The Capacity Bet

What this pack runs.

A plant, a fleet, a fab, a data center, a team: it exists before the volume that fills it, because it has to. Nobody builds after the orders arrive. So the wait between the capacity existing and the demand arriving is the structure of the decision rather than a failure of planning, and what separates the outcomes is whether anybody priced it. The argument in the room is always about whether the demand will come, which nobody can settle, so the meeting becomes about conviction while the meter runs. This pack turns that into two divisions. Carrying cost over contribution per unit gives break-even volume, and as a share of capacity, the utilization at which the asset stops losing money — set against the utilization you run at. Committed funding over what a year of waiting costs gives the carry: how many years of waiting the money covers, set against how long the demand needs at the growth rate the plan already assumes. The gap between those is the decision, and its width matters more than its sign. It stops on five conditions: no carrying cost, no capacity figure, no contribution per unit, nothing stated about what is arriving, and no funding committed to the wait.

The casebooks these cases come from.

The pack reads nine sourced decisions through the framework. They are drawn from these casebooks, each one a set of verified records on a single decision type.

A verified record has passed a mechanical claim-versus-source check, a second model's read, and human approval. The count is what exists today, not a target.