The AI capex machine keeps finding fresh fuel.
According to the Financial Times, a who's who of alternative-asset heavyweights is pulling together a $500 billion package aimed at Nvidia's next wave of infrastructure spending, arguably the most ambitious private-capital construct we have seen for this cycle.
Ironically, investors greeted the news by knocking Nvidia lower, oil ripped almost 5 percent on renewed Hormuz stress, and Intel picked the moment to sell as much stock as the market can absorb. A busy Monday setup ahead of Wednesday's CPI print.
The Rundown
- A private-capital consortium is reportedly building a mega-financing package for AI infrastructure tied to Nvidia.
- Wall Street eased back modestly ahead of Wednesday's inflation reading.
- Oil jumped nearly 5 percent on hardening rhetoric around the Strait of Hormuz.
- A legacy US chipmaker is capitalising on its share-price recovery with a large equity issuance.
The $500 Billion Question
Let me start with the story that everyone will be dissecting today.
A consortium featuring Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, KKR and Goldman Sachs is reportedly finalising a financing vehicle worth up to $500 billion, with NVIDIA CORP (NVDA | ???2.86%) as the anchor partner.
The capital would not flow into Nvidia's own balance sheet, instead, the chipmaker would help underwrite loans and structured facilities used by data-centre operators, hyperscalers and grid-expansion projects, effectively lowering the risk for the private-credit giants writing the cheques.
Two things stand out.
First, the sheer scale, half a trillion dollars in a single construct dwarfs most sovereign capex programs and puts a firm number on how far private credit is willing to push into infrastructure.
Second, the market's reaction. Nvidia shares fell nearly 3 percent on the report, and that tells you plenty about where sentiment sits. Investors have been fretting for months about circular deals in the AI ecosystem - the pattern where Nvidia takes stakes in customers who then use those funds to buy more Nvidia chips - and this looks like a much bigger version of the same choreography. The scepticism is fair. Whether it turns out to be visionary or another dot-com moment is going to depend on what these data centres actually earn once they are switched on.
Peers were dragged along in the slipstream. MICRON TECHNOLOGY INC (MU | ???1.89%) and ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES (AMD | ???2.86%) each gave back ground on the same nervousness around AI infrastructure economics, with Micron feeling the extra weight of the memory-pricing debate that keeps popping up in Apple's supply-chain commentary.
Wall Street Eases Off Ahead of CPI
The main indices finished modestly in the red as traders positioned themselves ahead of Wednesday's inflation report.
The Dow Jones (DJI | ???0.11%) shed a tenth of a percent, the Nasdaq gave back a third of a percent. Nothing dramatic, but two undercurrents are worth flagging.
First, September rate-hike odds have crept back above 50 percent after Friday's soft payrolls print briefly took them lower. Second, Treasury yields nudged higher again. The CPI print will either extend Friday's dovish narrative or complicate it materially, and until then the market appears content to stay flat.
The earnings backdrop remains genuinely strong. Per FactSet, S&P 500 revenue is on track to grow 15 percent in Q2 - the strongest quarter since early 2021 - and Bank of America has earnings growth running at roughly 30 percent with about 90 percent of the index reported.
AI-linked names are still doing the heavy lifting at 28 percent earnings growth versus 12 percent for the rest, though BofA expects that AI premium to narrow to 16 percent in Q3. Worth remembering when we hear the next round of bubble talk.
Oil Snaps Back on Hormuz Standoff
The Brent price added almost 5 percent to $87.5 a barrel as Tehran drew a hard line on reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran's list of preconditions - withdrawal of US forces, full removal of sanctions, war reparations - is the sort of maximalist framing that essentially rules out a quick resolution. President Trump matched the tone on Truth Social, demanding reparations of his own. There is also a data point worth chewing on: the US strategic petroleum reserve has fallen below 300 million barrels for the first time since 1983. The buffer that used to absorb these geopolitical spikes is not what it once was.
Predictably, the oil majors rode the tape higher. CHEVRON CORP (CVX | ???4.48%) and EXXONMOBIL HOLDINGS CORP (XOM | ???4.41%) both added more than 4 percent on the session.
