proven this pays off, and the biggest name in the room just doubled down anyway.

Koko: That's either conviction or a very expensive bet that returns show up eventually.

Max: Or it's table stakes. If your competitors are all spending, you can't be the one bank that sat it out and explains that to shareholders in three years.

Koko: Now layer in Gartner's number: global AI spend hitting two point seven trillion dollars in twenty twenty-six, up nearly fifty percent.

Max: Except Gartner's own analysts are flagging that a lot of that is rebranded IT spend, not incremental budget.

Koko: Which means the growth rate is partly an accounting story, not a demand story.

Max: That's the real CFO action item here, actually. Go look at how your own AI line items are classified. If half of it was already in the IT budget under a different name, your disclosure has a credibility problem waiting to happen.

Koko: So BofA's doubling might be real new spend, or it might partly be relabeling. Nobody outside finance would know the difference from the headline.

Max: Which is exactly why this belongs on the audit committee's agenda, not just the CIO's roadmap.

Koko: OpenAI and Anthropic cut API prices forty to fifty percent within ninety minutes of each other this week.

Max: [excited] Ninety minutes. That's not competitive response, that's two companies who already knew what the other was about to do.

Koko: Or it's just how thin the moat is at the model layer right now. Nobody wants to be the expensive option for more than an afternoon.

Max: Either way, if you're a CFO who signed an API contract last quarter, you're overpaying today. That's a renegotiation call, not a someday item.

Koko: Agreed, but don't stop at the API line. There's a second read here from Nutanix, that the real cost leak isn't the per-token price at all, it's idle GPU allocation.

Max: Right, cheaper tokens don't help you if you're still paying for capacity nobody's using behind bad orchestration.

Koko: So the win from this price war could get eaten entirely by a utilization problem nobody's auditing.

Max: Which is the disagreement worth having out loud. I think the price cuts are the bigger near-term number. You think the allocation problem is the bigger structural one.

Koko: I do. Renegotiate the contract this month. But audit GPU allocation before you sign the next capacity commitment at today's pricing.

Max: Two different clocks, same board meeting.

Koko: Qualcomm-Apple: licensing renewals are quietly becoming the stable revenue story while chip demand elsewhere wobbles.

Max: CFO talent: demand for AI expertise is outpacing wage growth, per CFO dot com. Retention just got more expensive than headcount growth.

Koko: Governance: agent incidents and self-governance efforts, like SAFA, are running in parallel with actual breaches, not ahead of them.

Max: And the ERP layer keeps proving the same point: clean core, composable edge. The AI overlay is only as good as the system of record underneath it.

Koko: So what goes in the board deck this quarter versus what gets a call this month.

Max: This month: renegotiate any API contract signed before this week's price cuts. That's free money sitting on the table.

Koko: Also this month: audit GPU allocation before committing to new capacity. Don't let idle spend eat the savings from the price war.

Max: Next quarter, board-deck item: get a clear line on execution guarantees in any infrastructure contract, after Oracle. Ask what happens if your vendor files force majeure too.

Koko: And put your own AI spend classification in front of the audit committee. If Gartner's right that a chunk of that two point seven trillion is relabeled IT budget, yours might be too.

Max: What would change my mind on the BofA bet is simple: if next year's earnings call still can't show sustained ROI, doubling down stops looking like conviction and starts looking like sunk cost.

Koko: Full write-up's at kokoknows dot A I.

Max: Here's the open question for the weeks ahead. Oracle called it force majeure once. Watch whether another hyperscaler files the same notice before year end.

Koko: If it happens twice, it's not an outlier anymore. It's a category.