Stunning stat: "Anthropic’s investors are expecting the company to reach a valuation of $2tn when it goes public in the coming weeks. Add in SpaceX, which began trading at $2tn after its IPO in June, and OpenAI, which is considering raising money privately at $1.2tn ahead of a public listing next year, and these companies alone could be worth well north of $5tn. Now compare that with the entire history of IPOs from 1980 to 2025. The 3,365 tech companies that went public in that period were worth a combined $4.1tn when they started trading."
While I've written much about AI's transformative potential across sectors, I've always been dubious about how much value hyperscalers can seize enabling that transformation. As I dissect in my recent report on "The AI Trade" ( it's not about user acquisition. OpenAI claims to have over one billion active users across its services and two million businesses using its AI models. Anthropic has claimed to have more than 300,000 business customers. The question is not whether they can bring users to their services, but rather how much average revenue they can generate per customer relative to the price of building and maintaining their models. The cost of compute is inflating at the same time competition is depressing token pricing power. That's a precarious dynamic when so much hinges on the success of two companies.
To again quote the report:
"It’s hard to overstate how much hinges on these IPOs. As mentioned in the Executive Summary, OpenAI and Anthropic will account for 13% of AWS revenue and 27% of Google Cloud revenue this year. As for Microsoft, OpenAI alone accounts for roughly 70% of its AI-specific revenue ($24.1 billion out of an estimated $34 billion total for the fiscal year ending in June 2026). OpenAI has committed to tens of billions of spending on chips from the likes of Nvidia and Broadcom. Deepening circularity concerns, tech giant earnings growth has been increasingly driven by paper gains in the private-market valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI. In Q2, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft reported $160 billion in cumulative “other income”, trouncing the $69 billion in “other income” reported in Q1. To quote the FT: “These one-off valuation boosts, derived in large part from enthusiasm around AI, risk distorting the financial picture at a time when investors are closely scrutinizing tech earnings.” If either Anthropic or OpenAI stumble in their IPOs, it’ll hit tech giants on multiple balance-sheet fronts and likely ripple through the US and global economy. A pin-prick popping of the AI bubble may not be our base case, but if a pin is out there, it’s likely the revenue versus spending trajectories of Anthropic and OpenAI."
FT link:
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A TON OF THINGS HAPPENED IN THE STOCK MARKET TODAY.
Here's a full recap:
1. The U.S. reportedly offered Iran a deal to halt the siege and lift sanctions in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and ending proxy attacks, according to Al Arabiya. Axios also reports that Rubio told several foreign counterparts the U.S. does not plan new strikes on Iran for now, with pressure shifting toward the naval blockade and new sanctions campaign instead. Crude Oil fell 4% and the 10-year treasury bond fell from 4.72% to 4.62%.
2. Global physical gold-backed ETFs $GLD attracted $6.4B of inflows last week, their largest weekly intake since January and the 3rd-largest weekly inflow on record. North America led with $4.4B, followed by Europe at $1.7B and Asia at $300M. This marked the 7th straight week of inflows, with global gold ETFs pulling in $16.4B over that stretch. Total AUM in global gold ETFs rose by $33B last week to $615B, the highest level since the second week of May.
3. Intuit $INTU reported Q4’26 revenue of $4.4B, beating estimates of $4.27B and up 14% YoY. Adjusted EPS came in at $4.03 versus $3.58 expected. Global Business Solutions revenue rose 14% YoY to $3.4B, the Online Ecosystem grew 17% YoY to $2.6B, Consumer revenue increased 14% YoY to $930M, and Credit Karma revenue rose 16% YoY to $743M. For FY27, Intuit guided revenue to $23.3B–$23.5B versus $23.72B expected, while adjusted EPS guidance of $22.88–$23.12 came in well below the $27.32 estimate. The company also raised its dividend 15% YoY to $1.38/share, bought back $5.5B of stock, and has $7.9B remaining on its authorization. Management said its strategy is to win as an AI-driven expert platform while staying disciplined on investments and scaling its big bets.
4. President Trump said the U.S. Navy has removed and/or detonated all mines from international waters in the Strait of Hormuz. He said Iran has been notified that any ship or boat placing new mines will be “immediately and systematically destroyed.” Trump added that Space Force is monitoring every square inch of the Strait, along with Pickaxe Mountain and the three previously destroyed nuclear sites, and said a “Zero Tolerance” policy on mine placement is now in full effect.
5. Canada is responding to U.S. tariffs with new tariffs of its own. The country is raising steel tariffs to 50% from 25%, while roughly 700 products will face new tariff rates of 15%, 25%, and 50%. The measures are set to take effect on September 8, marking another escalation in the U.S.–Canada trade dispute.
6. Anthropic is expected to tell IPO investors its total addressable market exceeds $30T, topping SpaceX’s $28.5T estimate, according to WSJ. The figure represents the potential value of work Anthropic believes AI models could eventually perform, not a direct revenue forecast. Anthropic generated $11.6B in Q2 revenue and could seek to raise as much as $100B at roughly a $2T valuation. IPO documents are expected within weeks, potentially setting up a September or early October listing.