Intel Cashes In on Its Comeback
INTEL CORP (INTC | ???4.06%) announced a $15 billion equity issuance on Monday evening, and per Bloomberg the book is oversubscribed enough that the deal could be scaled up to $20 billion.
On paper the market response looks harsh, but management is executing textbook opportunism. The stock has staged a remarkable recovery on the back of CPU demand tied to AI data centres and after years of decline that saw it removed from the Dow Jones back in late 2024. Raising equity into strength - rather than distress - is the right call, even if existing shareholders take the near-term dilution hit.
The interesting follow-up is what management does with the proceeds: fab capacity, balance-sheet cleanup, or the acquisitions they will need to close the gap on foundry rivals.
Berkshire Rewarded for Getting Off the Sidelines
BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC-CL A (BRK.A | ???1.76%) added almost 2 percent after Saturday's Q2 release confirmed that the transition to Greg Abel is producing a more active capital allocator.
Operating earnings were strong, buybacks stepped up materially, and the group deployed meaningful capital across new positions. As I flagged in yesterday's update, the shift matters, for four years Berkshire acted like a giant money-market fund with an insurance business attached. A more traditional, deal-doing Berkshire is a very different investment case, and Monday's reaction suggests the market is warming to it.
Apple Loses Another Bull
APPLE INC (AAPL | ???1.62%) took another knock after Jefferies analyst Edison Lee moved to a Sell rating with a $263.7 price target, trimmed from $285.6.
The concern is Apple's ability to keep pushing average selling prices higher. Supply-chain checks reportedly indicate that the all-glass 20th-anniversary iPhone has been shelved due to poor manufacturing yields, and elevated memory-chip prices are already inflating BOM costs. The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple has been testing memory chips from China's CXMT for iPhones and MacBooks and is seeking White House sign-off to formalise a supply relationship, a pragmatic move given the AI-driven memory shortage, but politically loaded.
Meta Goes Small (On Purpose)
META PLATFORMS INC-CLASS A (META | ???0.48%) edged higher after launching Muse Glimmer, a slimmed-down variant of Muse Spark 1.2 designed to run on a single GPU and handle agentic tasks like calendar management and file organisation on PCs and Macs.
Meta is making the model open source, which fits Zuckerberg's broader push to lower barriers for open AI development and to counter Chinese players like DeepSeek and Alibaba that keep closing the performance gap. Add in Meta's plans for a dynamically priced compute cloud and a fully private AI-agent mode, and the "personal superintelligence" positioning is becoming genuinely distinct from the hyperscaler crowd.
Other Movers and Nabeurs News
EBAY INC (EBAY | ???3.81%) slid on a Bloomberg report suggesting GAMESTOP CORP-CLASS A (GME | ???1.93%) may pull its bid, though CEO Ryan Cohen reportedly still likes the idea of a joint venture.
After the close, ROCKET LAB CORP (RKLB | ???3.37%) posted revenue of $234.1 million, ahead of the $231.6 million consensus, and announced the launch of Rocket Lab Germany GmbH, a strategic push to build independent European space capacity following the Mynaric acquisition in Munich.
HIMS & HERS HEALTH INC (HIMS | ???0.57%) beat on revenue at $753 million (versus $699 million expected) and lifted full-year revenue guidance to $3.1–$3.3 billion, but Q2 swung to a $128 million loss and the EPS miss was material, largely tied to restructuring around its GLP-1 pivot.
Conclusion
Monday was a session about narrative shifts rather than headline numbers.
Private credit is prepared to write the biggest AI infrastructure cheque we have ever seen, and yet the market punished Nvidia for it, a reminder that scale by itself no longer settles the ROI debate.
Oil is back to reminding portfolios that Hormuz is not fixed. Intel is quietly proving that comeback stories can pay for themselves. And with CPI landing on Wednesday, the tone of the rest of the week will hinge on a single data point.
ChartMill Market Desk - Kristoff
With regard to the stocks discussed in the article above; the author owns individual shares in Nvidia.
