"Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky shares ominous ‘bomb shelter’ warning for Russian officials refusing to end war"

From the New York Post, September 25:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ominously warned Russian officials to find the nearest bomb shelter if they continue to refuse to end the war.

“They have to know where the bomb shelters are,” Zelensky told Axios Wednesday. “They need it. If they will not stop the war, they will need it in any case.”

Zelensky went on to insist Ukraine would only target Kremlin officials and not Russian civilians because “we are not terrorists.”....

....MUCH MORE 

Probably not related, September 25: 

Hegseth orders rare, urgent meeting of hundreds of generals, admirals

The Pentagon has summoned military officials from around the world for a gathering in Virginia. Even top generals and their staffs don’t know the reason for the meeting.... 

....MUCH MORE 

Questions Bankers Are Asking: "The disaster playbook: What happens if a stablecoin fails?"

 From American Banker, September 24:

• What's at stake: Stablecoin failure could echo throughout the banking system. 
• Forward look: The Senate will debate market structure legislation next month. 
• Expert quote: "No one wants to hear about this" – Senate Banking Committee ranking member Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. 

WASHINGTON — As Congress prepares to debate sweeping market structure legislation this fall, one glaring question remains unaddressed: what happens when a major stablecoin collapses? 

Lawmakers spent months crafting the GENIUS Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law in July, creating the first legislative framework for stablecoins. That legislation passed despite objections from Democratic lawmakers and banks alike, and Republicans pushing the bills say those concerns will be addressed in a forthcoming market structure package that the Senate is planning to take up next month. 

But the biggest of those concerns is what would happen to the financial system if a stablecoin issuer — or a bank holding significant stablecoin deposits — were to fail. That question, so far, has barely registered in the debate. 

"I actually have had some of this conversation with Republicans as well, and no one wants to hear it," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee,  told American Banker in July. "Nobody wants to hear this."

How it starts
The idea of a single company, or a small number of companies, going under and taking all or a significant part of the entire financial system with it are usually fringe cases.

Bankruptcies are rare, and big financial companies going under are even rarer. That said, it does happen, most recently with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, which set off a broader crisis of market confidence among large regional banks.

A stablecoin issuer failing would be very different from a bank failure or large nonbank bankruptcy. Consumers, should the industry grow, may increasingly park their money in stablecoins just as they do with bank deposits, except the treatment of stablecoins is different from deposits should the entity holding them fail....

....MUCH MORE 

M&A: Setting Up A Potential Fujiwhara Effect

This is a post on weather. I maybe should have headlined it "Pas de deux" rather than "M&A."

But then it would have risked disappointing the the ballet crowd, and they can be mean buggers.

From Gulf Coast News Now, September 25:

Dancing Hurricanes: What is the Fujiwhara effect?
When 2 hurricanes glide close to each other, they can spin around in a stormy duet

Tropical Storm Humberto is rumbling in the Atlantic. It's track may be influenced by a secondary system bubbling in near the Bahamas. The two may experience the Fujiwhara effect and enter a sort of tropical tango. 

The Fujiwhara effect occurs when two spinning vortexes, like hurricanes or typhoons, rotate around a shared center. This cyclonic samba happens when two hurricanes pass close enough, usually between 350 to 850 miles, to influence each other's paths.

The tropical twirl is dependent on each storm's strength. Two storms of similar intensities can spin into each other and merge to create one system. Sometimes, they briefly rotate, only to be tossed in separate ways. 

 

If one storm is significantly stronger than the other, the weaker system usually begins to orbit around the larger. This is similar to the way a planet orbits the sun. Often, the smaller storm will orbit closer and closer until it eventually crashes into the larger system....

....MUCH MORE 

Here's the current set-up from the National Hurricane Center.  

Hurricane Gabrielle seems to be bound-and-determined to Reconquista the Iberian Peninsula:

 

while to the west Humberto has just become a tropical storm on his way to possibly maturing into a cat 2 Hurricane. Even further west, Invest 94 is also forecast to develop into a tropical storm and it's those two who could go all Fujiwhara on us:

 

1. Central Caribbean Sea and Southwestern Atlantic (AL94):
A tropical wave is producing a large area of disorganized showers, 
thunderstorms, and gusty winds across portions of the Dominican 
Republic, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.  An area of low pressure 
is expected to form along the wave tonight or early Friday when it 
moves near the southeast Bahamas.  This low is expected to become 
a tropical depression when it is in the vicinity of the central and 
northwest Bahamas in a couple of days.  Interests in the Dominican 
Republic, Haiti, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Bahamas 
should monitor the progress of this system as heavy rains and gusty 
winds are likely across that region regardless of development.  
Interests along the coast of the southeastern United States should 
also monitor the progress of this system.  
* Formation chance through 48 hours...high...70 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...high...90 percent. 

 I had a bad feeling posting September 10's "Well, Today Is The Statistical Peak Of The Atlantic Hurricane Season":

And we still haven't gotten around to posting on all the various forecasts. Maybe next week for the whole batch.

*** 

On the other hand, just posting this little bit of hubris will probably be the butterfly-flapping-its-wings necessary to trigger the first whole-hemisphere-category-7-North-and-South-Atlantic-cyclone. 

Fifteen days later no Cat-7 but we shall see.

"Global Gas Power Buildout Faces “Turbo Lag” Even as Demand Surges"

From OilPrice, September 24:

•  TC Energy plans to invest $8.5B in U.S. power projects over five years, betting on soaring natural gas demand from AI data centers, manufacturing, and LNG exports.
• Analysts expect natural gas to remain the only fossil fuel gaining share in major economies by 2050.
• Wood Mackenzie warns of rising costs, turbine supply constraints, and competition from cheaper renewables

Canadian energy infrastructure company, TC Energy Corp. (NYSE:TRP), has unveiled plans to invest $8.5 billion over the next five years in U.S. power projects, banking on predictions of a 45 billion cubic feet per day increase in natural gas demand to meet surging power demand. According to TC Energy CEO François Poirier, gas-fired generation will power the ongoing AI build-out, adding that his company has a footprint in eight of the ten largest U.S. electric utilities.

“It’s all about energy--and natural gas is going to be the backbone,” Poirier said in an interview.

Poirier says favorable policies by the Trump administration will make it easier for the company to achieve its lofty goal, saying that time spent on permitting and construction could be cut in half. The energy executive has predicted that U.S. LNG exports will double from the current 12 bcf/d to 24 bcf/d over the next 10 years. Back in May, Poirier reaffirmed TC Energy’s capital expenditure guidance of $5.5 billion to $6 billion in the current year, and said it remains on track to place assets worth $8.5 billion into service in 2025. TC Energy reported that its projects are tracking ~15% below budget.

TC Energy is not the only organization that has predicted robust growth in U.S. natural gas demand.

Last year, Morgan Stanley predicted that the U.S. natural gas market is entering a new growth cycle thanks to the advent of AI data centers, clean energy manufacturing and the cryptocurrencies boom. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) global electricity demand increased by 4.3% in 2024, up from 2.5% growth recorded in 2023.

