It's already the biggest capital expenditure (capex) driver of gross domestic product (GDP) growth in history, and now they are backing up the truck. From a societal perspective, amazing things came from canals and railroads, electrification, highways, and the telecom buildout, but the investment landscape was riddled with winners and even more carcasses.

There is Demand

Yesterday, Intel (INTC) shares took it on the chin after management announced a $15.0 billion raise. The company has devoured capital in its efforts to carve out a spot on the artificial intelligence (AI) buildout. After staving off near-death with U.S. intervention and investment, the stock took off in a manner even the rocket engineers at SpaceXAI (SPCX) envied. 

Recently, the shares have been pressured by concerns over a return on all that capital.

After the bell, it was reported that there was $100 billion in interest in the latest Intel offering, and the offering size has been increased.

The Floodgates are Opening

The moneylenders are entering a new golden age.

NVDA

Over the weekend, I read a lot of pieces, including articles, Substack posts, and social media posts, and a major topic of concern was whether Nvidia (NVDA) had morphed into a modern-day GE Capital. This unit brought down the then most valued company in the world, or even worse, a modern-day version of Enron. Those are fighting words, but Jensen replied with a “hold my beer” initiative.

I took the liberty of editing down Jensen's bullets:

NVIDIA AI Factory Compute Is Becoming an Investable Asset Class

Today, we announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish independent financing platforms designed to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital to support the buildout of AI infrastructure over time.

A New Infrastructure Asset

NVIDIA compute is not just a chip. It is a complete AI factory platform including accelerated computing, networking, systems software, AI frameworks and a global developer ecosystem.

Bringing Capital to AI Factories

The demand for AI infrastructure is extraordinary. But access to capital is uneven. Many great AI companies, enterprises and AI clouds have demand for compute but do not yet have access to financing at the scale or cost required to build quickly. That is why we are partnering with the world’s leading long-term capital providers.

The Important Questions:

Is this circular financing?

This initiative is designed to address that concern. We are bringing independent, long-term institutional capital into the AI infrastructure market.  The capital providers independently underwrite each project — including the customer, demand, utilization, cash flow, and residual value. NVIDIA provides the platform; the investors make independent financing decisions.

Why would NVIDIA support financing?

In some cases, NVIDIA may provide a residual-value support mechanism for up to 25% of an opportunity, assessed carefully on a project-by-project basis.

Can the market absorb this capacity?

The question is not whether we are building data centers. The question is whether we are building productive AI factories. Capacity will be built around real customer economics.

Where is the return on investment?

The return is in the usefulness of AI. This is the virtuous cycle of the AI industrial revolution.

The Infrastructure of Intelligence

Every industrial revolution has been built on infrastructure: electricity, transportation, communications and computing, with every buildout enabled by external financing.  AI factories are the infrastructure of the intelligence era.

The age of AI is here. Together, we will build the infrastructure to power it.

As for the overall session, it was ho-hum at best. But it wasn’t long enough for that ho-hum to invite heavy selling. Right now, it’s wait-and-see, and about enjoying the last few weeks of summer’s feel in the market.

Today’s Session

Major indices are split out of the gate.

China’s First robotics IPO, Unitree, is seeing large investor hype and reportedly 8,000x oversubscribed.

In other AI news, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) signed a multi-year $240M deal to deploy AI clusters on IBM Cloud using Nvidia (NVDA) HGX B300 systems with Spectrum-X Ethernet networking. The customer is Together AI, which will run open-source model inference for enterprises off the cluster, with availability targeted for the first quarter of 2027.

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