#investing

Tech companies have moved more than $120bn of data centre spending off their balance sheets using special purpose vehicles funded by Wall Street investors, adding to concerns about the financial risks of their huge bet on artificial intelligence.

Meta in October completed the largest private credit data centre deal, a $30bn agreement for its proposed Hyperion facility in Louisiana that created an SPV called Beignet Investor with New York financing firm Blue Owl Capital.

The SPV raised $30bn, including about $27bn of loans from Pimco, BlackRock, Apollo and others, as well as $3bn in equity from Blue Owl.

Looking for all that money Sam plans to spend…

“This is where we’re looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental, the ways governments can come to bear,” she said. Any such guarantee “can really drop the cost of the financing but also increase the loan-to-value, so the amount of debt you can take on top of an equity portion.”

OpenAI is losing money at a faster pace than almost any other startup in Silicon Valley history thanks to the upside-down economics of building and selling generative AI. The company expects to spend roughly $600 billion on computing power from Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon in the next few years, meaning that it will have to grow sales exponentially in order to make the payments. Friar said that the ChatGPT maker is on pace to generate $13 billion in revenue this year.

On track to lose $8.5B/yr is good, right?

OpenAI generated around $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025, about 16% more than it generated all of last year, The Information reported on Monday, citing financial disclosures to shareholders.

OpenAI said it burned $2.5 billion, in large part due to its research and development costs for developing artificial intelligence and for running ChatGPT, the report added. Research and development cost the ChatGPT maker $6.7 billion in the first half, the report said, adding that it had about $17.5 billion in cash and securities at the end of the period. OpenAI looks to meet its full-year revenue target of $13 billion and a cash-burn target of $8.5 billion, the report added.

A $9.5B return on an $8B investment in less than a year. Not bad! How does "main street" get in on investments like that?!

The company reported a $9.5 billion pre-tax gain from its investment in the AI startup Anthropic, which was included in Amazon’s non-operating income for the quarter...

To put the $9.5 billion paper gain in perspective, the Amazon Web Services cloud business — historically Amazon’s primary profit engine — generated $11.4 billion in quarterly operating profits...

Amazon has invested and committed a total of $8 billion in Anthropic, initially structured as convertible notes.

Looks like a clean beat. Why did the stock go down?