The five largest American cloud providers—Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Oracle—have arrived at a quiet but consequential turning point: the realization that even doubled capital expenditures cannot build fast enough to meet the world's hunger for artificial intelligence compute. Buried in their financial disclosures is a figure that tells the deeper story: $1.16 trillion in signed lease commitments for data center capacity they will pay others to construct. It is a moment in which the logic of vertical integration bends under the weight of urgency, and the infrastructure of the digital