Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

Anthropic's $19 Billion Lease Rebuts the Private Credit Scare - The AI Capex Tracker - Week of July 7, 2026

The AI Capex Tracker for the week of July 7, 2026. A bond PM who owns the paper calls the credit panic overdone, TeraWulf signs a 20-year $19B lease with Anthropic, and Broadcom locks in Apple for a custom AI ASIC while HBM memory keeps accelerating.

The AI Capex Tracker

Week of July 7, 2026: Anthropic's $19 Billion Lease Rebuts the Private Credit Scare

TL;DR

  • The credit crack that led yesterday's note got rebutted this morning, by a bond desk and by hard demand prints. A fixed-income PM who buys this paper says flatly "we're not seeing, quote, dangerous forms of financing": AI bonds are 6–7% yield from balance sheets that "started with close to no debt." Meanwhile TeraWulf signed a 20-year, ~$19B lease with Anthropic and jumped ~14%. (Excess Returns, Jul 6; The Rundown, Jul 6)

  • Two marquee investors took opposite sides on the same morning. Roger McNamee called it "worse than the dot com bubble" and said the circular financing "eventually has to blow up." Brad Gerstner said Anthropic revenue "went totally parabolic," is on track for "$100 billion of revenue by the end of the year," and is "the single most important thing in the market." (Squawk on the Street, Jul 6; Squawk Pod, Jul 6)

  • Broadcom bagged another anchor and memory kept accelerating. Apple locked in Broadcom to co-develop its first AI server ASIC ("Baltra"), AVGO up ~5% on the day; Korea's June HBM/high-margin memory exports rose 32% month-on-month at "approaching +90%" margins, with SK Hynix set to raise ~$29B in a US listing this week. (The Rundown, Jul 6; Real Vision / Macro Mondays, Jul 6)

What's New

Yesterday the note led with the money: private-credit funds gating, Blackstone walking from projects, the marginal AI dollar turning selective. Twenty-four hours later, the tape pushed back on all three. Ranked by dollar P&L impact:

1. A bond PM who owns the paper says the credit panic is overdone, the most important rebuttal on the tape. Excess Returns, Jul 6, Jeff Klingelhofer, Managing Director & PM at Aristotle Pacific (ex-PIMCO). Asked directly whether we're seeing dangerous financing yet: "My honest take is at this point, we're not seeing, quote, dangerous forms of financing." His frame: ~$600B of capex "coming all online this year" from "only four or so companies," investment-grade issuers that "started with close to no debt," AI bonds paying "6% to 7%" with yields kept "artificially wide" by supply, not credit risk. What scares him isn't defaults, it's price competition: "a lot of companies in AI that are pretty gosh darn good and charging a whole heck of a lot less." Against yesterday's Blue Owl gating headline: the equity risk is real; the credit-blowup thesis is not yet confirmed by the people underwriting it.

2. Anthropic wrote a real check, and it went to the levered middle layer that got hit hardest yesterday. The Rundown, Jul 6 (news-recap show; treat as corroborated news, not operator commentary). TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for a purpose-built AI data center at its Kentucky campus, "expected to generate about $19 billion in contracted revenue over the initial lease term," the stock ripped ~14%, +80% YTD. This is the exact asset class (neocloud / ex-Bitcoin-miner operators) that re-prices first on a credit scare, and a signed, long-dated, named-tenant contract is the cleanest counter to the air-pocket read.

3. Apple locked in Broadcom for custom AI silicon. The Rundown, Jul 6 (Bloomberg-sourced). Broadcom will co-develop and supply Apple's first dedicated AI server chip, codenamed "Baltra," reversing the recent in-sourcing drift (Apple is ~20% of AVGO revenue). That makes Broadcom the custom-ASIC supplier to Google, Meta, OpenAI and Apple, "the arms dealer of the AI era. So whoever wins this AI race, Broadcom will get paid." AVGO +5% on the day, +38% over the past year.

