Four companies now spend like a superpower.
Hyperscaler AI capex is on track for ~$733B in 2026, about 87% of the base US defense budget.
Wall Street has been buying Leopold Aschenbrenner's book
• Nebius $NBIS *Goldman Sachs disclosed a 10.5% in August • SanDisk $SNDK *Jane Street disclosed a 5% stake in August • Core Scientific $CORZ *Citadel disclosed a 6.5% stake in August • CoreWeave $CRWV *Magnetar holds 14.9%, Goldman holds another 8.1% • Applied Digital $APLD *Jane Street disclosed a 7.1% stake in May • IREN $IREN *Bank of America disclosed a 5.8% stake in June His Q2 13F is due in 3 days and his updated holdings will be public Source: Leopold Stock Tracker
“Virtually nothing matters more to markets at present than the AI buildout. It’s such a sudden and massive stimulus for the US that it has shifted macroeconomic data. "
Columbia Business School’s Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh argues that without it, the US would be in recession. He estimates AI infrastructure investment at roughly 2.8% of GDP, larger than the railroad boom, and it’s projected to keep rising Source: Annmarie Hordern Bloomberg
Norway Sovereign Wealth Fund H1 2026 results in a nutshell Record $184B profit... but tech-driven gains + SpaceX are the real story
Source: Emmanuel – Big Tech & AI Investor
Starlink has a lot of room left to grow into, telecom is a truly massive market.
Source: Christian Keil
US stock market concentration is at unprecedented levels
US tech stocks now account for nearly 50% of US stock market capitalization, an all-time high. This is ~9 percentage points above the 2000 Dot-Com Bubble peak. The top 10 stocks alone represent a record 40% of the S&P 500's market cap, ~13 percentage points above the Dot-Com Bubble peak. Source: Global Markets Investor
The most bullish chart of the year?
Josh Schafer (via Keith Lerner) shows that future earnings expectations for '26 and '27 have soared this year. This simply doesn't happen often, as most years see things trending lower. Source: Ryan Detrick, CMT
Nvidia Expands Into AI Infrastructure Finance
Nvidia is reportedly forming a major AI infrastructure investment partnership with some of the world’s largest private-capital firms, including Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR. The objective: mobilise huge pools of private capital to finance the chips, data centres and power infrastructure required for the AI build-out. The scale is enormous: Morgan Stanley estimates hyperscalers will spend $3.5 trillion between 2026 and 2028, while Apollo believes total AI infrastructure investment could eventually exceed $8 trillion. Nvidia is moving beyond selling GPUs. It is increasingly helping customers finance the infrastructure needed to buy and deploy its chips—including providing financial backing and potentially guarantees. Nvidia is separately discussing a massive guarantee for a 10GW Ohio data-centre project leased to OpenAI, highlighting how deeply it could become involved in financing the AI ecosystem. Private capital is becoming critical. AI investment requirements are now too large to be financed through corporate cash flows alone, pushing tech companies toward private credit, bonds, securitisation, project finance and equity. The risk: Nvidia financing or guaranteeing customers that ultimately purchase Nvidia chips creates concerns around “circular financing” and increasingly concentrated financial exposure across the AI ecosystem. Bottom line: Nvidia is evolving from the AI boom’s dominant chip supplier into something closer to its financial architect. Partnering with private-capital giants could unlock trillions for AI infrastructure—but also further intertwines Nvidia’s financial fortunes with the customers driving its extraordinary revenue growth. Source: FT
