CME Group and Silicon Data will list two compute futures on Oct. 5, letting hyperscalers and AI builders lock in the hourly rental cost of Nvidia H100 and B200 GPUs. It's the first regulated derivatives market for AI compute, turning a blindly negotiated input into a transparent, tradable commodity.
With CapEx and stock comp inflating reported S&P 500 profits, the gap between true FCF yield and earnings yield widened 1.4% this year. Earnings now sit 1.11% below Treasury yields, putting the real equity risk premium near -2.5%, a setup last seen before the 1987, 2000 and 2008 busts.
OpenAI just lost chief revenue officer Denise Dresser, days after COO Brad Lightcap exited, gutting its C-suite weeks before its confidential IPO. Investors read the departures as a red flag, especially with Google, Anthropic, and cheap open-weight models pressuring its $852 billion valuation.
The New York Fed digs into its own data to explain the Great Recession-era headline: roughly 13% of card balances are 90+ days overdue. The stock is inflated by stale, charged-off loans lenders now report for longer, while the flow of new delinquencies has been stable for two years. The nuance matters for anyone reading stress signals into consumer credit.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI hedge fund burned ~$35B in weeks as 400%-leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks triggered margin calls and a discounted fire sale to Citadel. The 25-year-old is now courting existing backers and lenders for fresh capital while keeping private stakes like Anthropic. Tellingly, Silicon Valley is rallying around him.
Stripe has agreed to buy OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, roughly five times the startup's valuation from May. The model-routing hub serving 8 million developers gives Stripe the neutral plumbing layer to monetize AI inference spend, putting it at the center of cost-conscious model switching.
The SPV structures behind AI data centers mirror subprime-era CDOs: debt is raised inside ring-fenced vehicles, sliced into tranches, and repaid only if customer revenue actually flows. This teardown walks through the DSCR, liquidity and reserve mechanics that keep the leverage off hyperscaler balance sheets, and why construction delays could trip them.
Apple has held early talks with Chinese DRAM maker CXMT to supply memory for China-sold iPhones and MacBooks, betting White House approval can ease an AI-driven chip shortage that has forced price hikes. But CXMT sits on a Pentagon list tied to the Chinese military and US rules bar custom orders, so Apple may have to redesign parts for a plan Washington dislikes.
A free, multi-part deep dive walks through Reddit's ad business segment by segment, from unit economics and the customer to the moat, landing right as RDDT trades 20% off and retail sentiment turns loud. Presents itself as the most thorough public analysis of Reddit's business on the internet.
You’re caught up.
That was all 9 stories in the 17 August issue.