Wealth, infrastructure, and legacy: the capital layer below the AI stack

Wall Street is quietly repositioning for what the Financial Times pegs as a $60 trillion wealth transfer—baby boomers handing capital to the next generation, disrupting how money gets managed and where it flows. At the same time, the infrastructure layer beneath the AI boom is getting direct allocation. Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures to launch a new firm with Morgan Beller, explicitly targeting not the model labs but the energy and compute stack that powers them. The bet is no longer on the application or the branded frontier lab; it is on the grid, the data center, and the capital expenditure that precedes revenue.

Together AI raised $800 million at an $8.3 billion valuation, more than doubling its January mark. The neocloud provider hosts open source models and competes on inference cost, not on proprietary weights. That re-rating signals investor belief that the next margin pocket sits between hyperscale cloud and vertically integrated labs—close to the workload, lighter on the training bill.

Elsewhere in the build economy: Germany is accelerating talks with the Trump administration on joint production of US weapons in Europe ahead of the NATO summit. China's Windrose Electric, an e-truck rival to Tesla, is seeking a $2 billion US SPAC deal and claims current tariffs are not high enough to keep it out. SpaceX workers are forming a new city in the Texas sand, complete with border patrols, natural gas projects, and AI data center plans. The physical world is catching the capital that used to stop at software.

Retail is rebalancing at the same time. Kroger is acquiring Giant Eagle for $1.7 billion, with divestitures expected. TG Jones won court approval to close up to 150 stores after its buyout owner admitted WHSmith's former high street business is "almost completely broken." Sony will stop making discs for new games starting January 2028, and small retailers are losing the margin cushion physical media provided. China's Xiaohongshu is targeting men to grow its audience ahead of a Hong Kong IPO, a rare pivot for a platform known as "China's Instagram."

The through-line: capital is moving toward hard assets, energy, manufacturing, and the layer that ships before the model does. The $60 trillion handoff is happening while the infrastructure thesis is live. The two flows are beginning to converge.