Meanwhile, S&P Global Commodity Insights recently predicted that natural gas will be the only fossil fuel that will increase its share in the energy mix of the United States, China, and India by 2050, even as oil and coal usage decline globally. S&P Global has projected that renewables will supply 20% of global energy by 2050, up from just 4% currently. “By 2050, gas shall be the only fossil fuel with a potential increase in the energy mix for the US, China, and India,” the report stated....

....MUCH MORE 

Very related: "So You Say You Want To Buy A GE Vernova Utility-Scale Natural Gas Turbine? Plan Ahead (GEV)"  

"The $4trn accounting puzzle at the heart of the AI cloud"

A question related to the one we raised introducing September 23's "OpenAI in talks to lease Nvidia chips instead of buying them, Information says". 

From The Economist, September 18:

A beancounter’s look at the hyperscalers’ balance-sheets 

IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, billions are so 2022. Three years after ChatGPT ignited the AI boom, the business is all about trillions. The market value of Microsoft, whose Azure cloud has a glistening AI lining, is not far off its recent $4trn record. Alphabet, which is giving Google an AI makeover, has just become a $3trn company. On a good day, Amazon, with a rival cloud, rounds to that. Meta, as much about AI these days as about social media, is now firmly a $2trn firm, plus or minus. Last week Oracle, challenging Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft in the AI cloud, made a dash for $1trn. If some stock sales go to plan, OpenAI, ChatGPT’s maker, and its two rivals, Anthropic and xAI, could together be worth this much, give or take, by the end of the year.

AI revenues and expenditures are likewise a 13-figure affair nowadays. Worldwide spending on AI hardware and software nudged $1trn last year, according to Gartner, a research firm. This is likely to double to $2trn in 2026. Between 2024 and 2026 the five listed AI powerhouses will have splurged over $1trn on capital investments, chiefly AI data centres. A slug will end up with Nvidia and Broadcom, which furnish them and others with AI semiconductors. The duo (combined market capitalisation: $6trn) are together forecast to book almost $1trn in sales over that period.

Such a tally of zeros is normally reserved for official statisticians in G20 economies. In business, it is dizzying. All the more so given that examining the AI titans’ finances can be like staring into a black hole. Whether or not it promotes long-termism, President Donald Trump’s latest suggestion that American companies move from quarterly to half-yearly financial reporting is liable to make things blacker still. Pity the analyst without the levellest of heads and the brightest of torchlights.

Fortunately, some are equipped with both. And they are beginning to raise questions about aspects of AI book-keeping. Depending on the precise answer, the impact on the AI champions’ value could itself be measured in trillions of dollars.

The most pressing set of questions concerns the tech giants’ assets—specifically, the longevity of all those fancy AI chips they are installing in their data centres. Last year Nvidia, which makes most of them, said it would unveil a fresh AI chip every year rather than every couple of years. In March its boss, Jensen Huang, remarked that “when Blackwell starts shipping in volume, you couldn’t give Hoppers away,” referring to Nvidia’s latest chips and their predecessors, respectively.

No one took Mr Huang literally: that would imply that the useful life of his firm’s pricey products is now a mere 12 months. Rightly so, for he was clearly being tongue-in-cheek. And his biggest customers have in recent times been raising their servers’ lifetimes, reducing depreciation charges in their accounts. Microsoft pushed it up from four to six years in 2022. Alphabet did the same in 2023. Amazon and Oracle changed it from five to six in 2024. And in January Meta moved from five to five and a half years.

In the same month Amazon reversed course and moved back to five years for some kit, noting this would cut operating profit in 2025 by $700m, or about 1%, owing to a higher depreciation expense. Given the rapid advances in chipmaking, that seems optimistic. And Amazon’s AI rivals clinging to their elongated depreciation schedules look Pollyannaish. In July Jim Chanos, a veteran short-seller, posted that if the true economic lifespan of Meta’s AI chips is two to three years, then “most of its ‘profits’ are materially overstated.” A recent analysis of Alphabet, Amazon and Meta by Barclays, a bank, estimated that higher depreciation costs would shave 5-10% from their earnings per share.

Apply this logic to the entire AI big five and the potential overall hit to the bottom line is huge. The companies do not report the net book value of their computing infrastructure. But you can get a rough idea by multiplying the gross value, which each discloses in its annual filings, by the ratio of net book value to book value of all plant and equipment (excluding land, which is not subject to depreciation). Next assume that half the resulting sum is tied up in servers, in line with their estimated share of the global AI capital binge. Then, if all these servers lose their value in three years rather than however many each company assumes, their combined annual pre-tax profit would fall by $26bn, or 8% of last year’s total.

At the five companies’ current ratio of market capitalisation to pre-tax profit, this would amount to a $780bn knock to their combined value. Redo the sums depreciating the servers over two years instead of three and the size of the hit rises to $1.6trn. Take Mr Huang literally, and you get a staggering $4trn, equivalent to one-third of their collective worth.

The cloud-depreciation society
In reality, not all of the AI quintet’s servers would be useless after three years, let alone 12 months. They can keep performing oodles of non-AI work. Some AI tasks can also be farmed out to older processors....

....MORE 

 The Economist homepage

Nvidia's development cycle is currently around eighteen months, shorter than the magic number that Moore's  Law observed for the number of transistors in an integrated circuit, two years.

I don't know how long Nvidia can maintain that pace but Mr. Huang is pushing to shorten the development cycle further, thus making earlier generations of the company's GPUs obsolete even faster, a point we were pitching as a positive earlier this year regarding leakage of state-of-the art chips from the Middle Eastern buyers to China:

As noted exiting from May 18's "U.S. Still Mulling Whether To Allow Nvidia To Sell One Million+ Most Powerful Chips To UAE": 

On the one hand with that many chips floating around that part of the world there is no way to keep a bunch of them from ending up in China. On the other hand, Nvidia's development cycle is focused on releasing new, more powerful chips every 12 -14 months meaning the current smoking hot H100 chips will have been superseded by two cycles at the end of the contract period. 

The first point, that chips will get to China is borne out by the recent news that $1 billion worth of chips had been smuggled into China in three months after the export ban on the more powerful Nvidia chips. 

note: the smuggled chips were not the ones destined for the UAE.

The second point is that the real technology transfer deterrent is in the pace of NVDA's development cycle. 

Although there are hiccups—most recently server racks overheating from the amazing amount of electricity flowing through the systems—the overarching goal is an almost metronomic rhythm to the development of new chips such that the H20s will be out-dated in under 2 1/2 years.

If interested in a deeper dive into the pace of development see also:

Nvidia Earnings Call Transcript: Q2 2026 (August 27, 2025)  

"U.S. expands tariff dragnet to masks, syringes and robotics in sweeping import probe"

From CNBC, September 24:

• The Trump administration has launched national security investigations into imports of robotics, industrial machinery and medical devices, a move that could pave the way for fresh tariffs.
• The investigations also targeted imported medical equipment like wheelchairs, hospital beds and devices used in medical diagnosis and treatment like pacemakers.
• The Trump administration has already used the “Section 232” law to impose levies on automobiles and parts, copper, steel and aluminum. 