4. Gerstner reframed the whole trade around one number: Anthropic revenue. Squawk Pod, Jul 6, Brad Gerstner, Altimeter. He tied this year's ~80% chip-and-data-center rally to Anthropic revenue that "went totally parabolic" after Opus 4.8, now possibly "$100 billion of revenue by the end of the year," and AI "contributing over 100 basis points" of US GDP growth. The NVDA read-through: "post-Mythos" models start training in September on Vera Rubin, "10x the amount of compute." His hedge is the one to keep: "trust but verify. You got to see those revenues rolling in."

5. Memory is still accelerating, and Hynix is coming to raise. Real Vision / Macro Mondays, Jul 6 (macro commentators Mikkel Rosenvold & Andreas Steno, not semi specialists; flag). Korea's June HBM/high-margin memory exports rose +32% month-on-month with HBM+DRAM margins "approaching +90%," and "nothing pointing to fundamentals rolling over. Rather the opposite." SK Hynix taps dollar markets this week for a depository-receipt listing of ~$29B: read short-term bullish (better access), medium-term bearish (a supplier raising equity into peak margins is a sell-the-top tell). Samsung reports this week.

The Debate

The $700B+ thesis didn't move; the balance of new evidence did, back toward demand.

Bear steel-man, no moats, circular money, math that doesn't work. Roger McNamee (Co-Founder, Elevation Partners; early Facebook/Google investor and former Zuckerberg advisor) is the loudest new voice: the industry "invested $1.4 trillion over 4 years before it had any moats," with "a minimum of 7 companies competing for what, 2 slots." His killer test: "find me a single use case in which the customer pays more than the cost of delivery of the service. There aren't any." On the trigger: "I was assuming it would be the private debt market, and it may well be." And the mechanism: Oracle "borrowed way too much money to create data centers for OpenAI"; Nvidia "leveraged themselves up by providing capital to OpenAI and Anthropic... to buy their parts. The circular financing eventually has to blow up." (Squawk on the Street, Jul 6)

Bull steel-man, the revenue is showing up and the paper is money-good. Gerstner: two 25% AI drawdowns in 18 months were the market asking "would AI revenue justify the capex," and Anthropic's parabola answered it, "follow the money... if they're really upset with the companies, then I don't think they would be using the product" (Squawk Pod, Jul 6). Klingelhofer says the credit isn't cracking (Excess Returns, Jul 6). And the Meta "selling compute" scare gets reframed: AWS itself "grew out of excess compute," Meta may be building the next cloud, not capitulating on capex (Real Vision / Macro Mondays, Jul 6).

Sell signals to watch: private-credit gating widening (not just the Blue Owl headline); an AI-bond deal that actually prices at distressed spreads; a hyperscaler cutting forward capex; the TeraWulf/neocloud lease pipeline stalling; memory spot rolling over as Samsung/Hynix/CXMT capacity lands. None of these fired today.

Stocks In Play

NVDA. Bull: "post-Mythos" training starts September on Vera Rubin at "10x the amount of compute," and Hightower calls it "crazy cheap" at ~14x forward for ~50% growth (Squawk Pod, Jul 6; Money Rehab, Jul 6). Bear: McNamee's circular-financing tell, Nvidia levered up to fund the very customers buying its parts (Squawk on the Street, Jul 6). Next: TSMC mid-July read; Q2 in August.

AVGO. Bull: Apple's "Baltra" ASIC makes it the arms dealer to Google, Meta, OpenAI and Apple; +5% on the day, +38% YoY (The Rundown, Jul 6). Bear: Apple (~20% of revenue) has been in-sourcing; the AI-server ramp is still a design win, not shipments. Next: ASIC ramp cadence.

AMD. Quiet on the tape, a passing mention as a Hightower holding, no fresh signal. Next: AMD Advancing AI Day, July 2026 (MI450X/Helios).

