This week on Equity Mates

Hey there Equity Mate,

Data centres, data centres, data centres. One of the most ‘pitched’ investment ideas we’ve had from experts on the show this year.

And surprise, surprise, big tech is leading the way. Last week we saw that Microsoft plans to invest $7.16bn in new data centres in northeastern Spain. This is on top of a $3.2b investment in Australia for nine data centres, a $2.9b investment in Japan, $2.16b in the UK and $4.31b in France. There are also rumours of a $100b project with OpenAI.

In 2019, Microsoft planned to open 100 data centres over the next decade. They are now building more than 100 every year, and are increasing their number of data centres from 192, to 800 by 2028.

Big tech just keeps getting bigger.

PS. Only 20 tickets are left for our live show in Melbourne

Here’s what is in your podcast feeds this week:

Equity Mates Investing (Spotify | Apple | YouTube)

• Monday - Audinate: Is it a buying opportunity at these levels? Company deep dive

• Tuesday - Expert: Tim Samway - The new frontier of private equity

• Thursday - Eli Lilly: The greatest drug of all time? | Company Deep Dive

• Friday - Expert: Claire Smith - Bryce is on the hunt for a private equity manager

Get Started Investing (Spotify | Apple | YouTube)

• Tuesday - Fees: What we pay and what we NEVER will | Financial Check-up

Come and join us for a live podcast - only 20 tickets are left!

Your questions, answered

Montana asked via Instagram:
“How do I know how much super I should have? I’m 36 years old.”

A few weeks ago we did a series on superannuation. One of the episodes looked at how much you should have, and what you can do to make sure you’re on track. The good news is no matter what your age, there is always something you can do to maximise your super.

If you have a question you’d like answered, hit us up at [email protected] 

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What we’ve been reading

Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event?

For a media company: this was grim reading. For a media consumer: it was equally grim.

The first line of this article from The New Yorker says it all: Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience.

In 2023, it was NBC News, Vox Media, Vice News, Business Insider, Spotify, theSkimm, FiveThirtyEight, The Athletic, and Condé Nast laying off staff. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed News and Gawker shut down entirely. In 2024, it was Pitchfork, the Los Angeles Times, Time, the Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated. The whole industry is downsizing. The traditional advertising-first and subscription-second business model no longer works as advertising dries up (or gets sucked up by social and search) and users develop subscription fatigue.

Sadly, we’re not at the end of this trend. Recent changes to Google’s search engine intended to provide answers with AI Overviews rather than pushing traffic to publishers is only going to exacerbate this trend. Similarly, Meta’s push to de-prioritise news on its platforms in response to government’s trying to force them to pay for links that were shared by their users. As this article forecasts: we may be on the cusp of an extinction-level event.

Our take here is slightly different. Extinction, by definition, refers to the death of all species of a plant, animal or other organism. And media and news is not going extinct. By some measures, more news is being consumed than at any point in history. We are all constantly plugged in to 24/7 news machines. It is just that the way we consume news has changed. From accounts on social media and in private internet spaces like group chats. There are new media companies rising to meet that moment, like The Daily Aus on Instagram or The Pocket Report on TikTok. But what this is doing is leaving traditional media and the first generation of digital publishers behind. The disruptors of the early 2000’s are being disrupted. And all the while the total pool of advertising available is getting smaller as Big Tech takes a larger and larger share.

What are we to do as news consumers in the face of these massive trends and huge forces? Subscribe to news publishers that you value. Or at least read their articles. Because our attention is literally the only thing that keeps them going.