The Trump administration has launched national security investigations into imports of robotics, industrial machinery and medical devices, a move that could pave the way for fresh tariffs and raise costs for consumers, hospitals and manufacturers.

The Department of Commerce said Wednesday that the probes, opened Sept. 2 under the “Section 232” of the Trade Expansion Act, will assess whether such imports threaten U.S. national security, according to Federal Register filings.

The latest probes expand the list of items that could be exposed to higher tariffs to include personal protective equipment such as surgical masks, N95 respirators, gloves and other medical consumables, including syringes, needles and prescription drugs.

They also extend to imported medical equipment such as wheelchairs, hospital beds and diagnostic and treatment devices like pacemakers, insulin pumps and heart valves.

The probes could be used as justification for fresh sectoral tariffs aimed at boosting domestic production of goods deemed critical to national security.

The department is seeking comments from companies on their projected demand for these products and whether domestic production can meet local demand and the role of foreign supply chains.

Firms are also invited to outline the impact of foreign subsidies and what the administration described as “predatory trade practices.”....

....MUCH MORE 

"An oil and gas giant signed a $1 billion deal with Commonwealth Fusion Systems" (and Deng Xiaoping does a driveby)

If/when fusion derived electricity first becomes commercially viable, it will have "Chinese characteristics."*

From MIT Technology Review, September 22:

The power purchase agreement makes Eni the second major customer for Commonwealth’s first commercial fusion power plant. 

Eni, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, just agreed to buy $1 billion in electricity from a power plant being built by Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The deal is the latest to illustrate just how much investment Commonwealth and other fusion companies are courting as they attempt to take fusion power from the lab to the power grid. 

“This is showing in concrete terms that people that use large amounts of energy, that know the energy market—they want fusion power, and they’re willing to contract for it and to pay for it,” said Bob Mumgaard, cofounder and CEO of Commonwealth, on a press call about the deal.   

The agreement will see Eni purchase electricity from Commonwealth’s first commercial fusion power plant, in Virginia. The facility is still in the planning stages but is scheduled to come online in the early 2030s.

The news comes a few weeks after Commonwealth announced a $863 million funding round, bringing its total funding raised to date to nearly $3 billion. The fusion company also announced earlier this year that Google would be its first commercial power customer for the Virginia plant.

Commonwealth, a spinout from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, is widely considered one of the leading companies in fusion power. Investment in the company represents nearly one-third of the total global investment in private fusion companies. (MIT Technology Review is owned by MIT but is editorially independent.)....

....MUCH MORE
*A bow to the man who lifted 800 million of his fellow Chinese out of abject poverty:

 

"Socialism with Chinese characteristics" 
—Deng Xiaoping, 1982

 

From CGTN, the English-language channel of state-run China Global Television Network:

Over the past four decades, the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics has led China to

remarkable achievements. China's gross domestic product (GDP) grew from $149.54 billion in

1978 to $14,342.9 billion in 2019, while its GDP per capita rose from $156 to $10,262....  

And if one is interested, here is a short explication of Deng's thinking via Marxists.org:

Deng Xiaoping 
Building a Socialism With a Specifically Chinese Character 
1984 

Deng's abbreviated version was later referred to as "Cat Theory." From his 1962 speech, "Restore Agricultural Production": 

...Comrade Liu Bocheng often quotes a Sichuan proverb — 
“It does not matter if it is a yellow cat or a black cat, as long as it catches mice.”

And fusion? Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at The Telegraph, September 23, 2025:

The ultimate American nightmare: China is winning the fusion energy race
Beijing’s Manhattan Project promises to obliterate the existing global energy order

China is moving at lightning speed to secure a stranglehold over the industrial supply chain of nuclear fusion, aiming to leapfrog the US as the technology advances from theoretical science to actual power for the grid.

The Communist Party has launched what amounts to a Manhattan Project to dominate the next stage of fusion, which promises to start sweeping away the existing energy order much sooner than is widely understood.

Beijing is replicating the same strategy it used to wipe out global rivals in solar panels, lithium batteries, critical minerals and electric vehicles.

“China’s rise in fusion poses an existential threat to US energy dominance,” said Will Regan, founder of the US start-up Pacific Fusion.

Regan said China had deployed upwards of $10bn (£7bn) to $13bn since 2023 in a systematic attempt to capture the family of specialist industries that will underpin the rollout of fusion power plants at scale.

That figure is more than the rest of the world combined over the same period – probably by a large margin.

“Their facilities are so big you can literally see them from space,” said Bob Mumgaard, the chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion, the West’s frontrunner in commercial fusion.

“We are hearing reports that they are working 24 hours a day with interns sleeping in cots. This is a coordinated, state-organised intention to win the fusion race,” he said. 

*****

Mumgaard warned the US Congress that China’s ambitions are becoming a clear and present danger to US economic and national security.

“This is a very high-stakes race worth trillions of dollars. China is positioned to win; the US isn’t,” he said.

Mumgaard said the Chinese were pouring money on a massive scale into all the foundational structures of an active fusion industry.

“The US has nothing like this. Our fusion programme looks like it did a decade ago. It’s fragmented, underfunded and ill-equipped and still focused on science,” he said.

He was speaking last week at a shocking but sparsely attended session in Congress on the fusion race. The mood was in stark contrast to the heady triumphalism of the Pujiang Innovation Forum in Shanghai happening at much the same time.

Prof Zhang Jie, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said his country was fast developing a form of inertial laser fusion at a vast new facility in Sichuan that was 30 times more efficient than its US rival and promised to deliver baseload power at circa $25 per megawatt hour.

Such a level – if achieved – would obliterate all competition in global energy and establish China as the hegemonic electro-superpower.

Prof Zhang, China’s “Dr Fusion”, said the technology would drastically change the international order and lead to an economic upheaval that surpassed all three industrial revolutions seen so far – mechanical, electrical and digital.

China’s leaders were stunned when the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California announced in December 2022 that it had achieved ignition, generating more energy from fusing hydrogen isotopes than it put in to set off the reaction.

The lab has since repeated this eight times and reached an energy gain ratio of 4.1, as well as a “self-sustaining feedback loop” known as burning plasma.

Regan said Beijing had instantly grasped the significance of the breakthrough and had since mobilised the full apparatus of the Chinese state to surpass it.

“They are now close to operating a facility that could produce up to 10 times more yield: an enormous capability gap,” he said.

China is also going hell for leather on the more traditional fusion technology using ultra-strength magnets.

In January its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (East) contained burning plasma at temperatures above 100 million degrees for a record 17.7 minutes, catching up with the West in what some are already calling a Sputnik moment....

....MUCH MORE 

And MIT Technology Review, July 8, 2025:

Why the US and Europe could lose the race for fusion energy

The lack of essential supply chains and process technologies necessary to commercialize fusion energy could doom the US and European countries in capturing the critical geopolitical prize.

