By Michael Parekh
Publication Date: 2026-08-11 20:02:00
Today’s theme is ‘Gaming the System’ for AI, and I mean it in both senses. The skeptics use the term as an accusation: circular financing, manufactured demand, risk quietly moved onto other people’s books. All real financial engineering concerns, seen in every tech wave, not just the modern run from PCs to internet to mobile to AI, but the waves hundreds of years ago too: railroads, industrialization, electricity.
I mostly mean it the other way. The best operators through every cycle make sure their businesses and strategies are accommodated to the capital markets, private and public: the mechanics of funding, debt, equity, and every constituent that can help in the financing. That is what is going on in spades in today’s AI Tech Wave.
Three events today: Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic. My take on each, then my Overall Take. Plus a Gadget AI on Apple’s glassy 20th anniversary iPhone, and your questions.
MP TAKE: Four days ago I wrote about Nvidia the ‘Kingmaker’, now ‘uber AI investor and banker’. That was Nvidia lending its own ballooning balance sheet. Today’s move is the next turn of the dial: mobilizing OTHER people’s money, half a trillion dollars of AAA institutional capital pointed at AI factories. When the funding system you have runs out of road, you build new roads. That is the game, played at the highest level.
The mechanics, per the FT: Nvidia is partnering with the who’s who of world finance on a funding package of more than $500 billion…
