Christopher Romei
Power-list entries - evidence-backed

Power-list entries: three people who moved the money in AI infrastructure

Format sample. Three entries of 150-200 words each, written to the shape a power list uses: the claim first, then the numbers that carry it, every one linked to a primary source. Written 10 November 2026 to the style described in Observer's freelance editorial research analyst call.

The point of an entry is not to praise the honoree. It is to leave an editor with three numbers they can defend if the subject's press office rings up. Each figure below is taken from the company's own release, call or filing, not from a summary of it.

Michael Intrator - co-founder and CEO, CoreWeave

Intrator turned a crypto-mining operation into the landlord of the AI buildout, and the contracts are the evidence. CoreWeave reported $2.575 billion of revenue in the quarter ended 30 June 2026, up 112% year on year, against a revenue backlog of $104.2 billion, up 246%. The backlog is not a pipeline in the loose sense: $9.7 billion had already been billed and deferred at 30 June. Contracted power rose to roughly 4.2 gigawatts by 11 August from 3.7 gigawatts at quarter end, and more than half of the June backlog sits on contracts where delivery has already begun, a share management expects to pass two thirds by year end. None of that counts the more than $25 billion of net new commitments signed in the opening weeks of the third quarter, which sit outside the June figure. His case rests less on demand now than on the gap between a signature and an energised hall: the company guided $3.45-3.60 billion of third-quarter revenue and reports on 10 November.

(168 words)

Masayoshi Son - chairman and CEO, SoftBank Group

Son is on this list because he is now the largest external supplier of equity capital to OpenAI, and he is buying it with borrowed money. SoftBank completed the third and final $10 billion tranche of its follow-on investment on 1 October 2026, taking cumulative investment to $64.6 billion for a stake of approximately 13%. The tranche was funded from a foreign-currency senior note sale, following the $11.1 billion high-yield issue in September that Reuters described as the largest such sale on record. He chairs Stargate, the vehicle announced to put $500 billion into United States AI infrastructure over four years, which makes him counterparty to the power, land and construction commitments that the rest of this list is waiting on. The number worth tracking is leverage rather than ownership: $10 billion of undrawn bridge capacity was cancelled on 30 September, so the next dollar has to come from asset sales, a listing, or the bond market.

(157 words)

Doug Ostrover and Marc Lipschultz - co-CEOs, Blue Owl Capital

Blue Owl wrote the cheque that made private credit the default funding route for AI campuses. In October 2025 its funds took an 80% interest in the joint venture owning Meta's Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, committing a pro rata share of approximately $27 billion of development cost and contributing roughly $7 billion of cash - Meta's largest private capital transaction to date. The franchise behind it is specialised rather than general: $158.1 billion of assets under management at 30 June 2026, with digital infrastructure at about 6% of AUM against what management calls unprecedented demand for data-centre capacity, and $39.4 billion of gross direct-lending originations over the trailing twelve months. The Hyperion structure is the part to study rather than the headline: lease agreements running to Meta, a residual value guarantee behind them, and part of the equity itself funded by privately placed debt sold to PIMCO and other bond investors. The number that matters is the $7 billion: equity sitting beneath senior debt. Every further gigawatt needs someone to underwrite that layer before a bondholder will look at it.

(181 words)

The optional ask - one name, one number

Larry Ellison, Oracle. Oracle's remaining performance obligations reached $664 billion at 31 August 2026, up $209 billion in a year, of which the company says about 90% is cloud infrastructure. It added 850 megawatts of data-centre capacity in that single quarter.

How each figure was checked (method note for the editor)

No figure in these entries comes from a press summary where the primary document was available. Where a number is an analyst's reading rather than the issuer's own statement, it is not used.