Addendum: Reading the Memo Like a Machine Reads a Contract

Alex Davis’s “State of the Union” letter isn’t just investor color. It’s a language system that turns concentration into virtue and risk into inevitability.

By Cherokee Schill | Horizon Accord

This is an addendum to our data center follow-up. The Axios piece mattered because it brought an insider voice into a public argument. But what matters just as much is the wording in Davis’s memo—because the memo isn’t merely describing markets. It is manufacturing permission.

So let’s stay close to the text and look at phrases that are doing structural work, not just stylistic work.

Thesis

These lines don’t just communicate strategy. They set the moral atmosphere in which strategy becomes unquestionable. They turn “we chose this” into “this is what reality demands,” and they do it through a tight set of rhetorical moves: shift from measurable outcomes to narrative justification, treat market behavior as weather, elevate informal influence over governance, invoke sovereign necessity, and celebrate closed-loop capital as progress.

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Evidence

1) “We are now at a scale that requires more than just the usual report on IRRs.”

On the surface, this sounds like maturity. Underneath, it’s a reframing of accountability. IRRs are measurable; “why” is interpretive. By elevating “why we act” over returns, he’s claiming a kind of moral or strategic authority that can’t be falsified. Once you’re “beyond IRRs,” outcomes become narrative-managed.

This is the same move infrastructure builders make when they stop talking about rates and start talking about “national competitiveness.” The moment the metrics aren’t enough, the story takes over.

2) “In a world where average gets bid up by the market.”

This is a quiet but important claim. It suggests that market inflation of valuations is an external force—something that happens—rather than the result of coordinated capital behavior. It absolves the speaker from participating in the very dynamics he’s describing. “Average gets bid up” makes overcapitalization feel like weather, not choice.

That framing is not innocent. If the market is weather, nobody is responsible. If the market is weather, concentration is just adaptation. And if concentration is adaptation, then everything that follows can be described as discipline instead of domination.

3) “Founder’s favorite investor” / “we define it by trust.”

This one is subtle. “Trust” here is framed as proximity and asymmetry: founders tell him everything, he’s “months ahead of a board.” That’s presented as virtue. But structurally, it’s an argument against formal governance and for informal influence. It positions personal relationship as a substitute for oversight.

That same logic appears in data center siting: backroom utility deals framed as “efficient partnership” instead of public process. It’s not that governance is wrong. It’s that governance is slow—and slow threatens advantage.

4) “The war for AI dominance is now a sovereign-level concern.”

This phrase is doing escalation work. It moves decisions out of the realm of market choice or local consent and into geopolitical necessity. Once something is “sovereign-level,” opposition becomes suspect and speed becomes a virtue.

That framing is exactly what lets infrastructure override local objections: you’re not saying no to a project, you’re saying no to the nation. This is how “permission” gets manufactured without asking.

5) “Private-to-private value assimilation.”

This is a euphemism masquerading as analysis. What it really describes is capital recycling inside a closed loop, increasingly decoupled from public markets, public scrutiny, or public exit ramps.

When paired with the data center warning, it becomes revealing: capital wants to circulate among owners and operators, not landlords or publics. Infrastructure becomes internal plumbing for private ecosystems. The public is invited to pay for the grid, then excluded from the value chain built on top of it.

Implications

Now bring it back to the phrase that feels “a bit weird”:

“One of ones.”

“One of one” already means unique. “One of ones” tries to make uniqueness into a category. It sounds like rigor, but it’s actually a shield phrase: it turns power concentration into discernment, inevitability into taste, and exclusion into discipline.

This matters because it quietly justifies the very behavior the memo later warns about. If you believe a few winners are inevitable, then massive speculative buildout feels rational. You’re not gambling; you’re preparing for the “one of ones.” That mindset is how society ends up paying early for projects that later get described as “market corrections.”

Call to Recognition

This is the fault line: our essays keep reopening questions that this memo tries to settle.

Who decides?

Who pays?

Who carries the risk when inevitability turns out to be a bet?

Language like “one of ones” is designed to close those questions. It makes the outcome feel earned, and the costs feel unavoidable. But the costs are not unavoidable. They are assigned. And the assignment happens through contracts, commissions, permitting, incentives, and the soft coercion of “sovereign necessity.”

The memo is useful precisely because it is smooth. Smoothness is the tell. When phrases become too elegant, it’s usually because they are doing concealment work—turning choices into destiny.

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