So far this year:

• "China's 'artificial sun' shatters nuclear fusion record by generating steady loop of plasma for 1,000 seconds"
• China Building Huge Laser Fusion Research Facility, Analysts Say
• Nuclear Fusion: "France tops China’s tokamak record with 22-minute plasma containment run"

And previously:

• February 2016 - "That's cute, Germany – China shows the world how fusion is done"
• December 2019 - And Speaking of Fusion, China Is Close To Turning On Their "Artificial Sun"
• May 2021 - "China’s “Artificial Sun” Fusion Reactor Just Set a World Record" 

Possibly also of interest:

May 2023 - Electrical Generation: China’s Jiangxi Province To Build A Fusion-Fission Reactor

For now, I'll believe it when I see it. But the scientists seem to have convinced the people with the money it is doable. 

December 2023 - Meanwhile in France: Recreating The Sun In Provence

Greta Thunberg's Flotilla Claims Israeli Drones Have Hacked Their Radios To Blast ABBA's "Lay All Your Love On Me"

From The Telegraph, September 24:

Italian warship sent to protect Greta’s Gaza flotilla
Help sent after suspected Israeli drones blast pop music at Greta Thunberg’s aid fleet  

An Italian warship was ordered to defend Greta Thunberg’s flotilla after the Gaza aid boats were targeted in a third suspected drone strike.

Italy’s defence minister redirected the navy vessel towards the aid boats during the overnight attack near the coast of Greece.

The latest incident raises the prospects that a warship could shoot down drones, risking escalation with whoever was behind the attack.

Israel has not taken responsibility, but Italy’s foreign minister has demanded that it guarantee the safety of those on the flotilla, ordering the Italian embassy in Tel Aviv to gather information.

“The Italian government is examining all options to avoid further offensive actions against the flotilla’s vessels,” in the wake of the overnight drone attack, sources from the Italian foreign ministry said, according to Ansa, Italy’s national news agency.

Ms Thunberg’s Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) claimed on Tuesday that Israeli “military drones” had jammed its communications and were playing Abba’s “Lay All Your Love On Me” through the ships’ speakers.

A source on the flotilla told The Telegraph that 11 “explosive” devices were identified, as well as two chemical devices emitting “irritating substances”.....

....MUCH MORE

Possibly related, "British soldier captured by Russians forced to listen to ABBA on repeat: ‘Hell on earth’" 

 Probably not related: "Greta Thunberg sings Swedish Death Metal"

Other examples:

British Special Forces Blast ISIS Stronghold With Bollywood Music

There is a history of this stuff, the most famous probably being the U.S. psychological operations troops targeting the Papal Nuncio in Panama City to drive out strongman and drug dealer Manuel Noriega who had sought refuge within.
It took ten days but he came out, playlist below.

Probably my favorite example of music as instrument of power was this kid in St. Andrews last year:

Taking Out The Hate Preacher In The Most Scots Way Possible

For folks who don't recognize the tune, it's Scotland the Brave, which, for some reason pipe bands in the U.S. insist on playing on St. Patrick's day.

Back to Noriega.
From the National Security Archive at George Washington University here's the start of the official playlist:

(You've Got) Another Thing Coming - Judas Priest
Blue Collar Man - Styx
Danger Zone - Kenny Loggins
Dead Man's Party - Oingo Boingo
Don't Look Back - Boston
Electric Spanking of War Babies - Funkadelic
Heaven's On Fire - Kiss
If I Had A Rocket Launcher - Bruce Cockburn
In My Time of Dying - Led Zeppelin
Iron Man - Black Sabbath
Judgment Day - Whitesnake
Jungle Love - Steve Miller
No More Mister Nice Guy - Alice Cooper
Paradise City - Guns & Roses
Panama - Van Halen
Paranoid - Black Sabbath
Refugee - Tom Petty
Renegade - Styx
Run Like Hell - Pink Floyd
The Party's Over - Journey
This Means War - Joan Jett

Wanted Dead or Alive - Bon Jovi
Wanted Man - Ratt
War Pigs - Black Sabbath
We're Not Gonna Take It - Twisted Sister
You Shook Me All Night Long - AC/DC
Your Time is Gonna Come - Led Zeppelin

And many more.

So You Say You Want To Buy A GE Vernova Utility-Scale Natural Gas Turbine? Plan Ahead (GEV)

From Next Big Future, September 23:

2028-2030 To Get a GE 290-430MW Natural Gas Turbine

 

A new order for a GE Vernova 7HA gas turbine placed today would likely see delivery in late 2028 at the earliest, with potential delays extending to 2029–2030 depending on production ramp-up and order prioritization. This equates to a lead time of approximately 3–4 years from order date, though some reports indicate quotes up to 5–7 years for non-prioritized slots amid surging demand from AI data centers and grid reliability needs. Non-prioritized slots means you do not pay about double the price to get it faster....

....MUCH MORE 

Up 109% over the last six months the stock has been stuck in a fairly wide band, $550 to all-time-high $677, late July to today:

 

—TradingView, 6 mo. 

$626.18 last, down $7.23 (-1.14%) on the day.

Peter Thiel: "Cohen’s Gideon and the advent of pre-crime AI"

He seems a bit dubious. 

From Mr. Thiel's personal website, August 30, 2025: 

Executive Summary

The launch of GIDEON, an AI-driven threat detection platform designed for U.S. law enforcement, signals the entry into an era of algorithmic pre-crime policing. Developed by former Israeli Defense Forces operator Aaron Cohen, GIDEON leverages continuous internet scraping, behavioral profiling, and advanced ontologies modeled on Israeli counterterrorism frameworks.

Its debut (framed in the aftermath of a tragic school shooting) suggests the weaponization of fear and trauma to normalize surveillance practices that resemble a fusion of Palantir-style data analytics with the fictional dystopia of Minority Report.

⸻

1. Strategic Context
   • Israeli Counterterrorism Doctrine: GIDEON draws on decades of Israeli operational practice, where predictive profiling and OSINT have been applied extensively to manage populations under persistent threat.
   • American Tech Ecosystem: By branding itself as “Palantir-quality,” GIDEON situates itself alongside firms already embedded in the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement infrastructure, exploiting both trust and urgency to accelerate adoption.
   • Trigger Events: High-profile mass shootings provide the political and emotional leverage needed to deploy such systems with minimal resistance.

⸻

1. Core Capabilities
   • 24/7 Internet Scraping: Automated surveillance of digital spaces for linguistic and behavioral threat markers.
   • Behavioral (Israeli-based) Ontology: Classification frameworks that map online expression into predictive categories of potential violence.
   • Pre-Crime Profiling: Translation of online “indicators” into actionable leads for law enforcement prior to any committed crime.

⸻

1. Risks & Implications
   • Erosion of Legal Norms: Shifts the axis of justice from act to intent, undermining the principle of presumption of innocence.
   • Bias & False Positives: Algorithmic classification risks misidentifying vulnerable individuals (e.g., the mentally ill, political dissidents) as threats.
   • Normalization of Thought Policing: The system effectively institutionalizes “surveillance through psy-ops”, reframing dissent, deviance, or frustration expressed online as latent criminality.
   • Threat Inflation: The incentive structure, where contractors and agencies profit from the identification of threats, creates systemic bias toward over-detection.

