Signal #75: Anthropic Signed $45 Billion for Power That Turns On in 2027

Four things happened in the last five days and they are the same thing wearing different clothes. A lab signed a six-year power contract before it has a share price. Europe's public bank approved nine billion euros and did not put a cent of it against AI. A GPU landlord borrowed a billion dollars to buy chips it has already promised to Microsoft. A stablecoin protocol started lending against GPUs.

Equity built the last two years of this. Credit is building the next five. So this issue is about the paper: who wrote it, who holds it, and what has to keep leaving China for any of it to clear.

Anthropic committed around $45 billion over six years to Nscale for roughly 460 megawatts at the Monarch campus in West Virginia, running NVIDIA Vera Rubin chips that do not come online until late 2027. The company filed confidentially in June and is preparing a public filing in the coming weeks, with reporting pointing at a valuation above $2 trillion against the $965 billion it carried in May. Nscale is on the same autumn listing calendar, so the customer is about to go public, the supplier is about to go public, and the contract between them is one of the largest single assets either will show investors.

A capacity contract converts a variable cost into a fixed liability. Anthropic's floor price per token is now set by a deal signed in August 2026, not by whatever silicon costs in 2029. That is the reason to stop assuming vendor prices only fall. The same week, OpenAI told Cursor it will cut off its models on 12 November after SpaceX bought it, which is the other half of the picture: capacity gets locked for six years, access gets revoked in ten weeks.

Before you sign anything multi-year with a model vendor this autumn, ask what capacity sits behind the price and what happens to your rate when their contract reprices. A vendor quoting 2026 economics on 2029 hardware is either confident or selling you a subsidy. Then mark the week that S-1 lands, the first time anyone outside these companies gets to read a frontier lab's real unit economics.

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On 27 August the EIB board approved over €9.2 billion in new financing, with €4.3 billion of it going through local banks to small and mid-sized companies in Croatia, Czechia, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Spain. The named sectors are security and defence, space, energy and agriculture. The named projects are a Croatia to Hungary rail link, district heating in Lithuania, hospitals in Poland and France, an electricity network across Germany and Greece, and Italian solar. No intermediary banks were listed.

Hold that beside the West Virginia contract. American compute is being financed by private credit at commercial rates against hardware that depreciates. European industrial capacity is being financed by a public bank at concessional rates through your existing relationship manager, and the four words it uses to describe itself are defence, space, energy, agriculture. Nobody in Luxembourg is buying you GPUs. They are paying for the grid, the rail and the factory a defence supplier needs before it can bid.

The money reaches a company as an intermediated credit line, not a grant application, which means the counter is your own bank rather than a portal. If you make components, sensors, power electronics or anything dual-use in the five CEE countries on that list, call your relationship manager in September and ask which EIB envelope your file fits. Most will not volunteer it, because on-lending margins are thinner and the paperwork is heavier. The ones who ask get the cheaper money.

On 28 August Lambda took $1 billion in short-dated private debt arranged by JPMorgan to buy NVIDIA chips it will lease to Microsoft. It is the third raise in four months, after a $1 billion facility in May and a $926 million term loan for GB300s earlier this month. It last priced equity in November 2025 at $5.43 billion and is now in talks for a $3 billion pre-IPO round. More than $400 billion in AI-related debt has been raised globally so far in 2026.

The structure is the story. The collateral is hardware on a depreciation curve steeper than the loan, and the credit rests on a lease from a company large enough to build its own capacity whenever it decides to. The same day, Bullish extended USD.AI a $100 million facility to make GPU-collateralised loans, against more than $225 million already locked in the protocol. "Compute is becoming a credit market in its own right," said USD.AI chief executive David Choi, which is accurate and is not reassuring.

If you rent GPUs from a neocloud, your supplier's balance sheet is now part of your risk register. Short debt against fast-depreciating collateral works while the racks stay full and turns ugly the quarter they do not, and the first thing a squeezed landlord does is reprice the customers without contracts. Find out whether your provider's capacity is debt-financed, what the maturity is, and how much notice you are owed. Twenty minutes now, or a bad surprise next spring.

China suspended its toughest rare-earth export measures in November 2025 for twelve months, and decides in November whether to re-apply them. Yttrium exports are already down around 75% this year against 2025. China mines roughly 90% of the world's yttrium, processes effectively all mined ore into usable form, and supplies all the erbium oxide. The IEA puts China at about 91% of global separation and refining.

These are not the glamorous inputs. Yttrium and erbium sit in ceramic capacitors, microwave filters, solid-state lasers and the optical fibre amplifiers carrying traffic between racks, and a data centre is mostly those parts by count. Washington has moved money at it: $750 million from the Defense Department, $500 million from Energy across seven projects, and up to $10 billion through the Export-Import Bank's Project Vault. None of that produces separated oxide before 2027, the same year the Vera Rubin chips are due.

Nothing about November is priced into any of the paper described above. The watch item: for whatever hardware sits in your 2027 plan, ask the supplier now what lead times look like if the licensing goes the other way, and get the answer in writing before Q4 quoting season starts. Component buyers who asked that question in 2021 spent 2022 with stock on the shelf. The ones who assumed spent it explaining.

Five things to install or check this week, tagged by the seat they help.

Dev: GitHub dropped the size cap on Copilot code review. The 300-file, 20,000-line limit is gone as of 27 August, and Copilot now reviews bot-authored pull requests, including ones from its own cloud agent. Resolving a comment asks for a reason: addressed, won't fix, or incorrect. Switch it back on for the repositories that were quietly skipping review because the diffs were too big.

Design: Runway's Solaris makes interfaces without making code. Announced 31 August, it renders an interactive UI frame by frame as a world model, answering clicks, drags and typing with no intermediate representation. In a 250-participant study covering about 7,500 judgements, users preferred it 71% to 21% on natural behaviour. It is early-access only, so put your name down before your next client pitch, because this competes with the prototype rather than the codebase.

Productivity: OpenShot 4.0 records the screen you were going to edit. The 30 August release captures screen, webcam, microphone and system audio straight into a project, which takes the separate recorder out of the demo-video workflow. GPLv3, free, donations optional. Run it against your next product walkthrough before you renew a paid recorder and editor pair.

Security: Android 17 turned on Encrypted Client Hello system-wide. Shipped 28 August alongside local network protection, default certificate transparency and carrier-controlled 2G blocking, ECH hides destination domains from network operators when paired with private DNS. Anything in your product that reads SNI (filtering, parental controls, network monitoring) starts going blind on those devices. Check it before your support queue does.

Finance: the FSB told the G20 that frontier AI is a financial stability question. In a 31 August letter to finance ministers and central bank governors, Andrew Bailey names stretched AI valuations, private credit vulnerabilities and, as the most immediate concern, the effect of frontier AI on cyber risk. It is short, it is official, and it is the citation your next board risk memo has been missing.

Next edition soon,

Çelik