Who is paying, and with whose balance sheet. Cuts through every layer.
Funding, debt, public markets and the compute contracts that tie the layers together. This band is where a capacity decision at L1 becomes somebody's refinancing risk in 2028.
Cuts through every layer. This year it moved from equity to debt, which changes who carries the risk if demand does not show up.
· 3 min
SoftBank priced $11.1 billion of bonds on 24 September to fund the final $10 billion tranche of its $30 billion OpenAI investment. By our arithmetic the interest comes to about $1 billion a year, and S&P and Fitch rate the bonds one step below investment grade.
· Band Money · Confirmed
A new coalition of labor unions and data-center companies, including OpenAI, CoreWeave, SoftBank, and Blackstone, launched what it calls the first nationwide partnership between construction unions and the data-center industry. The group says it wants to set shared standards for building data centers responsibly; an IBEW union leader warned that blanket bans on data centers would cost construction jobs. The announcement names no dollar figure or specific commitment, so for now this is a statement of intent between labor and industry, not a concrete rule change; whether it changes anything for communities near data centers depends on standards the group has not yet published.
· Band Money · $64.6bn; ~13% · Confirmed
SoftBank says it has now put a combined $64.6 billion into OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, after finishing a previously announced $30 billion in follow-on investment on October 1, 2026 (Japan time). The new money itself was already expected, but this is the first time SoftBank has said exactly how much of OpenAI it owns in total: about 13 percent. Nothing about ChatGPT changes for a user because of this; it is a disclosure about who owns how much of the company behind it.
· Band Money · +$150bn to $235bn · Confirmed
Nvidia's board approved spending another $150 billion buying back its own shares, on top of what was left of an earlier plan, bringing the total it is now authorised to spend to $235 billion. Buying back shares doesn't change what Nvidia makes or sells; it signals the company has more cash than it currently has other uses for, and it has no direct effect on the price of Nvidia's chips.
· Band Money · up to $42bn · Reported
Reuters reports, from a confidential IPO filing it says it has seen, that Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, up to $42 billion, through debt Anthropic could later convert into its own shares. Reuters says this could cover about a third of a separate $125.2 billion, five-year deal Anthropic has made to lease Google-designed TPU chips. No prospectus is public yet, so this rests on Reuters' own account of a document it says it has seen, not a document this desk read directly.
· Band Money · up to $84.5bn · Reported
Reuters reports, citing the same confidential filing, that Anthropic has agreed to spend as much as $84.5 billion through 2029 on computing capacity supplied by xAI, the AI company Elon Musk's SpaceX bought earlier in 2026. This account says the deal can mostly be cancelled with 90 days' notice, so the figure is a ceiling on what Anthropic might spend, not money already committed. It is a separate commitment from the $42 billion Broadcom loan reported the same week, not the same deal counted twice.
· Band Money · ~$4.6bn 2025 revenue; $8.06bn operating loss; $518bn over a decade · Reported
Reuters reviewed a draft of Anthropic's IPO prospectus and reported on 28 September that Anthropic's revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, according to TNW's summary of that reporting. The filing has not been made public: Anthropic filed confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in June, and it declined to comment to Reuters. Reuters reported that the operating loss widened to $8.06 billion from $2.98 billion in 2024, and that about $34 billion of a $42 billion net loss was an accounting charge rather than money spent running the business. Reuters reported compute and infrastructure cost $7.33 billion. In a second report on 29 September, Reuters said Anthropic expects to spend at least $518 billion over a decade on infrastructure with six partners, about 80 percent of which it cannot cancel or must pay whatever its usage, including $111.1 billion with Google and $110 billion with Amazon. According to Reuters, the draft gives the seven co-founders 50.1 percent of the votes through a new Founder LLC.
· Band Money · $10bn+ capital and operating spending by 2030; $400m+ on cables · Confirmed
Microsoft says it plans to invest more than $10 billion in capital and operating expenses across Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates between now and 2030, expanding its cloud and AI infrastructure there, plus more than $400 million on undersea and land internet cables. It names what it calls national AI champion organisations, including Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN, the UAE's G42 and Qatar's QAI, as partners. The release does not split the total by country. For people in those four countries it points to more cloud capacity built locally; nothing changes today.
· Band Money · $10bn + €1bn notes at 7.125% to 9.75%; funds the final $10bn OpenAI tranche · Confirmed
SoftBank Group set the terms on 24 September for about $11.1 billion of new bonds, $10 billion in dollars and 1 billion euros, in five parts that mature between 2030 and 2034. It says the money will pay the $10 billion third and final tranche of the $30 billion it agreed in February to invest in OpenAI, a payment it expects to close on 1 October. The interest rates run from 7.125 percent to 9.75 percent a year, and S&P and Fitch both rate the bonds BB+, one step below investment grade. SoftBank also expects to cancel the $10 billion it never drew from a $40 billion bridge loan it signed in March. By our arithmetic the interest on these bonds comes to about $1 billion a year, one measure of how much of the money behind OpenAI is borrowed.