⸻

1. Historical & Cultural Parallels
   • Palantir Technologies: Like Palantir, GIDEON operates at the nexus of data integration and security. Both present themselves as indispensable tools against terrorism and crime, yet critics highlight their opacity, reach, and political entanglement.
   • Minority Report: Philip K. Dick’s fiction envisioned a world where “Pre-Cogs” predict crime before it happens. GIDEON operationalizes this narrative, replacing psychics with AI ontologies and machine learning.
   • Psy-Ops Surveillance: The platform represents not just technical surveillance but cognitive control—shaping behavior by instilling the knowledge that one’s digital expression is constantly monitored, classified, and judged....

....MORE 

"An expert has predicted the terrifying way WW3 could pan out, and it’s not looking good"

From The Tab (we are the voice of young people), September 19: 

A retired NATO commander has forecasted in scary detail how WW3 could actually start, and it’s way more low-key (and realistic) than you’d expect.

In an interview for the Daily Mail, General Sir Richard Shirreff, who used to be NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, has written out a minute-by-minute breakdown of how the West could be dragged into a global war in hours. This is how he thinks it would play out.

So picture this: One night, Lithuania suddenly goes dark. No lights, no WiFi, no TikTok scroll before bed. Hospitals are scrambling on backup generators, banks shut down, and within hours, the capital city of Vilnius is in absolute chaos. 

Sounds like the opening of a dystopian Netflix series, right?

He reckons it would start with a deliberate power cut in the Baltics, engineered by Russia. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia would all be plunged into chaos. Looting breaks out, riots erupt, and the Lithuanian president has no choice but to bring in martial law.

The very next day? Putin makes his move. He’d order Russian troops in Kaliningrad (that’s the chunk of Russia awkwardly wedged between Poland and Lithuania) to go on high alert, pretending it’s all about “keeping the peace.” Spoiler: it wouldn’t be....

....MUCH MORE 

Transmission: Jeffries Says Nice Things About Quanta Services, Stock Pops (PWR)

From Investing.com, September 24:

Jefferies bullish on Quanta Services on data center growth 

Jefferies upgraded Quanta Services to Buy from Hold, saying the engineering and construction company is positioned for earnings growth as it expands into data centers, renewables, transmission, and pipeline projects.

The brokerage raised its price target to $469, highlighting what it called Quanta’s “best-in-class execution” and ability to self-perform more than 80% of its work, supporting margins above 10%.

It expects the company to deliver high-teens earnings growth through the next decade.

Jefferies now models an 18.4% compound annual EPS growth rate from 2026 to 2030, above its prior forecast and consensus of 17.9%.....

....MUCH MORE 

The stock is up $12.29 (+3.15%) at $401.82 after getting to $407.08 earlier in the session.

As last mentioned in September 20's "US DOE launches initiative to accelerate development of large scale transmission and generation projects": 

Well that's right in our wheelhouse, what with the PWR and the GEV and CCJ and PRY(.mi)....

"Nvidia Expands Playbook With $100 Billion OpenAI Deal" (NVDA)

The AI buildout is a bubble.*

And we are still riding the bubble.

From Barron's, September 24: 

Nvidia has the hottest product in the world’s biggest investment boom. Its chips sit within the heart of data centers that power artificial-intelligence technologies around the globe.

It’s a $4 trillion behemoth at the center of both U.S. and China’s tech policy. CEO Jensen Huang, meanwhile, has spoken about “insane” AI demand dynamics, a “new industrial revolution,” and the potential of an “infinite” need for computing power.

So why is it paying for someone to buy its newest chips?

It’s all about growing the AI ecosystem. But it also raises questions about how that system seems to increasingly moves money within itself.

Nvidia entered a $100 billion financing arrangement with OpenAI on Monday that reportedly will see the ChatGPT creator, which has yet to turn a profit, cede an equity stake to Nvidia as it builds out its data center capacity. The tech giant also will supply 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure to OpenAI, with the first batch built on its next generation Vera Rubin platform.

Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya was bullish on the agreement, estimating it could generate as much as $500 billion in overall revenue for Nvidia.

“Perhaps more importantly, OpenAI will work with Nvidia as a preferred strategic compute and networking partner,” he added.

But setting aside the need to offer vendor financing to OpenAI, a company worth an estimated $500 billion—with the backing of Microsoft and the stamp of approval from the White House—the deal also highlights the increasing “closed loop” aspect of AI investments.

BofA’s Arya sees the OpenAI deal as a way for Nvidia to leverage its impressive profit and free cash flow margins into a flywheel of future growth.

Regulations have made direct stakes in other companies more cumbersome, he said. That means the alternative is to invest in the ecosystem itself in order to “expand the size of the addressable opportunity that could multiply future benefits, or accelerate time to market for new products.”

That certainly seems to be the playbook.

Earlier this month it was reported by The Wall Street Journal that Oracle—one of Nvidia’s biggest customers— booked a $300 billion contract to provide computing power to OpenAI, which now, according to reports, has committed to buying Nvidia chips.

That leaves billions of dollars flowing from OpenAI into Oracle, then back into Nvidia, then back into OpenAI, and then back into Nvidia once again.

But it doesn’t echo the bullish AI theme of insatiable demand. Nor does it speak well of Nvidia’s sales concentration, which was exposed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last month.

Two customers, dubbed “A” and “B” accounted for nearly 40% of Nvidia’s July quarter revenue, up from around 25% over the same period in 2024.

Adding OpenAI to the mix alleviates a portion of that concern but seemingly at an upfront cost. The first $10 billion of the deal will be paid in cash, in return for a reported equity stake.

The rest of the deal feels a little too dramatic to be true....

....MUCH MORE

The story includes the first mention of possible NVDA revenue of $1 Trillion that we've seen.

Recently: 

• "Nvidia Stock Pulls Back From Record High. Wall Street Has Questions About OpenAI Deal." (NVDA)
• "OpenAI in talks to lease Nvidia chips instead of buying them, Information says"

*And on AI as bubble:

July 2025 - "Microsoft and Meta’s earnings are making every part of the AI supply chain surge" (Ride the Bubble) MSFT; META; NVDA

As reiterated in January 7 2025's:
"Everything (retail) Nvidia Announced at CES 2025"
Reminder: We believe AI is a bubble and have made the decision to ride the bubble.

June 18, 2024: Nvidia's Financial Dominance (NVDA)

For the last year we have been referring to the AI phenomena as a bubble, perhaps not so much in financial terms but rather in terms of the psychology, the speculative frenzy. It's true in Nvidia's case, the stock could be cut in half and still be discounting the future with a 2-3% discount factor i.e. 33 to 50 times free cash flow.