This daily update is prepared by ChartMill for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Always do your own due diligence before making investment decisions.
Read full article here »
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Wall Street Titans Line Up $500 Billion Behind Nvidia's AI Buildout
The AI capex machine keeps finding fresh fuel.
According to the Financial Times, a who's who of alternative-asset heavyweights is pulling together a $500 billion package aimed at Nvidia's next wave of infrastructure spending, arguably the most ambitious private-capital construct we have seen for this cycle.
Ironically, investors greeted the news by knocking Nvidia lower, oil ripped almost 5 percent on renewed Hormuz stress, and Intel picked the moment to sell as much stock as the market can absorb. A busy Monday setup ahead of Wednesday's CPI print.
The Rundown
The $500 Billion Question
Let me start with the story that everyone will be dissecting today.
A consortium featuring Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, KKR and Goldman Sachs is reportedly finalising a financing vehicle worth up to $500 billion, with NVIDIA CORP (NVDA | ???2.86%) as the anchor partner.
The capital would not flow into Nvidia's own balance sheet, instead, the chipmaker would help underwrite loans and structured facilities used by data-centre operators, hyperscalers and grid-expansion projects, effectively lowering the risk for the private-credit giants writing the cheques.
Two things stand out.
First, the sheer scale, half a trillion dollars in a single construct dwarfs most sovereign capex programs and puts a firm number on how far private credit is willing to push into infrastructure.
Second, the market's reaction. Nvidia shares fell nearly 3 percent on the report, and that tells you plenty about where sentiment sits. Investors have been fretting for months about circular deals in the AI ecosystem - the pattern where Nvidia takes stakes in customers who then use those funds to buy more Nvidia chips - and this looks like a much bigger version of the same choreography. The scepticism is fair. Whether it turns out to be visionary or another dot-com moment is going to depend on what these data centres actually earn once they are switched on.
Peers were dragged along in the slipstream. MICRON TECHNOLOGY INC (MU | ???1.89%) and ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES (AMD | ???2.86%) each gave back ground on the same nervousness around AI infrastructure economics, with Micron feeling the extra weight of the memory-pricing debate that keeps popping up in Apple's supply-chain commentary.
Wall Street Eases Off Ahead of CPI
The main indices finished modestly in the red as traders positioned themselves ahead of Wednesday's inflation report.
The Dow Jones (DJI | ???0.11%) shed a tenth of a percent, the Nasdaq gave back a third of a percent. Nothing dramatic, but two undercurrents are worth flagging.
First, September rate-hike odds have crept back above 50 percent after Friday's soft payrolls print briefly took them lower. Second, Treasury yields nudged higher again. The CPI print will either extend Friday's dovish narrative or complicate it materially, and until then the market appears content to stay flat.
The earnings backdrop remains genuinely strong. Per FactSet, S&P 500 revenue is on track to grow 15 percent in Q2 - the strongest quarter since early 2021 - and Bank of America has earnings growth running at roughly 30 percent with about 90 percent of the index reported.
AI-linked names are still doing the heavy lifting at 28 percent earnings growth versus 12 percent for the rest, though BofA expects that AI premium to narrow to 16 percent in Q3. Worth remembering when we hear the next round of bubble talk.
Oil Snaps Back on Hormuz Standoff
The Brent price added almost 5 percent to $87.5 a barrel as Tehran drew a hard line on reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran's list of preconditions - withdrawal of US forces, full removal of sanctions, war reparations - is the sort of maximalist framing that essentially rules out a quick resolution. President Trump matched the tone on Truth Social, demanding reparations of his own. There is also a data point worth chewing on: the US strategic petroleum reserve has fallen below 300 million barrels for the first time since 1983. The buffer that used to absorb these geopolitical spikes is not what it once was.
Predictably, the oil majors rode the tape higher. CHEVRON CORP (CVX | ???4.48%) and EXXONMOBIL HOLDINGS CORP (XOM | ???4.41%) both added more than 4 percent on the session.