MSFT. Bull: investment-grade issuer tapping wide-open bond markets at 6–7% from a near-debt-free balance sheet (Excess Returns, Jul 6). Bear: announced fresh layoffs (20% of Xbox staff), McNamee's "something's getting crowded out" read on AI diverting capital (The Rundown, Jul 6; Squawk on the Street, Jul 6). Next: FY26 Q4 capex, late July.

GOOGL. Bull: still a core Broadcom custom-silicon anchor, and Gerstner keeps "Gemini in the mix" of the frontier thoroughbreds (The Rundown, Jul 6). Bear: bears keep re-casting Google's compute demand as Anthropic's, not Gemini's. Next: July capex guide.

AMZN. Bull: the "AWS grew from excess compute" analogy is now the bull template for the whole group, and Amazon is tapping bonds to fund the build, Jassy's letter says "we've never seen anything like this" (Real Vision / Macro Mondays, Jul 6; Money Rehab, Jul 6). Bear: the neutral cloud hosting both OpenAI and Anthropic, exposed if either wobbles. Next: late-July earnings.

META. Still the eye of the storm. Bull: the "selling excess compute" headline reframed as building the next AWS, not throwing in the towel on capex (Real Vision / Macro Mondays, Jul 6). Bear: McNamee, the man who advised Zuckerberg, says the whole structure is "a humongous bubble." Next: late-July earnings, the single most important print of the cycle.

Read-throughs

  • Power / thermal (VRT, ETN), still the cleanest long. Hightower's Stephanie Link walks the "food chain": Vertiv is the "end-to-end" data-center cooling name (exec chair Dave Cody, ex-Honeywell), GE Vernova is "sold out" on power to 2028 and supplies ~30% of global electricity, and Quanta Services (PWR) just raised its 2030 TAM from $960B to $2.4 trillion. A 1GW data center now runs ~$40B all-in (Money Rehab, Jul 6).

  • Memory / networking (MU, MRVL). Korea June HBM exports +32% MoM, HBM+DRAM margins ~90%, Micron DRAM ASPs +60% YoY last quarter, demand accelerating, not digesting. The trade to respect: SK Hynix's ~$29B raise into peak margins (Real Vision / Macro Mondays, Jul 6).

  • Neoclouds / data-center operators (WULF, CoreWeave-type). TeraWulf's $19B/20-year Anthropic lease is the hard demand print for the levered middle layer that got hit worst on yesterday's credit scare, this cohort re-prices before the chips do (The Rundown, Jul 6).

  • Optics (LITE, COHR). Quiet in this window, no dedicated specialist episode surfaced. No new signal; carry prior stance.

What Changed vs Last Issue

Monday's issue (Jul 6, "Zuckerberg admits it. Now the financing blinks.") led with the credit channel tightening: Blue Owl gating redemptions, ~$14B "trapped," Blackstone abandoning a Virginia megaproject. Today the weight of new evidence pushed the other way:

  • The credit-crack thesis got a direct rebuttal from someone who underwrites the paper. Klingelhofer: "we're not seeing, quote, dangerous forms of financing," AI bonds are high-quality 6–7% credit, and the fear is price competition, not defaults. The gating story isn't dead, but it's no longer unanswered.

  • Demand answered with signatures, not narrative. TeraWulf's $19B/20-year Anthropic lease and Apple's Broadcom "Baltra" ASIC are the kind of hard prints that were missing on the bear side yesterday.

  • The debate got its heavyweight framing on both sides the same morning, McNamee ("worse than the dot com bubble") vs Gerstner (Anthropic "totally parabolic," "$100 billion by year-end").

  • Meta's "selling compute" flipped from capitulation to strategy in the bull read (the next AWS).

Numbers to track: the aggregate 2026 capex figure now spans $600B–$1.2T across commentators depending on scope (four hyperscalers "online this year" vs. broad annual run-rate); Hightower pegs ~$800B this year, +75% YoY, ~$1.1T for 2027. Watch SK Hynix's ~$29B print and Samsung's earnings this week; Meta's late-July print remains the referee.