However! Despite this we have been pitching a "Ride the Bubble" approach to the stock for over a year (we have an almost full decade with this one but it was in the last thirteen months that we thought it bubblelicious). Here's a July 1, 2023 post:

....So, we are faced with the decision whether-or-not to play a dangerous little game, riding the bubble knowing full well it is a bubble, or retiring to the sidelines.

For now one of our favorite economists with one of our favorite stories.

Here's the version hosted at MIT:

Riding the South Sea Bubble

By PETER TEMIN AND HANS-JOACHIM VOTH

This paper presents a case study of a well-informed investor in the South Sea bubble. We argue that Hoare’s Bank, a fledgling West End London bank, knew that a bubble was in progress and nonetheless invested in the stock: it was profitable to “ride the bubble.” Using a unique dataset on daily trades, we show that this sophisticated investor was not constrained by such institutional factors as restrictions on short sales or agency problems...

The two most important parts of the paper "II. Hoare’s Trading Performance" and "III. Causes of Success" are definitely worth a couple minutes....

***** 

....We'll have more on the big stories, autonomous vehicles, agentic AI and humanoid robots later today.

Mr. Huang believes they are each trillion dollar+ addressable markets.

*We reiterated the ride the bubble pitch a few more times, despite some trepidation. 

note: stock prices should be divided by 10 to adjust for the most recent stock split.

January 19, 2024 at $594.91 "AI: Lessons From The South Sea Bubble". 

February 6, 2024:

Nvidia Collapses (gives back half yesterday's gains) plus Isaac Newton and Daniel Defoe do a drive by (NVDA)

The stock is down $11.87, so a little less than half yesterday's up-move. $681.45 last after trading as low as $663.00 (down $30.31 and almost the entire Monday $31.72 up-move.) Unfortunately there is a gap on the chart at $660 so it didn't completely fill. Nervous-making....

By-the-bye, that $660 ($66, new style) is the "cut in half" number.

March 6, 2024:

WSJ: An in-depth look at Nvidia's DGX H100 setup: 32 DGX boxes, each weighing 300lb, that house eight individual $25K H100 GPUs, cooling, and other chips....

Earlier this morning the stock got to $889.68 and we are still pitching the "ride the bubble" approach—up $220 since the last mention, Feb. 6—but that could change anywhere between today and the end of the NVDA GTC conference (Mar. 21)....

If interested in some of our history with the big dog there are links embedded in January 2024's "Nvidia expands its reach in China’s electric vehicle sector" (NVD 

Finally, as Adam Smith put it in his book on the 'sixties bull market, The Money Game:

“Now you know and I know that one day the orchestra will stop playing and the
wind will rattle through the broken window panes, and the anticipation of this
freezes us. All of these kids but one will be broke, and that one will be the multi-
millionaire, the Arthur Rock of the new generation. There is always one, and
maybe we will find him.”

—As seen in February 2024's "JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon On The Business Case For AI: "This Is Not Hype" (JPM)" 

Not being in government, I don't have the authoritarian type of authority so I tend toward Burkeian humble and lovable: 

"All which a man without authority can give--
His unbiased opinion, his honest advice, and his best reasons."
—Edmund Burke (1791)*

—Power Politics For Outsiders, March 2023 (and elsewhere)
*Potential downside: Burke was described by Edward Gibbon (he of The...Decline and Fall...) as:
"The most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew". 

"Eli Lilly announces $6.5 billion manufacturing campus in Houston" (a trend is emerging)

Another one. Big money.

From Click2Houston, September 23: 

Governor Greg Abbott joined Eli Lilly and Company executives and local leaders on Tuesday in Houston to announce the pharmaceutical giant’s plans to build a $6.5 billion manufacturing campus in the city.

Abbott was joined by Eli Lilly Chair and CEO David Ricks, state Representative Harold Dutton, Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, and other local and state officials, as well as public health advocates.

• Medical company Eli Lilly plans to build $5.9 billion manufacturing campus in Houston

KPRC 2 first reported earlier this month that documents filed with the Texas Comptroller’s Office outlined the company’s plans. The facility is expected to create 4,000 construction jobs and 615 high-wage permanent roles for engineers, scientists, and operators once complete....

....MUCH MORE 

September 16:
"Lilly unveils 1st of 4 new US manufacturing sites with $5B Virginia API plant"

From Fierce Pharma, September 16:

Eli Lilly has revealed the location of the first of four large-scale manufacturing facilities that it plans to build in the U.S. The company has selected Goochland County, Virginia, as the site of a $5 billion plant that will produce active pharmaceutical ingredients. 

The facility is part of a $27 billion investment plan that the Indianapolis drugmaker laid out nearly seven months ago during a high-profile press event in Washington, D.C., dubbed “Lilly in America.”

The company expects to break ground this year on each of the new plants, which Lilly calls “mega sites.”

Lilly's move to bolster its domestic capacity and strengthen its supply chain reflects a broader industry trend in which drugmakers have poured billions of investment dollars into the U.S. in response to the growing threat of tariffs on pharmaceutical products imported from foreign countries....

....MUCH MORE

 Lilly is talking $27 billion for the four plants,

The article points out an effect of the administration's various tariff regimes that don't get highlighted that often: 

...Other companies that have revealed massive investment plans in the U.S. in recent months include Roche, which has pledged to spend $50 billion, and Johnson & Johnson, which has unveiled a $55 billion plan that includes bolstering its medtech business. Meanwhile, Sanofi and Novartis have committed to spend at least $20 billion each in the U.S. by the end of the decade.

Not highlighted that is except maybe by us.

As noted exiting Aug. 25's "Brace for a Second China Shock. Advanced Manufacturing Is at Risk":

One of the stated goals of the tariff regime is to encourage foreign companies to establish and/or increase their manufacturing footprint in the U.S. We have seen European companies, big pharma in particular respond to this aspect of the changing world of trade.

For their own reasons, some idiosyncratic, some policy driven, we have not seen Chinese companies react in the same way. The only recent large investment announcement that comes to mind is Chinese-owned (Haier) GE Appliances:

GE Appliances shifts more production to US as part of a $3 billion investment

"AstraZeneca pledges $50bn US investment ahead of drugs tariffs"

Another One: "Amgen to expand Ohio biotech manufacturing plant"

The one that really stood out for us was "Swiss pharmaceuticals company Roche announces $50B investment in US over next 5 years" because it followed so closely on the warning from the EFPIA (also because of the 50 large, that's a lot of money, no matter who you are):

...April 13's "Pharma CEOs alert President von der Leyen to risk of exodus to the US" on The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations:

These folks have clout.

Here's who "These folks" are ...

Another One: "Bristol Myers to invest $40 billion in the US over 5 years, CEO says"

"Sanofi to Invest at Least $20 Billion in US Through 2030"

A trend is emerging. 

The Per Capita GDP Of America's Poorest State Is Within $2,000 Of Germany' Per Cap GDP

As we've said, fun facts on the internet are usually not all that fun.

From Visual Capitalist:

How G7 Countries Compare to America’s Richest and Poorest States 

 

 Data for this graphic is sourced from the International Monetary Fund (IMF),Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Census Bureau, as of 2023.

