The best thing I have read on pacing the frontier argues that it is a margin lever. Shipping a better model at the same price is, in unit terms, a price cut per unit of intelligence, so slowing the cadence slows the price cuts, and an industry-wide agreement not to compete on cadence is an agreement not to compete on price. That is Paradis's argument and I think it is right. Here are two things from my side of the chain that sit underneath it. First, the accounting point is sharper than it looks. Labs expense training as research and development, so nothing amortises, but the economics are the same because every frontier model is superseded the moment the next one ships. Now put that next to what Oracle filed this week. GPUs coming up for renewal went out at a 20% premium to the prior contract price, and management said the majority of them were four years old or more. Utilisation on the same page was 97.9%. So the model has no book life and an economic life set by somebody else's release calendar. The GPU has a long book life set by policy and an economic life that just proved longer than feared. The asset with the shortest economic life in this industry is the one nobody capitalises, and the asset everyone argues about depreciating is the one that just repriced upward. Read that way, pacing is an attempt to extend the useful life of the only asset in AI that has no useful life on the books. Second, and this is the part that matters if you are positioned in the supply chain. Pacing is a statement about demand. It does not touch supply, because supply is already contracted. Oracle: 664 billion of RPO, up 209 billion year on year, the majority of the quarter's growth via pre-pay or bring-your-own-hardware, and 11.4 billion of customer prepayments against nothing a year earlier. Memory: DRAM and NAND go from 47% of major cloud capex this year to 68% next year, on long-term agreements that already carry price ceilings. Fabs: SK Hynix has 38 billion dollars approved with no output before December 2028, Samsung's P5 lands in 2028 after being pulled forward two years, Micron's first Idaho fab is 2027 and its second late 2028. Packaging: TSMC past 14 reticles with 24 HBM5E stacks by 2029. None of that unwinds if the release cadence slows. Concrete does not unpour and prepayments do not un-pay. Then the asymmetry worth keeping in view. One side of this has contracts with dates on them and money already transferred. The other has an essay, two replies, and exactly one concrete commitment, which is third-party evaluators with employee-level access. Nobody has committed to a slower release cadence. What would change my mind is a lab publishing an actual release schedule, or a hyperscaler cutting capex guidance and naming pacing as the reason. Until one of those happens, pacing reprices the demand curve and leaves the supply curve exactly where it was. $ORCL $NVDA $MU $SKHY $TSM