Technology Sector

Anthropic signed a $9.1 billion computing deal with Riot Platforms, a Bitcoin miner, to supply 191 megawatts of capacity from Riot's Rockdale, Texas facility over 20 years through June 2048. The contract could reach $16.1 billion if both five-year extension options are exercised. Riot will receive long-term, predictable revenue from its existing power and cooling infrastructure instead of mining Bitcoin, which generates volatile returns tied to crypto prices. Anthropic is racing to lock in compute capacity as AI model training demands explode; it has also committed to $10 billion with Volta Infra and roughly $45 billion with xAI. Riot's stock surged 26% overnight and shifted to "extremely bullish" retail sentiment, though the company swung to a $237.2 million net loss in Q2 despite 14% revenue growth to $174.2 million. The deal reflects a broader pivot by former miners—Core Scientific, TeraWulf, IREN, and others—to monetize scarce power assets for AI and high-performance computing, where margins and contract certainty exceed Bitcoin mining.

Meta released Muse Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter open-weight AI model designed to run on consumer laptops, and said it would open-source the weights of Muse Spark 1.2, its most powerful model to date. CEO Mark Zuckerberg used the launch to argue that U.S. policy must reduce restrictions on training data and model distillation if American firms are to compete with Chinese open-weight systems from DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Alibaba, which already rival top U.S. models in performance. The move reflects a strategic reset: Meta's frontier models have lagged behind OpenAI and Anthropic in enterprise adoption and revenue, and the company is repositioning itself as a cheaper, customizable alternative rather than chasing the same closed-model strategy as its rivals. Glimmer runs locally on a single GPU, avoiding cloud compute costs and addressing real demand from businesses spooked by ballooning AI bills and recent security breaches tied to closed-source systems. Zuckerberg also announced a governance change giving independent directors power to approve safety criteria before model releases, a concession to investor and regulatory concern. The stock rose in premarket trading, though Meta shares remain down for the year as Wall Street questions whether the company's capex forecast will generate returns. Advertising still accounts for 97.7% of Meta's revenue, and the company is betting AI will sharpen ad targeting further while also creating new revenue streams from selling spare data center capacity. The open-weight bet is a retreat from Meta's earlier ambition to compete head-to-head with frontier labs on closed models, but it positions the company to capture demand from developers and enterprises that prefer domestic alternatives to Chinese systems and want to avoid vendor lock-in.

Nvidia signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR on Monday to establish financing platforms that will mobilize over $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure projects. The deal treats Nvidia's chips and the data centers that house them as a standalone asset class—like commercial real estate or toll roads—that lenders can underwrite and finance without forcing customers to tap their own balance sheets. Here's how it works: hyperscalers, AI labs, and enterprises that need Nvidia GPUs and data centers can now borrow against those assets through these platforms, using institutional credit, insurance funds, and private capital instead of corporate debt. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the shift bluntly: "In AI, compute is revenue." Because Nvidia's hardware is broadly adopted, flexible across customers, and generates measurable returns, lenders can treat it as a revenue-generating asset with a long useful life—the same logic that makes a power plant or pipeline bankable. The second-order effect is immediate: Nvidia's customers—which include Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic—can now scale their AI infrastructure faster without balance-sheet strain. Those companies have collectively spent over $1 trillion on AI projects in just three years, and demand shows no sign of slowing. By unlocking $500 billion in fresh institutional capital, the partnership removes a financing bottleneck that could otherwise have forced customers to slow buildout or compete harder for scarce debt. For the banks, the move opens a new asset class. Apollo, which manages over $800 million in assets, and its peers have been eager to deploy capital into digital infrastructure; this deal gives them a standardized, Nvidia-backed vehicle to do so at scale. BlackRock and Blackstone have already tested the waters—BlackRock took a majority stake in a Meta data center in Texas, and Anthropic recently partnered with Macquarie and Singapore's GIC for its own infrastructure financing. Nvidia did not disclose individual firm commitments, financial terms, or a deployment timeline. The company also did not specify how much of the $500 billion would flow to Nvidia's own projects versus those of its partners, leaving the true scope of the arrangement opaque.