Remember AI and all the attendant debates and dramas? There was the capex question and associated cash burn worries. And “SaaSpocalypse.” And “loan-ageddon.”

If it seems like just last month when those stories mattered, that’s because it was. But when Donald Trump’s in the Oval Office, no story’s position above the digital fold is safe. Not even those related to his presidency.

The news cycle in “Trump 2.0” is considerably more manic than it was during “Trump 1.0,” which is really (really) saying something considering his first term included, among other things, a trade war between the world’s two largest economies, impeachment, a pandemic, the first armed insurrection in America since the Civil War and, as a result, a second impeachment.

Against the odds, Trump’s on track to (easily) one-up himself in the pandemonium department during term number two. Already, he’s raised the average US tariff rate to a 100-year high, bombed Iran’s nuclear program, topped his own record for longest government shutdown, kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, subpoenaed Jerome Powell, assassinated Ali Khamenei and spiked oil prices by 80% in the space of seven days. That’s pretty “impressive” for 13 months.

Suffice to say it’s a lot for the general investing public to process, and it means that stories which, in more normal times, would’ve dominated market headlines for months, can disappear without a trace virtually overnight given the sheer gravity of subsequent events.

Put differently: Who cares about cutesy riffs on synonyms for doomsday in the presence of a real apocalypse and literal armageddon?

Before the seven trumpets sound, I figured I’d take a moment to acknowledge three under-the-radar developments in the AI space which failed to compete for above-the-fold coverage in recent days amid the Mideast melee:

1. Oracle and OpenAI abandoned a planned data center expansion at a Stargate site in Texas amid wrangling over the project’s financing
2. Reports indicated that Oracle’s planning thousands of layoffs to help offset cash burn from the AI buildout
3. Nvidia indicated that recent investments in OpenAI and Anthropic ($30 billion and $10 billion, respectively) are likely to be the company’s last ahead of expected IPOs from both startups

None of those headlines are game-changers in their own right, but together they at least nod in the direction of a potential inflection point.

“Any sign of deceleration in exponential AI capex growth is the best catalyst to reverse the ‘short tech bonds’ trade,” BofA’s Michael Hartnett remarked, in his latest.

Commenting Monday on the Oracle-OpenAI news, Nomura’s Charlie McElligott posed three questions:

“What does the stock market do when the first hyper-scaler makes a conscious decision to knowingly ‘miss’ on capex?”

“Is that company rewarded for ‘breaking the cycle’ and showing ‘discipline’?”

“Or is it punished as an admission of failure and downgraded visibility on the path to monetizing spend?”

When Charlie put those questions to clients recently, “nobody was able to provide a high conviction directional view,” he said.

Oracle reports tomorrow assuming, of course, that there is a tomorrow. Don’t scoff. There wasn’t one today.