New GPU contracts price at more than double last year's

Markets: chip stocks had their longest losing streak since 2008. CoreWeave lost a quarter of its value, and its bonds yield about 15%.

Rents: B200 rents rose about 15% in a week. IREN says new contracts price at more than double last year's, with 45-55% of GPU capex prepaid.

The gap: lenders are pricing financing risk, not demand risk. GPUs age faster than the debt against them. No defaults yet. (Section 2)

Nscale: lost Microsoft in Essex over power. Anthropic is reportedly in talks for about $45 billion more in West Virginia.

Essex is out. Microsoft dropped plans to anchor Nscale's Loughton site on Oct 18, the Telegraph first reported. UK Power Networks can't supply enough power until the early to mid-2030s. Nscale says it remains committed and is exploring other power.

The IPO is wobbling. Nscale wants about $30 billion; some investors suggest $16-19 billion, citing Firmus's failed IPO, Bloomberg reported. Its Norway flagship is six months late after leaks, delays and a fire.

West Virginia is the bet. Anthropic is reportedly in talks for about $45 billion more at Nscale's Monarch campus: a second 460 MW building on Vera Rubin, plus first refusal on a third. Talks ongoing. It already rents the first for $45 billion.

Microsoft: a 20-year deal with Indiana's NiSource adds about 1.1 GW from 2028, with large customers funding their own generation and grid, plus 600 MW of batteries. "Paying our own way," says Microsoft's Jeff Riles.

Amazon: funding a feasibility study for a proposed 960 MW nuclear plant (12 X-energy Xe-100 reactors) AEP would build in Sullivan County, Indiana. No investment decision yet.

Everyone else is squeezed. DOE let PJM tap backup generation "as a last resort" Oct 13-16. Loudoun County votes today (Oct 20) on a pause of up to 12 months.

Chips: the SOX fell 15.7% over eight sessions through Oct 16, its longest losing streak since October 2008. Monday it rose 1.61% to 11,316.34, still 14.4% below its Oct 6 close.

Neoclouds: CoreWeave and Nebius each fell 25.2% last week (Fri-Fri closes, Oct 9-16), IREN 23.3%.

Credit: CoreWeave's June bonds (due 2032, issued at a 9.675% yield) traded to about 15%; separately, its 2031s yielded 15.13% Monday (Tradeweb via Reuters).

Contagion: risky AI debt spreads are up 50%+ in six months (Barclays). Some Oracle bank debt trades around 90 cents. Insuring $1M of SoftBank debt costs over $40,000, up from under $27,000 (NYT).

Rents: Ornn's B200 index hit $8.54/GPU-hour on Oct 18, an all-time high per Ornn, then $8.41 Monday, up 14.7% in a week.

Contracts: IREN's co-CEO says new three-year deals are "more than double the prior year's pricing," with 45-55% of GPU capex prepaid.

Goldman: upgraded CoreWeave to Buy (target cut to $106 from $139), citing short-term deals near $40M per MW and price hikes of 25% in July and 10% in October, per Benzinga. CoreWeave still closed down 0.4% at $61.12.

Even Musk: SpaceX has "tried to rent inference compute from AWS, GCP or anyone."

Two loans, two risks. Neoclouds borrow against their GPUs and a few customer contracts. The buildings are often financed separately, through project bonds or special-purpose vehicles, like the joint venture behind Meta's Hyperion campus (80% Blue Owl).

Chips age faster than the debt. CoreWeave can borrow only a share of its GPUs' "depreciated purchase price." It writes them off over 6 years, but its debt matures in about 3.3, when ~45% of cost is still on the books. Others see 2-4 year lives.

Few, private customers. The main customers are labs that "publish no accounts."

Lenders want more. It shows in the bond yields above, not in rents.

No defaults yet. The distress is in prices, not missed payments.

Spot goes public: Nebius now posts live spot (interruptible) prices, updated up to every 15 minutes. Monday 8:15 PM ET: $3.65/GPU-hour in us-central1, $4.50 in me-west1. A screenshot two hours earlier showed $3.35, up 109.4% in a week.

List: Nebius on-demand is $8.50, up from $7.15 on Oct 1. Nebius spot floor: $0.99.

Indexes split on level, agree on direction: Ornn $8.41; Silicon Data $6.14, up 3.4% in seven days by our math (its "7D" badge shows 7.2%, the change since Sep 20). On Ornn, a B200 hour costs 2.8x an H100 hour ($2.98).

Futures are coming: CFTC comments on compute derivatives close today (Oct 20). CME's Silicon Data H100 and B200 futures are under review until Nov 9; ICE's Ornn contracts await the end of the comment period.

OpenAI is racing to lock in about $30 billion at a valuation that could top $1.4 trillion before Anthropic's mid-November IPO, Reuters reported, citing sources. SoftBank and MGX are in talks to join.

It is telling investors it hit $50 billion annualized revenue, heading to $70 billion by year-end. The money also hedges against a slip in its planned 2027 IPO.

Anthropic told IPO investors Q3 revenue was $16.8 billion, up from $11.6 billion in Q2 (Reuters).

It will put 5% of its shares into a Public Benefit Fund (pending stockholder approval), plus 2% for every 50% rise in value above a baseline. An LLC, not a charity; no lobbying. With pledges and a match, about 20% of shares go to the public good.

Musk told Anthropic to give "the shares directly to the public," then pledged one SpaceX share to every kid in America next year. 25 million+ views by Monday night.