7. OpenAI’s data-center head Chris Malone left the company last week, according to WSJ. Malone joined in March 2025 shortly after Stargate was announced and played a key role overseeing OpenAI’s massive data-center buildout. He previously led data-center strategy at Meta and earlier worked on data-center technology at Google. The departure comes just weeks after OpenAI also replaced its chief revenue officer, adding another senior leadership change as the company races to scale infrastructure, revenue, and compute capacity.
8. ClickHouse has surpassed $350M in annual recurring revenue, up 40% since May, as AI agents drive demand for database and observability infrastructure. OpenAI’s usage has reportedly grown roughly 10x over the past year to more than 30 petabytes of data per day, or around 30T events daily. OpenAI has also shifted parts of its log-management workload from Datadog to ClickHouse over the past year. ClickHouse was valued at $15B in January and says gross margins currently range from 50%–70%. Earlier this year, the company acquired Langfuse to expand deeper into monitoring AI applications and agents. Nebius $NBIS owned a 28% stake in ClickHouse as of May 2025, though that stake has likely been diluted by subsequent fundraising.
9. JPMorgan reiterated its Overweight rating on SpaceX $SPCX with a $240 price target, saying the company’s AI ambitions are coming into sharper focus and that it is increasingly positive on Grok. The firm highlighted SpaceX’s completed acquisition of Cursor on 8/14 as an important step in building enterprise AI capabilities. Cursor brings roughly $4B of ARR as of June 2026, with about 75% coming from businesses, which JPMorgan says should help streamline go-to-market and provide valuable model-training data. The firm also said Cursor data is already showing up in Grok’s supplemental training, with tangible improvements in recent model performance.
10. OpenAI says its new Broadcom-built Jalapeno AI chip outperformed Nvidia $NVDA GB300 in both throughput per watt and response latency during internal testing, according to Bloomberg. The chip is built specifically for inference, not training, and runs at roughly 700 watts. OpenAI plans to begin deploying Jalapeno for its models later this year, saying the performance gap widened on larger workloads, including Moonshot’s Kimi model, and that the chip has also performed well on unreleased OpenAI models. The key caveat is that Jalapeno was tested against GB300, not Nvidia’s newer Vera Rubin generation. OpenAI says a second-generation chip is already nearing tape-out, while work on a third generation has begun.
11. The top 10 most active options today by contracts traded were $NVDA with 1.8M contracts, $TSLA with 1.8M contracts, $AAPL with 636K contracts, $SPCX with 548K contracts, $INTC with 540K contracts, $AMZN with 498K contracts, $MU with 483K contracts, $AMD with 403K contracts, $PLTR with 361K contracts, and $SOFI with 359K contracts.
12. Raymond James raised its Nvidia $NVDA price target to $352 from $330 and reiterated a Strong Buy rating. The firm says Nvidia’s CPU opportunity is becoming more important, especially for agentic AI workloads, even though CPUs are only about 3% of sales today. Raymond James expects CPU revenue to reach roughly 5% of total revenue by CY28 and believes Nvidia could potentially become the world leader in CPU revenue within several years. The firm also argued the stock remains inexpensive, trading at less than 15x CY27 GAAP earnings, below the S&P 500 at 18.6x, despite sales and net income growth still expected to exceed 20% in CY28. Its new $352 target is based on a 22x multiple on CY28 estimates, which Raymond James views as conservative given Nvidia’s leadership, CUDA moat, GPU performance, free cash flow, and history of trading at much higher multiples.
WALL STREET IS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.
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SAMSUNG’S $200B BROADCOM DEAL IS BIGGER THAN A MEMORY SUPPLY CONTRACT. 📊
Samsung Electronics $005930 and Broadcom $AVGO have agreed to pursue more than $200B of semiconductor cooperation through 2030, covering HBM, advanced foundry manufacturing and packaging. Reuters separately confirmed the $200B Samsung–Broadcom portion of the wider Korea–US semiconductor agreements.
The headline number is huge, but the strategic shift matters more.
Samsung is trying to move from being viewed as a component supplier to becoming a full-stack AI semiconductor partner:
Memory → Foundry → Advanced Packaging
The reported scope includes HBM4 and HBM4E for Broadcom’s AI accelerators, sub-2nm foundry processes for key chip products, and integrated support from design optimization through packaging and mass production.
That matters because Broadcom is one of the central players in custom AI accelerators and high-speed data-center networking.
If this MOU converts into real production orders, Samsung would capture more value from each AI chip—not only memory revenue, but also manufacturing and packaging economics.
For the Korean market, Samsung is the clearest direct beneficiary.
Equipment, materials and packaging names may follow, but only after capacity expansion, supplier participation and actual purchase volumes are confirmed.
I would not treat the entire $200B headline as booked revenue yet.
This is still an MOU.
The real revaluation depends on:
→ Final contract volumes
→ Product and process allocation
→ Production timing
→ Pricing and margins
→ Whether orders translate into utilization and earnings
The headline creates expectations.
Execution is what creates the rerating.
$005930 $AVGO
For reference only. This is not investment advice. Avoid excessive leverage, do not chase sharp moves and maintain strict risk management.
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