Altea Update: Jan 6

Hello

Welcome to the best of the Alts Community, 2026 version

As always, do your own research; nothing in the community constitutes financial advice. Stay safe out there, kids.

Let’s go 🚀

🚀 Live Deals

🎞️ Film Co-Invest

In 2024, we launched ​Film I​, an SPV that makes bridge loans to film producers. The portfolio, backed by AA+ collateral, has generated IRRs approaching 100%.

Before Christmas, we offered Altea members the a new way to invest in these deals. Rather than via pooled capital in SPV form, investors can now choose which specific deals they want to get involved with.

Two ways:

1. Co-invest – When we originate a deal, investors come in alongside us on the same terms
2. Take out – investors buy us out of a deal while

The last week of December, we launched the first of each type of deal to our members, and the response was overwhelming.

To ensure timely comms, we spun up a WhatsApp group for everyone who expressed interest.

Both filled up their allocation immediately.

This is what the forecast numbers look like:

Co-invest

Take out

Note: Because payback dates on these loans are fluid, the numbers are above are estimates only.

We’re aiming to put together four more of these deals in January.

👉🏽 ​Express Interest Now​

👋 New Members

Welcome to the 24 new members this week 👋

A few notable members..

🇧🇷 ​Gustavo​ is the publisher behind ​Critical Minerals Journal​, an independent research Substack focused on the often overlooked (but increasingly strategic) world of critical minerals. He recently authored the excellent Alts guest issue on ​Rare Earths: A practical investing framework​.

Gustavo is directly involved in developing a rare earth mining project in Brazil, where he currently lives.

🦷 ​Gary Sexson II​ is an orthodontist from Illinois looking to cut down his workload and let his cashflow turn to more passive income streams.

🎸 ​David Mosby​ spent 25+ years in the music industry, designing and building road cases for sound companies and touring bands. He’s looking for investors interested in acquiring his museum-worthy ​collection of music posters​.

🏆 Introducing Alts Rewards

Our weekly ​Leaderboard​ is kind of fun, but it has two big problems:

1. It rewards “activity” more than real impact.
2. It resets, meaning long-term contributors do not get lasting recognition.

​Alts Rewards​ is designed to fix both. It’s a meaningful and durable rewards program for the long-term.

How it works

Alts Rewards runs on points and levels.

• You earn points through actions.
• Points unlock levels.
• Each level triggers a perk or reward.

How to earn points

There are ​15 ways​ to earn points, from basic community participation, to meetups and referrals, to helping the community through guest posts and due diligence.

Most importantly, we’re recognizing Altea investments you make:

Levels and Rewards

The system is designed so the higher tiers shift into perks that meaningfully compound for active investors.

There are ​9 levels​ to unlock:

• Level 2 (20 Points): Commenting without admin review unlocked 🗣️
• Level 3 (50 Points): DMs unlocked 💬
• Level 4 (100 Points): Alts mug & unlock all premium content ☕
• Level 5 (250 Points): Your choice of a luxury hand-blown tequila or whisky glass 🥃
• Level 6 (750 Points): Luxury hand-blown wine glass 🍷
• Level 7 (1,500 Points): Your choice of a $200 gift card to a restaurant of your choosing, or premium hotel room upgrade on investor trips 🏨
• Level 8 (3,000 Points): Management fee reduction of 0.25% 💰
• Level 9 (5,000 Points): Management fee reduction of 0.5% 💰💰

Points recalculation

We have recalculated everyone’s points under the new rules. Your points (and the ​Leaderboard​) are now fully up to date.

Alts works because the bar is high and the people are real. As always, thank you for helping make this community what it is. You rock. 🤘

💬 New Discussions

The big topic this week was Morgan’s thoughts on ​What could really pop the AI bubble?​

This sprouted some great discussions:

“The key issue nobody is highlighting is the inefficient design and power hungry GPU’s Nvidia built are nowhere close to what they can be. In my book (and I am very very very close to the design) – these GPU’s were an accidental fit to training llm’s. They were not designed for training or inference. Custom silicon will rule next 5-10 years, & be far more efficient. These over build outs in infra and energy needs based on current Nvidia ones is highly exaggerated.” – ​Amit​

“I’m not underwriting the future assuming today’s GPUs are the end state. Cars started out at < 1 mile per gallon 100 yrs ago!

I agree efficiency and custom silicon are coming. I’m focused more on path dependency. Capital is being deployed, facilities designed, and power interconnects queued now on multi-year timelines. Even if efficiency jumps, those infrastructure decisions don’t rewind.” – ​Morgan​

“A few weeks ago I dug into ​alternative data‑center strategies​ based on earlier discussions on Altea — SMR‑powered sites, underwater modules, Antarctic siting, even orbital compute — and the common thread is that we’re already running out of conventional headroom. These ideas only surface when the grid and cooling envelope are hitting real limits.” – ​Mandar​

“Ease of cooling is surprisingly NOT one of the key advantages of space-based data centers. Availability of energy is. Radiative cooling requires upwards of 200-500m2 per 100KW of data center. It’s solvable however. The moon would be nice to cool directly into the regolith.”

– ​Tyler​

“I work on solar and wind energy storage for large scale plants (what we designed is a novel infrastructure system, not to store a few hours at a time as in batteries, but enabling humanity to make real long term…seasonal energy storage and distribution). We have had an increasing number of requests about datacenters in recent months, so it’s definitely is a large demand energy user application. But still completely possible to manage with the right type of technology.” – ​Stefan-Larsson-Mastonstråle​

🧠 Trivia Challenge Winner

Over the break we had some fun with a ​trivia challenge​

These questions were hard. Nobody got all ten correct (including Stefan, and he wrote the questions 😂)

With 7 correct answers, the winner was…

🥇 ​Andrew Hodor​

There was a four-way tie for second place:

• 🥈 ​Aivar Laan​
• 🥈 ​Pierros​
• 🥈 ​Scott Solsvig​
• 🥈 ​Travis Mitchell​

Thanks to everyone who participated! This was fun, we’ll do these more often.

​Answers here​.