Read the story: SoftBank borrows $11.1 billion at up to 9.75 percent to make its last $10 billion payment to OpenAI · OpenAI
· Band Money · $207.9m cash; 2025 net loss $77.3m (2024: $47.9m); revenue $9.4m (2024: $1.2m) · Confirmed
Iambic Therapeutics, which says it combines its own large AI models with automated lab experiments to design medicines, filed on 21 September to sell shares to the public for the first time. Its filing shows $207.9 million in cash at the end of June 2026 and a net loss of $77.3 million in 2025, up from $47.9 million in 2024, while revenue from research partnerships rose to $9.4 million from $1.2 million. Its pipeline is led by three cancer programmes it says were developed with its AI platform; the most advanced is in an early-stage trial in patients with advanced tumours. The price range in the filing is still blank. For anyone asking whether AI drug discovery is a business yet, this is a rare full look at one company's books.
· Band Money · $3.7bn of 2.875% notes due April 2033; $498.8m of proceeds buys a dilution hedge · Confirmed
CoreWeave, which rents out AI computing capacity, priced 3.7 billion dollars of convertible senior notes on 18 September at 2.875 percent, maturing on 1 April 2033. The offering was upsized from a planned 3 billion, and the initial purchasers hold an option for a further 500 million. Net proceeds are put at about 3,644.5 million dollars, or about 4,137.0 million if that option is taken. Of that, about 498.8 million goes to capped call transactions, which is a hedge the company buys to limit how much its existing shares get diluted if the notes convert. So roughly one dollar in eight of this raise buys protection for existing shareholders rather than anything that computes. The rest is for general corporate purposes. How readily this debt sells, and at what rate, is one of the clearest signals of how confident lenders are that AI computing demand keeps paying the bills.
· Band Money · $2.276bn notes, 7.875% due 2031, priced at 98.5% · Confirmed
CleanSpark, which describes itself as built on "years of expertise as an energy company and bitcoin miner," is borrowing 2.276 billion dollars through a wholly owned subsidiary, CSDC Finance I. The money is for the remaining cost of building a data centre its filing calls the Sandersville Facility, for paying CleanSpark back for money it already put into the site, and for reserves that cover the interest. The notes pay 7.875 percent a year, fall due in 2031 and were sold at 98.5 percent of face value, so buyers paid 98.50 dollars for every 100 dollars they will be owed. Lenders get first claim on substantially all the assets of the issuer, and of CSRE Properties, if payments stop, and the deal is expected to close on 25 September. The filing does not say who will use the data centre. For an ordinary person, this is a data centre paid for with money borrowed at nearly 8 percent a year, a bet that it will earn more than that.
· Band Money · ~$1.5tn vs $1.2tn proposal; $730bn today · Reported
OpenAI is reportedly considering a new funding round that would value the company at about 1.5 trillion dollars, roughly double its most recent valuation of 730 billion dollars, according to a New York Times report citing unnamed people familiar with the discussions. A separate group of investors is said to have proposed investing at a lower, 1.2 trillion dollar valuation. Nothing is confirmed, OpenAI has not announced a round, and every figure here comes from people who were not named. If it happens near these numbers it would be one of the largest private company valuations ever recorded, but for now it changes nothing for anyone who uses OpenAI's products.
· Band Money · about $5bn reported · Reported
Z.ai, a major Chinese AI company formerly known as Zhipu, is reported to have raised about 5 billion dollars through a Hong Kong stock exchange filing, made up of roughly 2 billion dollars from placing new shares at a 10 percent discount and about 3 billion dollars of zero-coupon convertible bonds due in September 2027. A Hong Kong outlet reported these figures from the exchange filing, which we could not open directly, so this runs as Reported rather than Confirmed. The same report says Z.ai listed in Hong Kong in January and raised about 4 billion dollars in a follow-on share sale in July. It is evidence that Chinese AI labs are increasingly raising money on public markets in Hong Kong rather than only from private investors. Nothing changes outside China's AI industry today; this is a financing event, not a product.
