Cape Fear Advisors

Meta priced $37.5bn of equity Monday. NVIDIA, AMD and Broadcom had indicated interest in $5.0bn of it at the public price. AMD's February warrant to Meta: a penny a share. Seven instruments, five lines.

Anthropic filed. The S-1 states Q3 revenue as "86 times" Q4 2024's $197m: about $16.9bn, after Q2's $11.6bn. Dollars added rose every filed quarter; the ratio implies Q3 added fewer. Revenue is booked gross. First read, from the filing.

SpaceX’s 8-K this morning on the $40bn: a binding commitment for a finance lease with an Apollo-managed entity, which buys the GPUs. SpaceX rents them for about five years. Its 10-Q: compute contracts “terminable by either party upon 90 days’ notice.” Five years of rent, 90 days of notice.

Musk today: debt markets have shut for AI builders without other revenue, and SpaceX closed $40bn for GPUs on Starlink and launch. The filings refine it: IREN pays 7.05% on Microsoft’s contract, 9.0% for non-investment-grade customers. The money follows whose contract backs the builder.

Jensen Huang says a gigawatt of AI infrastructure brings $40bn a year. That matches the 3-to-6-month price (CoreWeave: ~$40m a MW-year). Five-year contracts on file: $9.7m to $18.7m. The buildings outlast the commitments. Free to read:

Tesla's new $30bn credit agreements write in a merger with a Musk-controlled company and consent to it in advance, on one condition: two investment-grade ratings for 90 days. SpaceX's lenders protect the controller. Tesla's protect the rating.

SpaceX’s Q3 call, priced: 13 GW by end-2027 costs at least $225bn in 2027 alone. Against our August $430bn count, no cash row came off; two years of the new targets cost what August counted for five. Free to read:

Nscale, read from its S-1: $16bn is the contracted book delivered. $30bn needs about 1.6 GW of new contracts, and $19.2bn of customer cash still has to arrive. With the reported second Monarch building, the growth case is Anthropic's. Free to read.

Tesla’s filed silence on Terafab ended this morning. Its proxy, filed today, names it once, in the Chair’s letter: “our Terafab initiative.” First mention in a Tesla filing since March, and the first filed possessive on the project. No dollar figure, no site, no transaction.

Microsoft walks from its 50 MW lease at Nscale’s Loughton site; grid power is now unlikely before 2030, per the FT. Nscale’s S-1 already puts its $43.8bn of Microsoft work “subject to the satisfaction of delivery and availability of service requirements.” Contracted counts once delivered.

CoreWeave, read from its filings: delivering the $103.7bn backlog needs $4.5bn not yet arranged by 2027, then $14.6bn of notes and convertibles mature in 2031 and 2032. The second contract decides the wall. Free to read:

CoreWeave’s own indenture caps lending at 90 cents against an investment-grade customer’s contract and 75 against the rest. The AI labs sit at 75. At NVIDIA’s margin, that gap is 13% against 33% of the margin handed back. The flex, read from the filings.

The dramatic version of this week’s question: do the neoclouds survive. The quieter one: what happens to the GPUs either way. In 2002 Global Crossing’s fiber sold for $250m against about $11bn borrowed to lay it. The fiber stayed in the ground; the owner changed.

Update: on Tuesday every CoreWeave senior note closed at its highest yield since issue, 13.05 to 14.68 percent (FINRA TRACE). Treasuries were flat, so the move is credit, not rates. The shares traded about 15 percent lower Wednesday, the day after the bonds.

The AI buildout is 1.3% of GDP, telecom's size in 2000. The fiber laid then still carries traffic, for owners who bought it after its builders failed. Who holds this build if it outruns demand is partly set now, in the financing. Free to read.

CoreWeave's parent-guaranteed facilities: SOFR + 4.50% in May, SOFR + 5.50% in August. Oracle's 2056 bond spread: up about 100bp by July, steady since. The AI buildout's money is still moving, at a higher price and with more conditions. Free to read.

Nscale's contracted value is 3,133 times its 2025 revenue. The customer test in the rules is struck on one year of revenue; these commitments run five to twenty. The AI labs' largest deals, read from the filings of the companies holding them. Free to read.

OpenAI’s annualized revenue is about $20bn below what was signaled, per the FT. The gap is a definition: Anthropic counts sales through cloud partners, OpenAI does not. The first filed definition comes with Anthropic’s S-1. Anthropic develops Claude, which we use in our work.

One SpaceX arrangement, four filed figures: $84,500m at the outside, $3,750m at the inside. Every one accurate about a different question. Adding them describes an obligation no party has. Four questions to ask of any AI headline, free to read:

SpaceX is reported to be raising $40bn for NVIDIA chips, $30bn of it investment grade. NVIDIA already holds $20.9bn of SpaceX stock and partners with the reported lead lender. The open seat is guarantor.

SpaceX's Terafab exists in seven records at once. The one written for investors says "not yet determined." The CEO's latest word, on TSMC: "Just discussions, but something may come of it." The decision moves a base-case share of the margin. Free to read:

Today's AI headline: $60bn of Broadcom chip financing, with a $42bn senior tranche. Broadcom's 10-Q already carries $42bn of notes. Same number, opposite sides of one lease. Adding them counts the racks twice.

Anthropic's $518bn headline splits across six SEC filers. Their filings put a commitment value on about $44bn of it. TeraWulf and Akamai filed $31bn more that the split leaves out, which dates the draft to June.

