Who's paying for AI's build-out: Anthropic's $517B tab, Blackstone's big bet and a bond market warning

Hello,

The AI race is turning into a race to pay for it. Chips, power and data centers now cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and the money is coming from some unlikely places. Not every bet is holding up.

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Anthropic’s $517 billion question

In just 11 months, Anthropic has signed compute deals that could cost as much as $517 billion, some of them with companies long aligned with its biggest rival. With an IPO on the horizon, investors want to know whether that’s enough and what it means for its margins.

Even the hottest startups are hitting a wall

Instinct is the personal AI assistant Silicon Valley insiders won’t stop talking about, and it has started warning users it’s running at full capacity. The fix it’s pitching to investors goes well beyond just raising more money.

SpaceX rethinks speed

Musk’s AI team famously brought its first data center online in 122 days. After outages spilled over to customers, a new crew of rocket engineers is rewriting that playbook, and it could slow SpaceX down just as it’s renting capacity to Anthropic and Google.

Musk goes after the power bottleneck

Turbine makers like GE Vernova are sold out until 2030, in large part because just four companies make a critical part inside them. Musk is making a move no one else has been bold enough to try, and he says it could get turbines running up to 18 months sooner.

Blackstone wants to be AI’s banker

Blackstone calls compute its “biggest conviction bet,” and its plans with Google have already grown well past what it announced in May. The firm thinks it has an advantage Silicon Valley’s usual funders can’t match.

A new way to cut the chip line

Even big chip designers are struggling to get memory and manufacturing capacity. Coatue is in talks on a multibillion-dollar venture that would help a four-year-old startup line up capacity the way Broadcom does, and the model could open doors for other hardware upstarts.

The bond market blinks

Debt behind a data center leased by Jane Street has soured fast, with yields climbing past 11%. It’s an early test of what happens when AI financing moves beyond big tech’s balance sheets.

The money for AI’s build-out is there. It’s just arriving with new players, new structures and new risks, and who ends up holding those risks will shape what comes next.

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