Intel Cashes In on Its Comeback
INTEL CORP (INTC | ???4.06%) announced a $15 billion equity issuance on Monday evening, and per Bloomberg the book is oversubscribed enough that the deal could be scaled up to $20 billion.
On paper the market response looks harsh, but management is executing textbook opportunism. The stock has staged a remarkable recovery on the back of CPU demand tied to AI data centres and after years of decline that saw it removed from the Dow Jones back in late 2024. Raising equity into strength - rather than distress - is the right call, even if existing shareholders take the near-term dilution hit.
The interesting follow-up is what management does with the proceeds: fab capacity, balance-sheet cleanup, or the acquisitions they will need to close the gap on foundry rivals.
Berkshire Rewarded for Getting Off the Sidelines
BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC-CL A (BRK.A | ???1.76%) added almost 2 percent after Saturday's Q2 release confirmed that the transition to Greg Abel is producing a more active capital allocator.
Operating earnings were strong, buybacks stepped up materially, and the group deployed meaningful capital across new positions. As I flagged in yesterday's update, the shift matters, for four years Berkshire acted like a giant money-market fund with an insurance business attached. A more traditional, deal-doing Berkshire is a very different investment case, and Monday's reaction suggests the market is warming to it.
Apple Loses Another Bull
APPLE INC (AAPL | ???1.62%) took another knock after Jefferies analyst Edison Lee moved to a Sell rating with a $263.7 price target, trimmed from $285.6.
The concern is Apple's ability to keep pushing average selling prices higher. Supply-chain checks reportedly indicate that the all-glass 20th-anniversary iPhone has been shelved due to poor manufacturing yields, and elevated memory-chip prices are already inflating BOM costs. The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple has been testing memory chips from China's CXMT for iPhones and MacBooks and is seeking White House sign-off to formalise a supply relationship, a pragmatic move given the AI-driven memory shortage, but politically loaded.
Meta Goes Small (On Purpose)
META PLATFORMS INC-CLASS A (META | ???0.48%) edged higher after launching Muse Glimmer, a slimmed-down variant of Muse Spark 1.2 designed to run on a single GPU and handle agentic tasks like calendar management and file organisation on PCs and Macs.
Meta is making the model open source, which fits Zuckerberg's broader push to lower barriers for open AI development and to counter Chinese players like DeepSeek and Alibaba that keep closing the performance gap. Add in Meta's plans for a dynamically priced compute cloud and a fully private AI-agent mode, and the "personal superintelligence" positioning is becoming genuinely distinct from the hyperscaler crowd.
Other Movers and Nabeurs News
EBAY INC (EBAY | ???3.81%) slid on a Bloomberg report suggesting GAMESTOP CORP-CLASS A (GME | ???1.93%) may pull its bid, though CEO Ryan Cohen reportedly still likes the idea of a joint venture.
After the close, ROCKET LAB CORP (RKLB | ???3.37%) posted revenue of $234.1 million, ahead of the $231.6 million consensus, and announced the launch of Rocket Lab Germany GmbH, a strategic push to build independent European space capacity following the Mynaric acquisition in Munich.
HIMS & HERS HEALTH INC (HIMS | ???0.57%) beat on revenue at $753 million (versus $699 million expected) and lifted full-year revenue guidance to $3.1–$3.3 billion, but Q2 swung to a $128 million loss and the EPS miss was material, largely tied to restructuring around its GLP-1 pivot.
Conclusion
Monday was a session about narrative shifts rather than headline numbers.
Private credit is prepared to write the biggest AI infrastructure cheque we have ever seen, and yet the market punished Nvidia for it, a reminder that scale by itself no longer settles the ROI debate.
Oil is back to reminding portfolios that Hormuz is not fixed. Intel is quietly proving that comeback stories can pay for themselves. And with CPI landing on Wednesday, the tone of the rest of the week will hinge on a single data point.
ChartMill Market Desk - Kristoff
With regard to the stocks discussed in the article above; the author owns individual shares in Nvidia.
This daily update is prepared by ChartMill for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Always do your own due diligence before making investment decisions.
Read full article here »