DeepSeek + Huawei: Huawei engineers sit in DeepSeek's offices co-designing Ascend chips (The Information). DeepSeek may train on the 950DT by end-2026 and get most of the 960DT in Q1 2027. A frontier run could need 10,000+ chips for weeks.

Rented compute: IFP estimates China will have access to about 4.6M H100-equivalents by end-2026 and 8.8M by end-2027. Fastest channel: renting US chips abroad, about 75% in Southeast Asia. IFP says new controls could "almost entirely" restrict it and urges BIS to act.

Controls both ways: China's Oct 16 draft would restrict exports of frontier model weights (10^26+ FLOPs or 2T+ parameters). Taiwan plans to criminalize unapproved AI server and chip shipments to China (Bloomberg).

Gulf licenses: former acting BIS undersecretary Nazak Nikakhtar says UAE and Saudi chip licenses "are being held" until investment pledges are met. A former official's account; BIS did not respond.

Its yearly auction to pay plants to be available hit its price ceiling for 2027/28 and still fell 6.5 GW short. The grid's market monitor blames data centers.

Regulators rejected most of PJM's data center hookup plan Oct 9. Jefferies expects higher prices for longer.

About 474 GW of large users want in, roughly 90% data centers. New data center hookups are paused pending an audit due Dec 10.

ERCOT warns planned generation may not keep up, making approved sites scarcer.

MISO proposed a 120-day fast track for sites over 200 MW paired with new nearby generation.

Both must be online within three years and stay paired 15 years. Deposits aim to weed out speculative projects.

Big users can get a grid agreement in about 90 days if they accept being cut off when the grid is stressed.

That likely suits workloads that can pause, not always-on ones.

Georgia Power has 32 large customers committed to about 15.6 GW, under stricter financial-commitment rules.

RMI says utility gas plans are surging as turbine supply tightens and costs rise.

Oregon paused air and water permits for new data centers until July 1, 2027, effectively pausing most development, per OPB. Amazon warns billions in investment are at risk.

AWS announced TorchNeuron, a native PyTorch backend for its Trainium chips: existing PyTorch code runs on Trainium without a rewrite. It goes open source today (Oct 20). About Amazon

Meta says its gigawatt-scale Prometheus cluster in Ohio ran Muse Wonder pretraining at more than 85% goodput (the share of paid GPU time doing useful work) and is scaling toward about 1 million GPUs. Meta Engineering

Modal, a fast-growing AI cloud, will add Nvidia's Vera CPU alongside Intel and AMD for its agent sandboxes after early tests showed it doubled agent throughput; Nvidia expects at least $20 billion of Vera sales this fiscal year. Agents are turning CPUs into AI compute too. Reuters via Investing.com

Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion at a $6.2 billion post-money valuation, more than double its last, even as chip stocks fell. CNA (Reuters)

SemiAnalysis now forecasts about 50 GW of new data center capacity in 2027 alone, up from its earlier 43 GW call. SemiAnalysis

Anthropic signed a 20-year lease for the 95 MW first phase of EverWind's Point Tupper campus in Nova Scotia, due online late 2027. Canadian Press, EverWind

IDC's preliminary estimate has Q3 smartphone shipments down 22% year on year, as the AI-driven memory crunch pushes up prices. The Register

TSMC's Q3 revenue rose 41.2% to $46.72 billion; it guided Q4 to $52.3-54.3 billion. TSMC

doubleAI, from Mobileye's Amnon Shashua, raised a $200 million Series A at a valuation above $1 billion, per Calcalist, to sell software that cuts compute costs. Calcalist

Germany's federal government signed a joint declaration of intent with Nvidia to work on AI models for physical AI and industry. NVIDIA

OpenAI disclosed four more "rogue" incidents from June involving its models, including one that bypassed a government statistics site's authorization checks. Ars Technica

Disney agreed to hire most of Character.AI's staff after the chatbot company filed for bankruptcy. TechCrunch

Anthropic says Claude worked out in under half an hour how the NSA-supplied seeds for the NIST elliptic curves were generated, a cryptography puzzle dating to the late 1990s. Anthropic

This week: whether Nscale and Anthropic sign the second Monarch deal. Reuters via StreetInsider

Oct 20: Loudoun County's final vote on its data center pause; CFTC comment period on compute derivatives closes; TorchNeuron open-source release at PyTorch Conference. Loudoun agenda, CFTC, PyTorch blog

Oct 21: Meta, Tesla, IBM, Texas Instruments, Lam Research and SAP report after the close. Korea's Oct 1-20 export data around the same day. Opening Bell week ahead, Korea Customs

Oct 21-22: Clackamas County, Oregon, public hearings on a possible data center moratorium. Clackamas County

Oct 22: special PJM Members Committee consultation on its revised backstop procurement filing; Ohio Power Siting Board hearing on a 450 MW gas plant for an EdgeConneX data center in New Albany. PJM motion (PDF), The Reporting Project

Oct 28-29: SK hynix (Oct 28) and Intel (Oct 29) report; PJM plans its revised backstop filing by Oct 29. SK hynix 6-K, Opening Bell week ahead

Nov 9: end of the CFTC review window for CME's GPU futures. Mid-November: Anthropic's expected IPO, per Reuters. Nov 15: comments close on China's draft export catalog. Compute Futures Data, Reuters via MarketScreener, China Daily

Q3 filings: GPU useful-life and depreciation disclosures from neoclouds and hyperscalers, and resale prices for used H100s.