TechPulse USA

By Daniel Rao Meta spent Monday selling its own stock to the world. On Tuesday, its chip supplier decided to buy some. That is the whole story, and it is stranger than it sounds: Nvidia, the company whose processors Meta must have to build its AI future, is about to become a shareholder in the customer whose spending keeps its own factories humming. When the seller and the supplier start swapping places, the AI boom has entered a new phase — one where the money flows in a circle, and everyone in the circle insists it is not a circle at all. The announcement itself was terse, as these things always are. Nvidia and Meta said on Tuesday they would deepen their partnership on Muse, Meta's personal AI assistant, and that Nvidia would invest $3 billion in Meta's equity offering. It is a small number next to the sums Meta is throwing around this month. It is a very large statement about who believes in whom. One wrinkle first: some wire copies of Nvidia's release carry a 26 Oc...

By Daniel Rao South Korea has spent the past year talking about a sovereign AI factory as if saying the words loudly enough would build it. On 27 October, Naver finally gave the talk a signature. The country's dominant internet company has signed a $9 billion computing-infrastructure contract with Brookfield, turning a July handshake over AI infrastructure into a documented business structure — and, crucially, into the key that may unlock Nvidia's roughly $1 billion equity investment. That distinction matters, and it is the whole story. This is not $9 billion in cash landing in Naver's bank account. It is not a finished data centre, and it is certainly not proof that anyone will pay to use the thing once it is built. What Naver announced, through a corrected disclosure on its "Future Business and Management Plans", is that the infrastructure for its AI factory will be held in a company tentatively called Asset Co., formed by an investment vehicle of the Brookfi...

By Daniel Rao Anthropic has just told prospective investors it could pay SpaceX up to $120.5 billion for artificial intelligence compute — and then, in the same filing, handed both companies a 90-day exit. That is the strangest sentence in a 318-page IPO prospectus full of strange sentences, and it is the one that matters most. A $120.5 billion commitment sounds like a marriage. Read the small print and it looks more like a very expensive rolling lease, renewable every quarter, between two companies that also compete with each other. The figure comes from Anthropic's Form S-1, filed publicly with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, 26 October 2026. We checked our own coverage of that filing from the same day, Anthropic Filed Its IPO — With an $80.7B Loss on Page One , and the $120.5 billion number does not appear in it at all. The first-day story was, understandably, about the $80.7 billion first-half loss. This is the filing detail hiding underneath it, and it ...

Meta's $95B Plan Starts With a $35B Stock Sale By Daniel Rao For years, Meta bought its own shares back by the tens of billions. On Monday, it started selling them instead — up to $95 billion of them. That is not a pivot. That is a reversal, announced before the opening bell, in the plainest possible terms: the advertising machine that used to throw off cash faster than it could spend it now needs outside money to keep building. The pre-market tape told the story before most traders had finished their coffee. Meta shares swung between a small gain and a loss of more than 4% before the open, then settled about 1% lower, according to Investopedia's market update. They entered the day roughly 3% down for the year. Nobody was panicking. Nobody was cheering either. The market, for once, looked like it understood exactly what had happened and could not decide whether to be relieved or alarmed. Photo: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive and controlling shareholder. File ...

By Daniel Rao SWI Compute has ordered about $1 billion of NVIDIA hardware, signed its first customers and promised Europe 2.3 gigawatts of AI factories by 2029. It has not named a single customer. That gap — between the scale of the promise and the thinness of the proof — is the whole story of Europe's AI infrastructure boom right now. The company emerged from stealth on Monday, October 26, as the new AI infrastructure arm of Euronext Amsterdam-listed SWI Group. Its pitch is simple and, on its face, compelling: SWI Group spent six years securing power — 3.6 gigawatts of it across Europe and the United States — and SWI Compute is the vehicle that turns that power into NVIDIA AI factories, starting in Europe. It became a Preferred NVIDIA Cloud Partner in August. Two months later, it says, it had placed roughly $1 billion in NVIDIA systems orders and finalised contracts with its first customers. The speed is the selling point. Whether it is also the risk is the question this artic...

By Daniel Rao | October 26, 2026 Photo: Elon Musk, photographed in 2018. The man who just told 200-plus companies their funding has dried up is, by his own account, the exception. Credit: Debbie Rowe / The Royal Society, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA. Elon Musk closed a $40 billion bet on Sunday — and then, in the same breath, told an entire industry it was about to die. That is the whole story, really: the cheque and the obituary arrived together, and the obituary was the point. SpaceX, Musk wrote on X, has "closed" $40 billion in debt financing for graphics processing units, the Nvidia chips at the heart of the AI boom. The debt is primarily callable, the chips arrive in the first and second quarters of next year, and — his words — it is "not a major factor this quarter." Then came the twist that turned a financing announcement into a warning shot: debt markets, Musk wrote, "have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn't...