Information vs. Intelligence: Why Everyone Else Is Flying Blind

In 2025–26, the world is generating on the order of 181 zettabytes of data a year.  Every market participant has more dashboards, feeds, and “insights” than they could ever read. At the same time, the United States is in the teeth of a historic infrastructure and energy capital cycle: a $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, included roughly $550 billion in new spending, began reshaping transportation, broadband, water, and grid investments. The Inflation Reduction Act added nearly $369 billion in climate and energy incentives, delivered largely through tax credits, grants, and loans. Federal energy and environmental programs have already pushed about $2.25 trillion into communities since 2010. 

On paper, everyone can see the same numbers. In practice, most of the market is still flying blind.

The illusion is that access to information equals an edge. It does not. A sponsor can quote every IIJA headline and still miss the only corridor in a metro where transit upgrades, substation investments, and zoning reform actually converge into durable upside. A family office can recite the IRA’s or OBBBA’s headline dollar figure and still underwrite deals as if policy were a backdrop rather than a cash-flow engine. Headlines tell you money exists; they do not tell you where the rulebook is actually repricing land and risk.

The stakes are not academic. In the last year, shifts in federal policy have produced both locked-in commitments and sudden cancellations across clean energy and infrastructure: billions in grants have been obligated and therefore protected, while other projects and programs have been frozen, re-scoped, or clawed back. 

If your strategy is built on headlines rather than a corridor-level read of which funds, programs, and approvals are real and durable, you are not investing; you are gambling on noise.

OBA draws a hard line between information and intelligence. Information is the raw feed: legislation, agency guidance, funding announcements, glossy city plans, market reports, climate and grid data, insurance trends. Intelligence is what emerges after that noise is filtered, ranked, and mapped into a small number of places where you can actually win. 

For us, intelligence always answers three questions at the same time: where to play, how to stack capital, and what position in the capital structure allows you to write rules instead of accepting them.

The work begins at the macro level but never ends there.

Once the geography is right-sized, intelligence shifts to the capital stack. This is where information is most dangerous, because it produces the illusion of understanding. Everyone knows incentives exist. Far fewer can show you exactly how a specific blend of grants, tax credits, loan programs, PACE, private credit, and sponsor equity changes the IRR, equity multiple, and downside profile of a particular project type in a particular corridor. OBA’s work is obsessed with that translation. We treat related tools as ingredients in a capital recipe that must be sequenced and timed; the value is in how the stack is engineered, not in how many programs someone can name.

From there, intelligence becomes structural.

The final layer is dislocation. In a volatile policy environment, there will be projects that stall, deals that die, and assets that fall out of favor. To an information investor, these are cautionary tales. To an intelligence investor, they can be entry points. Many of the “failed” projects now being written off were never structurally impossible; they were misaligned with the programs, stacks, and approvals that actually mattered. OBA uses the same corridor and stack lens to identify which of these stories are salvageable or repurposable, then designs recapitalizations, governance resets, and new use-cases that turn someone else’s blind spot into your asymmetric upside.