Month: August 2026

With regard to the latest Nvidia $500 billion collaboration, these serious executives sound like used car salespeople. This is just embarrassing (via ZeroHedge):

“Modern compute has emerged as a scarce, mission-critical asset class with compelling investment characteristics that is positioned to drive significant long-term economic growth and productivity gains,” said Apollo President Jim Zelter. “The combination of NVIDIA’s proprietary technology ecosystem and Apollo’s flexible, long-term capital base provides a strong foundation to support the next stage of the AI buildout as part of the broader Global Industrial Renaissance.”

“The AI buildout will require unprecedented investment and a skilled workforce to turn that investment into the infrastructure that will help power future growth,” said Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock. “This partnership deepens our relationship with NVIDIA, including through the AI Infrastructure Partnership, and brings together NVIDIA’s leadership in accelerated computing with BlackRock’s ability to connect long-term capital to essential infrastructure. Together, we can help deliver the compute capacity that companies need to grow and create more jobs, supporting the continued growth of the U.S. and global economies, while creating attractive, long-term investment opportunities for our clients.”

“NVIDIA has created extraordinary demand for its compute through an intense focus on customer value and versatile technology,” said Jon Gray, President and COO of Blackstone. “We continue to be enormous investors globally across the NVIDIA ecosystem, and this announcement further underscores our confidence in their platform and the future of AI infrastructure.”

“As our strategic partner, NVIDIA is enabling us to scale AI factories. We are excited about further collaboration to build and fund the backbone of AI globally,” said Bruce Flatt, CEO of Brookfield. “With demand for large-scale AI compute growing significantly as adoption scales across industries, compute is fast becoming the essential layer of infrastructure and a core pillar of the Brookfield AI infrastructure strategy.”

“We’re in a pivotal moment of a historic AI investment cycle. NVIDIA’s full-stack platform is in high demand and uniquely positioned at the center of that global buildout,” said David Solomon, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs. “Our investment and distribution roles reflect our confidence in NVIDIA’s leadership, and we’re excited for the new opportunity to create a market for credit backed by NVIDIA compute.”

“Compute has become a critical infrastructure asset. As we’ve scaled our approach to digital infrastructure, we’ve learned that delivery, not ambition, is the hard part. That’s why we’re excited to build on our strategic partnership with NVIDIA, a founding investor in Helix Digital Infrastructure, to bring together NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform with KKR’s long-duration capital, infrastructure expertise and capital markets capabilities to turn growing demand into real capacity at extraordinary scale,” said Joe Bae and Scott Nuttall, Co-Chief Executive Officers of KKR.

Positions: None.

Volume

– NYSE volume 9% below its one-month average;  

– NASDAQ volume 11% below its one-month average; 

– VIX index: down 0.52% to 15.38

Breadth

S&P 500 Sectors

% Movers

Nasdaq 100 Heat Map

chrisideker

16m ago

Soapbox warning.  As a retired CPA who performed many accounting fraud investigations and led the group at a Big 4 that counseled auditors on how to detect financial statement fraud, I find myself damn near apoplectic at the current state of accounting in AI related names.  The only thing worse than breaking the rules is nominally following the rules while achieving the same ends as breaking them.  If Enron should have taught us anything, it is look at the substance over the form.

Alas, that takes auditors with significant understanding of finance and not those simply equipped with a flowchart of arbitrary rules.  You also have to have an auditor with a spine who will stand up and say, “I know this technically meets the stated criteria, but it violates the spirit of the guidance.”  Taking such a stand will likely cost you a client and audit firms from the Big 6 are suffering financially, so they don’t have the backbone.

I fear we are on the cusp of something major. 

Positions: None