NVIDIA Just Enlisted the Six Biggest Money Managers to Turn Its Chips Into a $500 Billion Bond. Private Equity Put $45.7 Billion Into Data Centers in One Year. The AI Trade Stopped Being a Software Trade — Follow the Boring Money.

For fifteen years, "tech private equity" meant one thing: buy a software company, lever it, expand the multiple on recurring revenue, and sell it to the next fund. That trade is over. Software multiples have reset hard enough that the industry gave it a name — the SaaS-pocalypse — as AI erodes the feature moats that justified the premiums and PE marks down the buyouts it did at the top. But the capital did not leave the AI story. It moved one layer down, from the model to the machinery underneath it — and if you want to know where the returns are being underwritten now, you follow the boring money.