One SpaceX arrangement, four filed figures: $84,500m at the outside, $3,750m at the inside. Every one accurate about a different question. Adding them describes an obligation no party has. Four questions to ask of any AI headline, free to read:

Akamai's warrant to Anthropic vests 516,068 shares per additional billion committed. The compute those billions buy is purchased "at mutually agreed upon terms." One side of the price is filed, the other agreed later.

Three cloud rate cards, nine steps between accelerator generations. Eight go up or flat. One goes down 10.30 percent, and it is Amazon pricing its 2020 part below its 2017 part. What sets the price when the first contract ends:

CoreWeave owed $8,077m in the first half: principal repaid, depreciation, stock compensation. Operations produced $3,663m. Forty-five cents on the dollar, and seven tenths of the principal by itself.

Six questions about circular financing, answered from CoreWeave's filings. 8.968 percent in, 9.12 percent out, and two to five billion a year of payments the machines do not cover. Eight minutes, free.

CoreWeave: a deployed rack needs $3.57/GPU-hour to clear its cost of capital over six years. March spot was $2.35. The equity funds $2.3bn to $5.3bn a year to hold the position while it waits for a price nobody publishes. Filed figures throughout.

NVIDIA put $2.0bn of cash into CoreWeave for shares. IREN put in nothing. It handed NVIDIA rights over 30,000,000 of its own shares and booked the $793.4m into the cost of the GPUs. Same rung, opposite direction.

Oracle reported its quarter's capital expenditure twice: $28,499m, and $18bn after subtracting what customers and suppliers put in. The $10,533m gap is bigger in one quarter than in all of last year. Pair the two figures Oracle leads with and free cash flow changes sign.

Oracle answered a rating condition with $75bn of customer-prepaid and customer-supplied hardware in June. S&P cut it to BBB- four weeks later, and now forecasts 4.4x against its own 4.5x downgrade threshold. Six companies, one credit rating, five positions.

NVIDIA's $105bn of guaranties ends when the counterparty wins a credit rating, by the terms of its own 8-K. One credit standing prices four instruments and no two documents define it the same way. Free to read:

NVIDIA places a reported $2.5bn into Thinking Machines Lab. The lab commits to a gigawatt of Vera Rubin. At NVIDIA's filed 74.9% margin that gigawatt returns 9.7 times the placement, and the placement carries no operating expense. Free to read:

SB Energy's S-1 discloses $178bn of capex behind a $439bn backlog. Thirteen filed positions are paid, secured or discharged from somewhere specific before the stock being offered is paid from what is left. NVIDIA's $105bn guaranty sits in there. Free to read.

Run the circular financing ladder in both directions and NVIDIA occupies six positions toward customers and four toward suppliers. The rung the argument is about, where a vendor lends a buyer the purchase price, carries nothing filed on either face. Free to read.

SpaceX commitments through 2030 now foot to about $430,000m, up $30,000m in three weeks on one spaceport announcement. About $75,000m of cash can move. No net new source has arrived since the June offering, and nothing has come off the list. Free to read.

NVIDIA guarantees $105,000m of other companies' leases and commits $36,000m to buy back cloud capacity from the clouds that buy its machines. On the rung where a supplier lends a customer money, its filings disclose no instrument. The scarce asset is a credit standing.

SpaceX, Adding it Up: The $235 Billion - Nope The $400 Billion - Nope The $500 Billion Cash Gap capefearadvisors.substack.com/p/spacex-add...

NVIDIA funds the customers that buy its chips. Two levers: how much it places, and an advance rate written into agreements it does not sign. A dollar placed opened 10 dollars of program in March. It opens 3.33 now. The economics still clear. Wednesday is not a crossing.

A supplier funds a customer. The customer's lenders decide how much of the resulting spending has to come back to the supplier. Four filed agreements, July 2025 to August 2026: from about 27 cents in the dollar to about 40.

CoreWeave can activate about 58% of its own committed credit capacity from cash after scheduled debt service. Two draw windows close September 30 and December 31. The arrangement fee on the newest facility was paid at signing, on the whole commitment.

CoreWeave's advance rate fell from 90.00% to 70.00% in 130 days. A dollar of equity now unlocks a third of the gross profit it unlocked in March. Priced off its own most expensive borrowing, a buyer of the stock needs a higher after-tax operating margin than NVIDIA earns.

Nine parties, one twenty-year lease on a closed uranium site in Ohio, and four accounts of NVIDIA's $105bn backstop that describe four different instruments. One figure in the whole transaction is in a filing: $3,500m.

NVIDIA earned 58.6% on invested capital last fiscal year. CoreWeave, buying its equipment, returned negative 0.74% on capital in service. Same construction, both from the filings. Two ends of one transaction.

NVIDIA earned 58.6% on invested capital last fiscal year. CoreWeave, buying its equipment, returned negative 0.74% on capital in service. Same construction, both from the filings. Two ends of one transaction.

CoreWeave borrowed $2.6 billion on August 7, and the credit agreement names everyone who gets paid out of it, in order, nine steps down. Read as a seating chart, the document produces a list of participants, and three of them were not on ours. It also prices the last seat.

Out with a sentence. Back without one. ~$1.4B round-tripped through CoreWeave's deferred revenue between the Q1 and Q2 10-Qs, shown by arithmetic. Our four August 3 questions, graded in public, and where a valuation looks when the consolidated ledger cannot answer.

CoreWeave reports its second quarter this evening. This piece is about last week's filing, and about reading the next one: the 8-K first, then its exhibits, and the release last. One facility, described three times in one accession.

Same cash, different statements. Re-expressed on the filings, NVIDIA's $2B in CoreWeave moves reported profit, segment, and growth, cash identical in every column. And about nine-tenths of CoreWeave's cash is NVIDIA's own placement.