Nvidia turned Wall Street into its bank 🏦

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Stocks took a breather Monday. The S&P 500 slipped 0.1% from record territory as oil spiked on the Iran standoff, but he real action was Nvidia recruiting six of the biggest names in finance to bankroll the entire AI buildout.

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

💰️ Intel raised $20 billion in its first share sale since listing in 1971 — upsized from $15 billion after orders topped $100 billion. The deal priced at $95 a share, and the stock dipped on the roughly 3% dilution. Proceeds bankroll the capex ramp behind Intel's AI-driven turnaround. 

🛢️ Brent crude jumped about 5% Monday to $87.72 a barrel after U.S.-Iran talks over reopening the Strait of Hormuz hit a wall. Iran issued six conditions for reopening the waterway, President Trump demanded reparations, and the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell below 300 million barrels — its lowest since 1983.

🚀 Rocket Lab shares fell in extended trading Monday after the company said its new Neutron rocket won't reach the launch pad until the fourth quarter, narrowing the window for a year-end debut. The delay overshadowed a record quarter: Q2 revenue jumped 62% to $234.1 million, and management guided to another record in Q3.

🩻 Teledyne agreed to buy X-ray imaging maker Varex for $18.90 a share in cash, valuing the company at about $1.1 billion. Varex stock soared nearly 50% toward the bid price. The deal bolsters Teledyne's medical and industrial imaging lineup and is expected to close in early 2027, pending approvals.

🔻 Trump Media posted a $238 million quarterly loss, driven by roughly $190 million in unrealized losses on its crypto holdings. New CEO Kevin McGurn is largely abandoning the company's push into betting and crypto to refocus on Truth Social — including a plan to sell subscribers faster access to Trump's posts.

💵 Strategy sold 1,690 bitcoin for about $108.6 million — its second straight week of selling, a sharp reversal after years of relentless accumulation. The sales, at an average price of $64,262, funded buybacks of its STRC preferred shares. Holdings now sit at 840,447 BTC, with nearly 7,000 coins sold this year.

🔋 General Motors is walking away from its $3.5 billion Indiana battery joint venture, selling its 49.99% stake to partner Samsung SDI. Both companies cited slower-than-expected EV demand. Samsung plans to repurpose the New Carlisle plant toward energy-storage systems — a telling pivot for the whole EV supply chain.

👗 Fast-fashion giant Shein plans to launch its Hong Kong IPO as soon as next Wednesday, per Reuters. The long-awaited listing comes after years of regulatory false starts in New York and London, and would hand Hong Kong one of its biggest consumer debuts in years.

On Monday, Nvidia signed agreements with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to create financing platforms designed to mobilize more than $500 billion in third-party capital for AI infrastructure — chips, data centers, and the power to run them.

Jensen Huang said he approached exactly six firms with the idea, and none of them turned him down.

The structure treats computing power itself as collateral: special-purpose entities issue bonds backed by GPUs and data centers, letting Nvidia's customers finance their buildouts without wrecking their own balance sheets.

Huang called it "the first time that technology chips have become an investable asset class," and BlackRock's Larry Fink compared it to the birth of mortgage-backed securities in the 1970s.

The AI buildout has been running into a wall. Hyperscalers and AI labs can only borrow so much on their own books.

This unlocks a vast new pool of institutional money to keep Nvidia's order machine humming. 

But the market's reaction was telling: Nvidia fell nearly 3% to $217.55 on the news, while capital providers like Apollo, Blackstone, and KKR rose.

The worry is "circular financing.” 

If Nvidia helps arrange the money its customers use to buy Nvidia chips, demand starts to look manufactured.

Veterans remember Lucent and Nortel financing their own customers in the late 1990s; the orders looked spectacular until the loans went bad.

What to watch:

• Whether these memorandums of understanding turn into actual funded platforms

• How regulators treat GPU-backed debt (the SEC just eased rules on some data-center bonds)

• Wednesday's CPI report is still the number that decides whether the September Fed meeting is live.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: Not financial advice. Do your research before making any trades.