WHAT’S INSIDE:

Feature: CoreWeave’s bounce fades, AI financing risks mount

Top Tech News: Narrow tech rally, $7.5B tech selling, Russia tariffs waived, Anthropic shutdown bill, Musk’s $11B share pledge, banks slump

Company Watch: Nscale’s $45B Anthropic talks, Winverse’s $400M valuation, Tenstorrent’s $1.5B raise, Dream Labs’ $90M seed, Berkshire backs Bending Spoons

Buzzy Tools: Touch-screen MacBook, Fable 5.5, ChatGPT for Chrome, Starlink Mobile, $499 Vive Eagle, AI-run companies, Vercel’s Jev

Buzzy Tech: AI hoverboard, OpenAI humanoid, 99.9% spin qubits, asteroid nuke simulations, game ownership bill, AI agent blocks, 30G eVTOL seats

Crypto: $910M Bitcoin ETF outflows, White House crypto chief exits, Fairshake’s 32 picks, wallet rule dropped, Cboe binary options, Latvia crypto tax plans

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Top Technology News

(Some) Tech Rebounds — Amazon up 5% on a Morgan Stanley top-pick call, lifts Nasdaq 1.1%; Palantir and Datadog gained 4%+, but 2/3rds of S&P stocks fell.

Tech Sell Skew Peaks — Jefferies' desk logged $7.5B in net tech selling last week, the biggest skew in 5+ years, topping DeepSeek week; CoreWeave debt fears hit chips, SOX -10%.

Russia Tariffs Waived — Trump waived new Russia-linked duties of up to 500% before the Oct. 18 oil deadline. No fixed expiry; earlier sanctions remain in force.

Leaked Bill — A confidential Anthropic draft bill sent to Congress would set strict limits on when federal authorities can shut down frontier AI models, per leaks.

Musk's Giveaway — Elon Musk pledged one SpaceX share to every "kid" in America next year, a gift worth about $11B across 72M minors. He also settled lottery suits.

Holmes Doc Breaks Records — A24's Theranos film earned $15M+ on under 900 screens, the biggest documentary opening in 20+ years.

Buyers Backing Out — Homebuyers are backing out of contracts at near-record rates, a potential sign of how higher mortgage rates are prompting buyers to rethink.

CoreWeave Bounced Back. Its Bonds Never Left 15%.

Tech Buzz Editorial Feature

The stock bounced. The bonds did not. Monday's AI rally had no breadth, CoreWeave closed at $61.12 with its debt still paying 15.13%, and the market is now pricing the technology separately from the money that built it.

CoreWeave rallied on a Goldman Sachs upgrade to Buy on Monday, gave the whole move back and closed at $61.12, barely above its July low of $60.82. Its 2031 bond eased 19.5 basis points to 15.13%, down from above 16% last week, which is relief rather than a change of mind. Credit default swaps on the company went past 1,100 basis points during the selloff. The arithmetic behind those numbers is simple: roughly $13B of expected revenue in 2026, about $50B of debt and lease obligations, and capital spending plans heading toward $39B. Equity spent Monday trying to call last week a dip. Credit was not buying.

The Bounce Had No Breadth

On the surface it was a recovery. The Nasdaq rose 1.1%, the S&P 500 added 0.4%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index gained 2.4% to snap an eight-session losing streak that had shed around $2T and run longer than anything since October 2008. Palantir gained 4.36%, Datadog 5.36%, Amazon 4.98% and Intel 4.5% on a JPMorgan upgrade. Nebius rose 3.4% after losing more than 31% in two weeks.

Underneath, nearly two-thirds of S&P 500 stocks fell and the equal weight index lost ground. The index rose while most of its members did not. Mark Malek, chief investment officer at Siebert Financial, put the limit on it plainly: you cannot just buy all the AI companies because they all dipped.

Everyone With Equity Says The Market Is Wrong

Michael Intrator, CoreWeave's CEO, told staff in an internal memo that markets sometimes misunderstand and act irrationally toward new technology companies. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, which holds about 10% of CoreWeave and also sells it chips, said last week that the company's cost of capital is actually decreasing.

The lenders disagree, and they are the only participants here whose upside is limited to getting paid back. John Atkins, who covers corporate bonds at PitchBook, describes CoreWeave as a bellwether for the riskier edge of hyperscaler sentiment, and notes investor wariness about speculative debt that has to be refinanced at much higher rates.

The Selling Was Bigger Than It Looked

Jefferies' trading desk logged a $7.5B net sell skew in technology last week, its most selling-tilted week in more than five years and larger than the DeepSeek week of January 2025. It was also the second-worst week for the tech momentum trade in over 20 years.

Jeffrey Favuzza, TMT equity strategist at Jefferies, located the problem precisely. Demand for the neoclouds has not weakened. Confidence in their access to cheap capital has. That distinction is the entire story, and it is why order books and share prices have stopped pointing the same way.

Banks Are Falling On Good Earnings

The stress is no longer confined to AI. The KBW Nasdaq Bank Index has fallen for six straight weeks and is down 11% since early September, its longest weekly losing streak since 2008. It did that while JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi and Wells Fargo reported credit provisions of $7.6B, down about 3% from a year earlier, loan losses down 5% and lending up nearly 10%.

Good results, falling shares. A survey of credit portfolio managers explains the gap: about 60% now expect corporate defaults to rise worldwide over the next year, up from 40% a quarter ago, and 85% expect wider spreads on North American junk bonds within three months, up from 50%.

The Spending That Was Supposed To Pay For This

Hyperscaler capital spending is expected to exceed $800B this year and pass $1T next, with Morgan Stanley putting total AI investment at $1.6T in 2027. All of it is underwritten by demand that has not arrived yet.

