STOCKS
GPUs Get A Mortgage | On Monday, Nvidia, the dominant supplier of AI chips, signed memorandums with Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to mobilize more than $500B for data centers and hardware purchases. The plan would treat compute like financeable infrastructure while keeping more AI spending off customers’ balance sheets. | The RIP: $NVDA fell -2.9% to $217.55 on 113.7M shares, 0.9x recent pace. The six partners aim to mobilize more than $500B through independent financing platforms. | “In AI, compute is revenue. NVIDIA compute is uniquely suited for this role,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia founder and CEO, said in the company statement. | Nvidia holders care because $500B of outside funding could keep customer orders flowing, but bond investors have doubled the extra yield they demand to lend to Nvidia since June, to about 0.40 percentage point over Treasuries. The next step is turning six memorandums into actual financing vehicles. The test is whether AI factories generate enough revenue to support the debt, or GPUs become very expensive collateral. | The Community Read: The $NVDA room stayed bullish through the selloff, follow the leverage debate -> |
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Low-Key, High-Stakes Oil | President Donald Trump signaled he would let economic pressure grind down Iran instead of launching fresh strikes, leaving the Strait of Hormuz partially blocked and oil flows vulnerable. Tehran replied Monday that shipping would not normalize until Washington lifts its blockade, releases frozen assets, and pays war damages. The decision came as rumors flew last week that the U.S. was facing shortages in both its oil reserves and missile stockpiles. | The RIP: Brent crude rose +1% above $84 Monday after gaining more than +5% over three sessions. Hormuz carried one-fifth of global oil and LNG before the war. The SPR fell 6.1M barrels to 298.7M, its lowest since January 1983, after Trump ordered a 172M-barrel release in March. | “We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump told Axios on Sunday. |
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Zuckerberg’s Power Play | In a long winded, 6,000 word post on Monday, Mark Zuckerberg pitched Meta as the champion of distributed superintelligence. He sees Meta as a counter to centralized AI labs, and wants to lead the way promoting a safety doctrine and an industrial policy. Of course, Zuck said the solution is moving fast, breaking everything, and above all else, using Meta AI products. | “The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote. | The RIP: Meta’s framework has 3 pillars: individual empowerment, invention over automation, and balance of power. Zuckerberg says a 2-month model advantage can be decisive, China adds 1GW+ of nuclear capacity every other week, and recursive self-improvement could produce 100x more intelligence per gigawatt. | “There is no such thing as a singular benevolent superintelligence,” Zuckerberg wrote. | The first two quotes make a real case: asymmetric capability can be the danger, and wider access can restore balance. But the essay ultimately swaps individual power for a coalition of frontier labs, cloud providers, and government, and judges ‘does AI work’ by the metric, ‘do people trust Meta AI.’ | Its policy conclusions also repeatedly favor faster releases, open-source protection, broader training-data rights, and legal distillation, all areas where $META ( ▲ 0.48% ) has direct strategic exposure. $NVDA ( ▼ 2.86% ) benefits from the compute race, while $MSFT ( ▲ 1.21% ) and $GOOGL ( ▲ 0.91% ) sit on the other side of the open-versus-closed model fight. This is a serious argument against centralization, but it is also a regulatory brief built around Meta’s competitive position. |
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