· Band Money · No shares sold under the cancelled plan · Confirmed
Oracle disclosed in a filing that Larry Ellison, the company's executive chair and chief technology officer, has cancelled a pre-arranged plan to sell Oracle stock. The filing says no shares were sold under that plan before it was cancelled, and that Ellison has no other plans in place to sell Oracle stock. These trading plans let executives sell shares on a schedule set in advance, so cancelling one without having sold anything under it says something about an insider's own intentions rather than being a sale in itself. For anyone who owns Oracle stock, or is watching the company's finances as it borrows to build AI computing capacity, this is a small concrete data point about what the company's largest individual shareholder is doing with his own shares, not a change to the business.
· Band Money · $2-3bn at $20bn, reported · Reported
Cohere, a Canadian AI company that sells its models mainly to businesses and governments, is in advanced talks to raise between 2 and 3 billion dollars at a valuation of 20 billion dollars, according to a Globe and Mail report carried by PYMNTS and attributed to unnamed sources. Neither Cohere nor any named investor has confirmed a figure. If the round closes at the reported size it would be a large step up for the company, but until someone puts their name to a number these should be read as reported rather than settled.
· Band Money · AU$1.1bn (about US$796m) · Reported
NextDC, an Australian data centre operator, is raising 1.1 billion Australian dollars, about 796 million US dollars, by selling convertible notes, bonds that lenders can later swap for company shares at a fixed price. It is the third time in a little over four months that NextDC has sought fresh capital, following a debt facility in July and other commitments in May. For anyone watching how AI data centre construction gets financed, this is another example of debt, not just equity or cash on hand, funding the buildout.
· Band Money · $25.9bn · Confirmed
SoftBank Group says it has decided to prepay, on 15 September, the entire outstanding balance of 25.9 billion dollars on the bridge loan it took in March primarily to fund follow-on investments in OpenAI, and has told the lenders. A bridge loan is short-term borrowing meant to be replaced by longer-term money. The facility was 40 billion dollars in total, of which 30 billion had been drawn. The release does not say where the repayment money comes from. For an ordinary person nothing changes; this is a financing arrangement between a company and its banks.
· Band Money · >$100bn held, AUM +54% · Confirmed
Abu Dhabi Global Market, a financial free zone in the UAE, says entities registered there now hold more than 100 billion US dollars in AI-focused investment. That is a cumulative total of money already raised or allocated to AI by firms based in the zone, not new spending announced this week. The zone also says its total assets under management grew 54 percent in the first half of 2026 against the first half of 2025, and that it now has 13,974 active licences. Nothing changes for an ordinary person today; this describes capital registered in a financial hub, not a product reaching anyone.
· Band Money · €3bn · Confirmed
Mistral builds AI models in Europe. It has just raised 3 billion euros, in a round led by Samsung with two investment funds as co-leads.
· Band Money · over $2bn · Confirmed
Cognition makes software that writes and fixes computer code on its own. It has raised over 2 billion dollars from investors who now value the company at 48 billion dollars, and says its revenue, measured at its current annual pace, has grown from 492 million to almost 900 million dollars.
· Band Money · SK Hynix +8.1% · Reported
American markets were closed for a holiday, so Asia was the only place trading. The shares that rose most were memory chip makers, not the famous AI names. Memory is where AI demand shows up first, because every AI machine needs far more of it than an ordinary computer.
· Band Money · 14.8 GW · Reported
One gigawatt powers roughly 750,000 homes, so this is enough electricity for about eleven million households. Anthropic has agreed to rent that much computing power over the coming years. The figure comes from a reporter adding up public announcements, not from the company.
· Band Money · approx $11.9bn · Confirmed
Nvidia's filing with the US securities regulator puts the price for Hugging Face at approximately 11.9 billion dollars payable to its stockholders. Up to approximately 1 billion dollars more is set aside in shares for Hugging Face employees who join Nvidia.
· Band Money · $65B · Reported
Anthropic is earning at a rate of about 65 billion dollars a year, up from 47 billion in May. The company published the May figure itself. It has never published the 65 billion one, which comes from numbers shared privately with investors and reported by Bloomberg.
· Band Money · $220B · Confirmed
Amazon told investors it will spend about 220 billion dollars this year, up from about 200 billion. It named one cause for the whole increase: memory has become more expensive. The number is not in the filing. It was said out loud on the earnings call.
· Band Money · $489B · Reported
Goldman Sachs counted 489 billion dollars of AI-related debt issued in 2026 up to late July. That is borrowed money, not spent money. It has to be paid back whether or not the demand it was raised to serve turns up.
· Band Money · $965B · Confirmed
Anthropic raised 65 billion dollars in one round, which valued it at 965 billion dollars once the money was in. That is near a trillion dollars for a company founded in 2021, and the figure is Anthropic's own published wording rather than an estimate.
Strata, the whole AI stack, explained simply. Every number carries a source and a confidence label.
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