....MUCH MORE 

Mississippi will catch Germany within two years unless there is a major shift ... pic.twitter.com/y07ZyIPmYh

— Erebus (@hyperionca) September 20, 2025

From Jackson Mississippi's Clarion-Ledger, May 27, 2025:

Mississippi's economy is surging. Here is why 

Mississippi's real GDP grew by 4.2% in 2024, ranking second nationally.

Personal income growth ranked fourth nationally in Q3 2024.

The state enacted the largest tax cut in its history in 2022.

....MUCH MORE 

Possibly related at The Conversation, March 26, 2025:

Mississippi’s education miracle: A model for global literacy reform

From Das Statistische Bundesamt (Destatis), August 22: 

Gross domestic product: detailed economic performance results for the 2nd quarter of 2025 

 Gross domestic product (GDP), 2^nd quarter of 2025
-0.3% on the previous quarter (price, seasonally and calendar adjusted)
-0.2% on the same quarter a year earlier (price adjusted)
+0.2% on the same quarter a year earlier (price and calendar adjusted)

....MUCH MORE 

And from Reuters, September 23:

Exclusive: German economic institutes revise up 2025 growth forecast to 0.2%, sources say

"$2.2 billion solar plant in California turned off after years of wasted money: ‘Never lived up to its promises’"

From the New York Post, September 23:

Seen from the sky, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California’s Mojave Desert resembles a futuristic dream.

Viewed from the bottom line, however, Ivanpah is anything but.

The solar power plant, which features three 459-foot towers and thousands of computer-controlled mirrors known as heliostats, cost some $2.2 billion to build.

Construction began in 2010 and was completed in 2014. Now, it’s set to close in 2026 after failing to efficiently generate solar energy.

In 2011, the US Department of Energy under former President Barack Obama issued $1.6 billion in three federal loan guarantees for the project and the Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, hailed it as “an example of how America is becoming a world leader in solar energy.”

But ultimately, it’s been more emblematic of profligate government spending and unwise bets on poorly conceived, quickly outdated technologies.

“Ivanpah stands as a testament to the waste and inefficiency of government subsidized energy schemes,”Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, an American energy advocacy group, told Fox News via statement this past February. It “never lived up to its promises, producing less electricity than expected, while relying on natural gas to stay operational.”

When Ivanpah began operating in 2014, it ranked as the world’s largest solar plant. It seemed like a viable solution to California’s renewable energy goals of employing affordable and efficient technology to reduce the need for fossil fuels.

Located near the California-Nevada border, 65 miles southwest of Las Vegas, the plant’s glowing towers are as striking as some casinos on the Strip.

The facility’s five-square-miles of desert were covered with some 173,500 heliostats, adjusted via computer to catch maximum rays.  The computer-controlled mirrors can reflect light from the sun at temperatures that can reach 1,000 degrees in part of the installment.

“The idea was that you could use the sun to produce a heat source,” alternative energy consultant Edward Smeloff told The Post. “The mirrors reflect heat from the sun up to a receiver, which is mounted on top of the tower. That heats a fluid. It creates steam [that spins] a conventional steam turbine. It is complicated.”

Though it sounds like a bit of a Rube Goldberg contraption — and looks like an art installation — Ivanpah was a cutting edge idea for a while. But, as the market changed, it couldn’t compete with newer and less less expensive forms of creating solar power.

“It simply did not scale up,” said Smeloff. “It’s kind of an obsolete technology [that’s] been outpaced by solar photovoltaic technology.”

That tech uses semiconductor material to transform sunlight into energy in a streamlined process. The solar energy panels you see on many residential rooftops or lined up in endless rows across the desert rely on the technology.

A statement from NRG Energy, the Texas based company that was an Ivanpah partner and the largest investor, having put up $300 million, agrees with Smeloff’s view.....

....MUCH MORE, including pics.

But just think, if we had built one thousand of these plants, the boost to nominal GDP would have been over Two Trillion Dollars! Of course it's a net negative on the national wealth balance sheet (see China's collapsing bridges) but still.

This was not hard to see coming. Previously on Ivanpah:

March 2011 - BrightSource Raises Another $201M for Solar Thermal"

Wow.
Or as Greentech put it:

This is going to have to be a big financial exit if investors are to be kept happy. 

April 2011 - BrightSource Energy Finalizes $1.6 billion in loans guaranteed by the US Department of Energy; Google Buys $168 Millinon Equity Stake (GOOG) 
This is big time political capitalism

Finally, as noted in a 2014 post on Ray Kurzweil:

Solar is still quite a ways from being cost-competitive. The brand new utility scale i.e. state-of-the-art Ivanpah facility won't disclose the unsubsidized cost of its electricity but it has been calculated by different methods at 17 to 24 cents per kilowatt hour. Wholesale electricity can be had for a nickle per KwH. 

"Terrifying gigantic sea monsters with 70 foot tentacles wash up across Texas beaches"

 In other news....

Just kidding with the segue, here's the story at the Daily Mail, September 23:

Texas beaches have been invaded by a rare sea creature with giant tentacles that's looking to wipe out local jellyfish along the Gulf Coast.

The culprit is called the 'pink meanie' and it's actually another species of jellyfish that wasn't declared a new species until 2011.

In a video by the Harte Research Institute in Texas, Director of Community Engagement Jace Tunnell revealed that the pink meanies have flooded the Texas coast, searching for moon jellyfish to feed on.

Pink meanies, whose official scientific name is Drymonema larsoni, can weigh up to 50 pounds and have a collection of tentacles which grow to be 70 feet long.

Although Tunnell said they were first spotted in the Gulf around 25 years ago, their appearances on Texas beaches are pretty rare, and Tunnell added he had been looking for this species for nearly a year.

With their favorite food swimming into the warm waters of the Gulf this summer, sightings have spiked, with Tunnell noting he's discovered over 10 of these giant jellies in a just a 10-miles stretch of US beaches.

Others on social media added they've seen even more giant pink meanies in the ocean, including one man on Facebook claiming to see 30 to 40 a few hundred miles south of Galveston this month....

....MUCH MORE 

As amateur scribblers we are adherents of the WaPo's Joel Aschenbach's dictum:

...When in doubt, go with the most hysterical headline.

(Rule one of blogging is that the End Of The World will be good for page views.)

Joel Achenbach, Washington Post
-World War Five

Okay kids, gather round. Tonight we're going to tell the tale of the Pink Meanies...

"OpenAI in talks to lease Nvidia chips instead of buying them, Information says"

 Okay, this is getting weird. Not just the leasing which is less profitable for Nvidia but the term of the lease which is being mooted at four or five years, longer than the economic life of the chips.

A quick hit from TipRanks, September 23: 

Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI and Nvidia (NVDA) are in talks over an unusual way to structure their new AI data center partnership, under which the ChatGPT maker would lease Nvidia’s AI chips rather than purchase them, The Information’s Anissa Gardizy and Sri Muppidi report, citing two people who spoke to executives at the companies about it.

That's it, that's all we have since dropping The Information subscription. 

