Step by step video series to Value a hyperscaler AI Company
AI is all the buzz these days with talk of the latest LLM, who has the most formidable AI stack etc but behind the headlines are finance and investment professionals putting capital to work to build out the required compute — and the infrastructure (think capex) needs are vast.
This is where corporate finance and project finance meet, as historic capital expenditure decisions are being made to move into an AI driven future. Here you will gain the essential financial tools needed to succeed in investment banking and be able to follow this historic conversation beyond just reading the headlines.
Who is This Course For?
This course is for anyone that wants to learn the tools needed to understand modern AI companies from a financial perspective. It focuses on laying the foundations for corporate finance (three financial statements, DCF valuations etc.) and project finance style decision making (determining go/no-go investment decisions on given projects).
These frameworks are at the financial heart of the trend. We will marry these two analytic frameworks up with a capstone exercise of valuing a hyperscaler AI company.
3 Statement Model from Scratch + Valuation
We build a three statement model from scratch, inclusive of a valuation. This model serves as the basis for modeling out a data center with co-located power.
Maintenance Capex & Working Capital
Layering in realistic assumptions around maintenance capex and working capital needs to accurately understand what the business is worth.
Data Center Company Valuation
This is where the rubber meets the road. Using the methodologies developed in prior videos – the three financial statements and DCF valuation – and using real world assumptions, we value a realistic data center company. We will do this from scratch.
The complexity will increase here as we will make a go/no-go investment decision on a data center prior to assessing corporate value, so make sure you have reviewed the prior lessons ahead of watching this video.
Valuing Co-Located Solar
This module will demonstrate the power of aggregating SPVs into a HoldCo to generate tax shielding mechanics, familiarizing you with NOL accounting - the tax alchemy of project finance.
Building on our prior model, we will build up a solar asset model from scratch. This solar asset will provide power to our data center.
We then evaluate the economics of executing on the capex decision to build (or "co-locate") a solar farm alongside our example 100 MW data center campus.
Valuing Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR)
While we build towards valuing a hyperscaler lets pause and use the tools developed thus far to value a leading data center company. Applying techniques learned thus far (3 financial statements & DCF methodologies), we will value Digital Realty.
This is the first module in the course that takes data from a public filing to value an actual company. We will use our results to ask some pointed questions around capital discipline and evaluate some key financial performance measures.