September retail sales looked like that demand was fine, rising 0.8% to $745.0B. Gasoline stations did most of the work. Receipts there jumped 6.4% on the month and 28.1% on the year, contributing about $4.1B of the $5.7B total increase. Strip out autos and petrol and spending rose 0.2%, a figure the data itself describes as not statistically distinguishable from zero.

The longer record looks thinner too. The Census Bureau's benchmark revision in late September cut 2023 retail sales growth from 3.53% to 1.39% and 2024 from 2.62% to 1.05%, with the level of sales revised down by roughly 4.5% as of July. Barely anyone covered it. Consumer confidence hit its lowest reading since 2014 the same week.

Equity Is Still Cheap. Debt Is Not.

Tenstorrent shows the split in one transaction. The Toronto chip startup raised $1.5B at a $6.2B valuation this week and turned down acquisition interest to stay independent. Equity capital at generous prices is still available to AI companies. What has repriced is borrowed money, and the companies that need the most of it are the ones building the physical layer.

What This Week Actually Tests

Meta, Tesla, Lam Research, Texas Instruments and Western Digital all report in the coming days. The question is not whether AI demand keeps growing, because order books say it will. It is whether the market still pays a premium for growth financed at these rates, and whether CoreWeave can put distance between itself and its July low. The technology and the balance sheet behind it are now being priced as two different assets. Only one of them is in trouble.

Latest deals and trending companies

Open Deals

Nscale Eyes Anthropic Deal — Nscale, a UK AI cloud and data center developer, is in talks to sell compute to Anthropic in a deal worth about $45B, seeking a second West Virginia site.

Winverse AI — Robot-AI startup in China, founded by a former Tencent scientist, is getting a seed round led by DeepSeek with Meituan's Long-Z, valuing it at about $400M.

Big Movers

Tenstorrent — AI inference chip startup raised $1.5B at a $6.2B valuation, up from $2.6B in 2024, after rebuffing Intel and Qualcomm takeover interest.

OpenAI — Sam Altman confirmed OpenAI will build a humanoid, disclosed that a research model spent Sepolia testnet funds from a stranger's crypto wallet.

SpaceX Wireless — FCC approved 15K next-gen Starlink satellites as SpaceX buys low-band spectrum after a ~$20B EchoStar deal, aiming at AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile.

Anthropic Public Benefit Fund — Anthropic commits 5% of its shares to a new fund, adding 2% per 50% valuation gain. ~20% of shares go to the public good.

Dream Labs — San Fran robot foundation model startup founded by ex-Nvidia GR00T leads raised a $90M seed round and launched a public robot-brain API.

Bending Spoons — Milan software firm that buys and revives struggling apps landed backing from Berkshire Hathaway ~4 mths post-IPO, validating its strategy.

Buzzy Tools & Tech

The Latest Trending Tools & Cutting Edge Technology Developments

Buzzy Tools

Buzzy Tools To Watch and Try Today

Touch MacBook — First touch-screen Mac, with OLED and Dynamic Island.

Fable 5.5 — Reportedly with partners; $10/$50 per 1M tokens, 1M context.

ChatGPT for Chrome — Reads open tabs, fills forms, sidebar chat.

Starlink Mobile — 15K satellites beam LTE-class signal straight to phones.

Vive Eagle — $499 privacy-first camera glasses, no social login.

Self-driving company — AI agents run daily tasks; humans decide.

Jev — Fast, cheap decision model; 35% of Vercel paid teams use it.

Buzzy Technology

Buzzy Tech Discoveries and Breakthroughs Trending Today

Hoverboard — 10 electric thrust units lift a rider; AI coaches balance.

OpenAI Humanoid — Robot planned; the AI 'brain' is the hard part.

Spin Qubits — One microwave line drives 5 silicon qubits at 99.9% accuracy.

Asteroid Nuke Sims — 3D models test nuclear blasts deflecting asteroids.

Game Ownership Bill — FTC rules would make buying a game mean owning it.

Agent Blocks — Yelp, Delta wall off AI agents unless licensed.

30G Seats — eVTOL taxi adds crash-absorbing seats and Northrop Grumman nav.

Cryptocurrency News

The Latest News in Crypto & Blockchain

Bitcoin ETF Outflows — US spot Bitcoin ETFs lost $228.6M this week after a $681.1M drain the prior week, about $910M over two weeks.

Crypto Chief Departs — Patrick Witt is leaving his White House post as head of the digital assets council, and no successor is named after a number of exits.

Fairshake's Bipartisan Bet — Crypto Super PAC Fairshake is backing 32 House candidates, 19 Republicans and 13 Democrats, with 6 getting $1M each.

Wallet Rule Withdrawn — Trump withdrew a 2020 Treasury proposal on self-hosted wallet data collection, ending a fight that drew thousands of objections.

Cboe Earnings Options — The SEC approved Cboe binary options on Coinbase trading volume and MARA Bitcoin output, paying $1 and staying settled.

Banks vs. Stablecoins — A BIS working paper found that stablecoin growth slows when U.S. banks raise deposit rates, with Circle’s USDC most sensitive.

Fidelity Crypto Settlement — Fidelity Digital Assets will pay $500K to California and must give written notice if it ends retail crypto transfers, while IRAs stay excluded.

Latvia Crypto Taxes — Latvia could let residents pay personal taxes in crypto as soon as 2027, per PM adviser Didzis Dejus, after parliament taxed withdrawals.

Crypto Opportunities

Citi-Coinbase Stablecoin Bridge — Coinbase expands its Citi partnership to let corporate clients move between traditional fiat payments and stablecoins.

Best Crypto Debit Cards 2026 — Coinbase Card offers up to 4% cashback, Kraken's Krak Card launched in the US August 18 paying up to 2% in BTC or USD, while Crypto.com tops rewards at 5% for staked CRO holders.

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