Nvidia seems to be getting creative in how it deals with customers, here's Tom's Hardware on a different deal, September 5, referring once again to The Information:

Nvidia signs $1.5 billion deal with cloud startup Lambda to rent back its own AI chips — 18,000 GPUs will be leased over 4 years, as Lambda gears up for its IPO
Details are fuzzy.

Nvidia, the company powering essentially the entire AI boom, is now looking to rent back its own chips. According to The Information, Nvidia has now signed a deal with Lambda, a cloud service provider in which it has already invested, to lease back some of its own GPUs over a period of time.

The details of the purported agreement are unclear, but reports suggest a four-year lease for 10,000 GPUs, valued at approximately $1.3 billion, followed by a separate $200 million deal for an additional 8,000 (likely lower-end/older) chips. These are Nvidia GPU servers that Lambda once bought from the company, and now the chipmaker wants to rent these back. This contract will make Nvidia, by far, the biggest client under Lambda's belt....

....MUCH MORE 

Both these stories tie back to something we were thinking earlier today:

"Nvidia Stock Pulls Back From Record High. Wall Street Has Questions About OpenAI Deal." (NVDA)

Besides the whole ouroboros thing with Nvidia investing money that will come back to Nvidia as chip sales. Something we pointed out in November 2024's "Nvidia Reportedly Weighing Investment in Musk’s xAI" (NVDA; ELON): 

Although the A.I. biz is not yet incestuous it does have a bit of an ouroboros vibe to it....

—from 2018's Unicorns Backing Their Own VCs? Welcome to Peak Tech

Something that Bernstein is also addressing. From Bloomberg via The Edge, Singapore, September 24:

Nvidia’s massive OpenAI deal fuels ‘circular’ financing concerns

Three years after OpenAI and Nvidia Corp helped kick off the global artificial intelligence frenzy, the two firms are joining forces to pave the way for a more costly phase of development with a deal that’s quickly revived fears of an AI bubble.

Nvidia on Monday said it will invest as much as US$100 billion in OpenAI to help the ChatGPT maker support a massive build-out of data centres equipped with Nvidia’s chips – a deal that some analysts say raises questions about whether Nvidia is investing heavily to prop up the market and keep companies spending on its products.

“The action will clearly fuel ‘circular’ concerns,” Stacy Rasgon, an analyst with Bernstein Research, wrote in an investor note after the deal was announced.

Those concerns have followed Nvidia, to varying degrees, for much of the AI boom. The chipmaker participated in more than 50 different venture investment deals for AI companies in 2024, and is on pace to top that number this year, according to data from PitchBook. Some of these companies, which include AI model makers and cloud providers, then use that capital to buy Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units.

But the size of the OpenAI investment “appears to dwarf all the others,” Rasgon said. The deal will “likely fuel these worries much hotter than what we have seen previously, and (perhaps justifiably) raise concerns over the rationale behind the action,” Rasgon wrote. Nvidia has said the investment in OpenAI will not be used for any “direct purchases” of Nvidia products, Rasgon added.

Other large tech companies, including Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc, have also made strategic investments in top AI startups intended to drive business to their cloud computing offerings. But Nvidia occupies a unique spot in the AI ecosystem by dominating the market for advanced chips that are essential for training cutting-edge AI models....

....MUCH MORE 

Super Typhoon Ragasa Bears Down On Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Two from the South China Morning Post, September 23:

Shenzhen scrambles as Super Typhoon Ragasa nears China’s tech hub: ‘wartime readiness’

Storm’s approach sees demand for supplies surge, inundating important delivery services, after southern Chinese city put on highest alert

As Super Typhoon Ragasa barrels down on southern China, the country’s tech and manufacturing hub has gone into emergency lockdown mode.

With the highest alert level declared, officials in Shenzhen – the southern manufacturing powerhouse with a reputation as China’s Silicon Valley – sounded the alarm for “wartime readiness”.

Residents responded by scrambling to stockpile supplies, boarding up or taping windows, and bracing for what forecasters are saying could be one of the most ferocious storms to hit the region in years.

Amid the rush, online delivery platforms struggled to keep up, inundated by orders from anxious residents keen on securing sufficient food, water and daily necessities to wait out the storm and its potential aftermath.

A staff member with delivery service provider Meituan’s online-to-offline Xiaoxiang Supermarket told the Post: “We’re still working through a huge backlog of orders and don’t know when we’ll be able to finish packing them – there are just too many.”

Doris Yin, a 24-year-old originally from the inland Chinese city of Chengdu, now working at a tech start-up in Shenzhen, said she planned to stockpile food on Sunday but regretted not acting fast enough.

“I have never experienced a typhoon in my life,” she said, adding that she “started to feel anxious” when a colleague told her how fast the supermarkets were being cleared out.

On Tuesday morning, she tried to buy fresh vegetables through delivery platforms. Freshippo – a hi-tech grocery chain owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba – was the only nearby option still with stock, but it was unable to fulfil her order due to surging demand. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

“My friends told me that the stock in supermarkets like Freshippo offered the best hope, but the online orders were so overwhelming that there weren’t enough delivery workers,” Yin said.

Yin resigned herself to not getting any fresh vegetables and instead bought fruit and tofu from another online supermarket, though she remained worried that the impending storm could still result in her order being cancelled.

Ragasa was projected to make landfall in Guangdong province on Wednesday, but the wave of stockpiling had already begun surging on Monday.

Also on Monday, during a meeting chaired by Shenzhen Party Secretary Meng Fanli, he instructed city officials to “enter a state of full emergency preparedness and wartime readiness, and take the initiative in the fight”....

 

....MUCH MORE  

And "When a typhoon hits HONG KONG":

By Brian Wang, Carlos Araujo, Catherine Ma, Davies Christian Surya, Jiang Chuqin, Joe Lo, Kaliz Lee, Rocio Marquez and Victor Sanjinez
Published September 23, 2025

....MUCH MORE

Total team coverage, it's a pretty big deal. 

From an earlier (Updated: 11:43pm, 22 Sep 2025) article at the SCMP:

...Ragasa, named after a Filipino word meaning rapid or fast motion, will be closest to the city on Wednesday morning, with the Observatory warning that the strength could be comparable with super typhoons Hato in 2017 and Mangkhut in 2018.

It is expected to bring hurricane-force winds with speeds of up to 230km/h (143mph) over the coming days, potentially breaking the record set in 2023 by Super Typhoon Saola, which had maximum sustained wind speeds of 210km/h....

As noted in this 2020 post: 

Shipping: "Typhoon could hit Port of Hong Kong this weekend"
Buy tape. The first rule of preparing for typhoons in Hong Kong is tape the glass.
We are talking a lot of tape.*

***

*Hong Kong has more skyscrapers than any other city in the world.
That's a lot of glass:

 

And in 2018's "Supertyphoon Mangkhut Downgraded To Severe Typhoon": 

....And here's the South China Morning Post's front page.
They're reporting that Hong Kong Has run out of tape for the windows....

And Andy Yeung via DesignBoom: