Primers · Monitors · Dispatches as of 2026-08-22
Research
How compute is priced, how it ages, and how it is financed — from public filings and posted prices.
Start here
Primers · the model The Compute Contract How GPU-hours are sold, from terms of service to SEC-filed take-or-pay master agreements — including the termination formula that prices the on-demand spread. The GPU SPV How lenders take compute as collateral: serial-number covenants, UCC account control, contract-realization tests, and a rating that travels with the offtake. Training, Inference, and What Compute Earns For credit readers: training demand behaves like construction backlog, inference like utility load — with the observables for each. A Compute Glossary for Finance FLOPS, bandwidth, TDP, PUE, MFU, NVL72, training vs. inference — the vocabulary of compute paper, defined in finance terms.
Monitors
Updated daily · live dataCredit
GPU-Backed Credit The debt stack behind AI compute, as filed — every instrument traced to a public document. Credit Reference Series Spread at signing, refinancing velocity, and lender-filed fair-value marks — arithmetic on filed numbers only. Term & Price
Committed Term Structure Posted committed asks by tenor — one month to a year, per chip. On-Demand vs Clearing Basis Posted on-demand asks against marketplace clearing. Dispatches
Dated · newest first 2026-08-16 The Price of Memory in ChinaIntelligence A memory maker is now the most valuable listed company in China. For anyone holding older GPUs the question is which incoming supply reaches what they earn, and when. The supply arriving now lands on the attribute that moves rental prices least. The one that would move them most is still scheduled, and it runs through Taiwan. 2026-08-13 The Rating Case Goes Investment GradeCredit Two Moody’s investment-grade GPU ratings in two days. Six rated financings, one pattern: the counterparty opens the grade, the structure sets the notch. 2026-08-12 Two Order Books, Two Funding MachinesIntelligence CoreWeave and Nebius reported a day apart. The order books tell one demand story: $9.7B and $6.0B of customer prepayments, guides reset 2x to 8x higher than a year ago. The funding machines behind them run in opposite directions: one borrows against a long contracted book at 9-15% money, the other collects cash up front on 1-3% convertibles and holds capacity back for what scarcity pays next. 2026-08-10 The Nearer Frontier: SpaceX’s Turn to Selling ComputeIntelligence SpaceX’s first public quarter as a compute seller: a third of revenue, and 86% of capital expenditure, running on gas turbines Mississippi agreed needed no air permit provided they did not stay. The ninety-day Anthropic book inherited that condition, and SpaceX is the only seller in the peer set that has not signed a year of its own spending. 2026-07-30 Five Builders, One Covered Quadrant: Microsoft’s FY2026Credit The five largest AI builders on one conservative basis — backlog against everything committed, debt and leases included. Microsoft is the lone company covered on both axes; Oracle covers most on the longest, most concentrated book; Amazon slips below its stack. With uniform-basis free cash flow and the week’s record CDS prints. 2026-07-30 Implied Committed Rates: What the Big Compute Deals Pay per GPU-HourTerm The multi-year compute mega-deals are committed-term prints disclosed as lump sums. Backed out and graded by disclosure quality: Narvik $2.72/GPU-hr with every input company-disclosed, an A-graded $5.27 fee-basis print from the SpaceX prospectus, and why every figure is a floor by construction. 2026-07-24 Buying, Building, Renting, Guaranteeing: How Alphabet Pays to Obtain Compute Capacity at SpeedIntelligence Alphabet’s Q2 10-Q as a capacity story: a $519.5B backlog at five years of Cloud revenue, four supply channels at once, and $43.8B of data-center payment backstops whose booked cost rose from 41¢ to $1.86 per $100 in six months. 2026-07-22 Breaking Down Big Tech’s $1.65 Trillion “Hidden Debt”Credit The off-balance-sheet AI commitments of Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, rebuilt from the filings — leases not yet commenced, take-or-pay language, RVGs, credit-derivative backstops, and the $2.1T backlog on the other side. 2026-07-20 Nebius’s First Secured Debt: A $775M GPU-Backed FacilityCredit Nebius entered its first senior secured debt facility on July 17 — its first secured debt after a history of nothing but convertibles. 2026-07-17 A GPU Lease Rate Enters the Rating CaseCredit Fitch’s July 16 rating case for CoreWeave’s DDTL 5.5 leads with a new assumption: expiring contracts renew “at favorable GPU lease rates.” 2026-07-12 Same Facility, Different MarksCredit Four advisers file 99.0 / 100.0 / 102.0 / 103.1 on one GPU-backed facility at one date — marked like performing credit, dispersed like stressed. 2026-07-08 Rent and MSRP: Five Generations of Posted PricesAsset economics Every generation’s gross posted-rate revenue passed its MSRP within 11–17 months; acquisition cost per unit of bandwidth fell 2.5×, rent per unit did not. 2026-07-08 GPU Rental Rates by Generation: Nine Years of Posted PricesAsset economics Per-generation histories, 2017–2026: declines arrive in steps set by the repricers, interrupted twice by demand. 2026-07-08 Betting on the Residual: Itel and the IBM 4300, 1979Precedent The largest independent computer lessor in the world, residual-dependent leases, and the machine that obsoleted the inventory — a $433M loss ($2B today). 2026-07-06 Rent and Age: Five GenerationsAsset economics The cross-section: ≈−26%/yr in dollars (R² 0.96) with age, flat per unit of memory bandwidth, banded per watt. 2026-07-06 The Commitment Discount: Three Years of H100 Posted PricesTerm Neocloud H100, Oct 2023 – Jun 2026: a persistent committed discount, a $2.80 on-demand floor through 2025, a turn upward since December.