Good morning.

Anthropic told investors over the weekend that its annualized revenue run rate reached $65 billion by the end of July, roughly seven times where it sat a year ago, according to CNBC. The company also put a preliminary number on the second quarter: $11.5 billion, a 14-fold jump. In May the run rate was $47 billion. For all of 2025, the company did about $10 billion.

That clears the roughly $40 billion run rate reported for OpenAI, which would settle a long-running argument if the two counted the same way. They don't. Rachel Metz, the Bloomberg reporter who broke the revenue story, said on Bloomberg Tech Monday that the two are calculating annualized revenue differently and it is "certainly not an apples to apples comparison."

Somewhere a seed-stage founder is taking careful notes on exactly how flexible the word "annualized" is allowed to be.

Artificial Intelligence

The Cold War left Pike County a hole in the ground. The AI trade just filled it with someone else's credit.

OpenAI has signed a 20-year lease on what would be the largest data-center project yet announced, an 8-gigawatt compute campus on Department of Energy land at the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio, developed by SoftBank's SB Energy. The ground under it spent decades enriching uranium. It will now enrich tokens.

The part that should hold a markets reader's attention is not the concrete. It is the counterparty. Nvidia (NVDA) agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion of conditional lease and power-payment obligations owed to SB Energy, CNBC reported, and will serve as the site's exclusive chip supplier. The chipmaker is no longer only selling the shovels. It is co-signing the mortgage on the mine.

Vendor financing is an old story in technology, and it usually ends the same way. What is new is the scale and the direction of travel: the supplier is now underwriting the customer's landlord. Strip the announcement down and Nvidia has written a very large put option on demand for its own product, payable if the buildout it is funding fails to fill.

The numbers around the campus explain why anyone needed a guarantee at all. Per Data Center Frontier, SB Energy plans a $33 billion power plant plus $4.2 billion of transmission to feed 10 gigawatts of new generation into the site. Axios put the all-in build cost at $500 billion or more at current prices for chips, labor and power, against 35,000 construction jobs through 2032 and 2,500 permanent ones.

Half-Life: The Portsmouth site took decades to decommission because enrichment leaves a long tail. So does this structure. A 20-year lease backed by a chipmaker's guarantee converts a cyclical hardware business into something with the duration profile of a utility, and utilities get repriced when rates move. Nvidia has spent three years being the cleanest way to own the AI trade. It just took on the messiest part of it.

Corporate Finance

The balance sheet is the part investors read. The commitments are the part that will bill them.

Nine of the largest technology companies have disclosed roughly $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments, mostly tied to AI, buried in the footnotes of their most recent securities filings, per a Wall Street Journal analysis covering Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, Broadcom, SpaceX and AMD. The split: about $1.2 trillion in leases that have not started, and $1.9 trillion in purchase commitments for chips, energy and data-center infrastructure.

Set that against the roughly $600 billion of capital expenditure those same companies reported over the past year and the gap is the story. Reported capex is the number the sell side models. The footnote is the number that actually gets paid.

The obligations are real, disclosed and not yet recognized as liabilities on the face of the balance sheet, which is exactly how leases looked before accounting standards caught up with them a decade ago. And the funding is already arriving in public. Alphabet (GOOGL) went to Australia's bond market for the first time Monday, hiring banks for a debut Kangaroo issue of around $3.6 billion, part of a global borrowing run that Bloomberg tied to capital spending the company now guides at $195 billion to $205 billion for 2026.

Schiffman's read is that demand is there and spreads on the widest names in his coverage have tightened meaningfully over the past two weeks. The bond market is not arguing with the buildout. It is pricing it.

Nor is the equity market. Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) added roughly $17 billion to its Alphabet position in the second quarter, an 83% increase that Forbes noted makes it Berkshire's third-largest holding. When the most valuation-disciplined buyer on the tape underwrites the biggest spender on the tape, that is a data point worth sitting with.

By the numbers, Monday still made the whole proposition more expensive: the 30-year Treasury yield topped 5.31%, the highest in 19 years, while the S&P 500 (SPX) slipped 0.50% to 7,747 and the Nasdaq Composite eased 0.31% to 26,647, Yahoo Finance reported.

Balance Due: Every one of those commitments was signed against a curve that has since moved. The AI capex cycle began as a cash-flow story funded out of hyperscaler operating income; it is finishing as a credit story funded out of the long end. That is not a verdict on whether the spending works. It is a note that the cost of being wrong has gone up, and the people carrying it are increasingly bondholders rather than shareholders.

Finance

Nobody buys a trophy asset planning to list it before the first banner goes up.

Mark Walter, the Guggenheim Partners chief executive who also controls the Los Angeles Dodgers, agreed this month to sell the Los Angeles Lakers at a $12.5 billion valuation to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner, CNBC reported. He had bought control of the team at a $10 billion valuation in October. Ten months, $2.5 billion, no championship required.

Sports franchises are not supposed to turn over like spec houses, which is why the interesting question is not what he made. It is why he was selling at all.

The answer sits with the insurance companies. The SEC and federal prosecutors are examining potential financial improprieties at two insurers Walter controls through his TWG Global holding company, and at Guggenheim Partners itself. The model under scrutiny is one Walter helped pioneer: take patient insurance float and deploy it into something livelier than Treasuries.

Sri Natarajan, chief Wall Street correspondent at Bloomberg News, walked through the mechanics on the Bloomberg Intelligence program Monday. His reporting: after a subpoena in February, one of the insurers, Delaware Life, restated the share of its book held in affiliated assets, investments routed back into other parts of Walter's own empire, from roughly 3% to roughly 40%. Across the two insurers, Natarajan put the affiliated exposure near $20 billion, with TWG Global now working to bring that proportion down. He also reported the group had explored short-term loans of $500 million to $1 billion secured against assets including its equity in Guggenheim Partners.

A firm does not pledge its crown jewel casually. One finance executive described the Lakers sale to Bloomberg as a lucrative fire sale, which is a useful phrase precisely because both halves are true.

Closing Costs: The lesson generalizes well beyond one financier. Insurance float has quietly become one of the largest pools of capital funding private assets, and the regulatory question of how much of that float may be lent back to the manager's own projects has never been properly stress-tested. Walter had an unusually liquid trophy asset to sell when the question arrived. Most managers running the same playbook do not.

Time on Site: Opening arguments begin Tuesday in the state attorneys general case accusing Meta of engineering addictive features, a roughly six-week trial with an advisory-only jury and a judge holding final say, in which the company has called the allegations unsubstantiated.

Board to Death: The DOJ has spent nearly a year examining whether a16z partners sitting on the boards of Databricks and Fivetran run afoul of Section 8 of the Clayton Act, the first real push of that theory into venture capital.

Down and Out: Groq raised $350 million led by Disruptive at a $3.5 billion valuation, roughly half its September 2025 peak, after Nvidia licensed its technology and hired founder Jonathan Ross along with much of the senior team.

Three data points, one day. A chipmaker guaranteed $105 billion of someone else's rent, Warren Buffett bought $17 billion more of the company borrowing hardest to build it, and a billionaire sold a basketball team because his insurance regulators had questions. The through-line is that almost nothing being built right now is funded out of the operating business that is building it.

Enjoy the retail earnings. Somebody has to tell us what the actual economy is doing.

That's the tape. We'll see you at the open. — AllThingsWallSt