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1.	Nvidia May Backstop Up To 25% Of Projects From $500 Billion Alliance With Wall Street Giants By Phoebe Liu Source: The Information

A group of private equity giants has signed a preliminary agreement with Nvidia to raise $500 billion to help finance AI infrastructure, Nvidia said on Monday. The firms are Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR. The partnerships haven’t yet been finalized, per an Nvidia press release.

The goal of the partnership is to allow more AI companies to raise debt (and at lower interest rates) to buy more GPU server racks and build more data centers. Nvidia has the option to backstop up to 25% of the financing for any project that’s part of the new partnership, said a person close to the agreement.

It’s not known how the $500 billion might be split among the lenders or others, but Nvidia said it’s all “third-party capital.” While its exact role is unclear, Nvidia’s backstops could involve cosigning leases, promising to lease back land if a customer were to stop being able to pay, or buy back computing capacity at an agreed-upon base rate. Nvidia has used similar tools with customers including OpenAI and a number of neoclouds, The Information previously reported.

It’s also unclear whether the partnership would help with financing a 10-gigawatt data center in progress in Ohio, for which OpenAI could be a major tenant. That project could cost as much as $500 billion, and directly taking on OpenAI’s risk would be a hard sell for many of the largest private credit investors, one private credit executive said. He added that Nvidia’s strong balance sheet would help put them at ease.

Even though Nvidia generated nearly $50 billion in free cash flow last quarter, some investors have expressed worries about Nvidia’s credit risk in the last month or so—likely in part spurred by potential backstop discussions.

2.	Anthropic in New Datacenter Partnership With Macquarie, GIC By Alix Coutures Source: The Information

Anthropic, Australia’s Macquarie Asset Management and the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC said Monday they were launching a new entity to develop, operate and lease AI data centers for Anthropic to meet demand for its Claude models.

The group will initially focus on U.S. data centers but the parties will identify new sites as the project develops, the companies said. Funds managed by Macquarie and GIC will own the platform and fund the majority of the equity for each project. Anthropic will cover electricity price increases that consumers may face from such projects. The companies did not disclose the amount of money they are putting in or the timeline.

News of the new entity, called Theseus Infrastructure, comes as Anthropic is striving to bring on 10 gigawatts worth of computing power over the next several years, at a cost in the hundreds of billions, The Information reported in February.

Banks and institutional investors are rushing to finance AI, spending historic sums on data centers and the chips that go inside them. Also on Monday, Nvidia announced a partnership with several private equity giants to raise $500 billion to finance data centers and chip purchases.

3.	Meta to Open-Source Flagship Muse Spark 1.2 Model By Juro Osawa Source: The Information

Meta Platforms said it plans to release an open-weight version of its most advanced Muse Spark 1.2 model soon. The Facebook owner also announced a new small-size open-source model called Muse Glimmer that can run on personal computers.

Meta’s move could provide customers with alternatives to popular open-source models from China, especially appealing to certain U.S. customers that prefer U.S. models out of national security reasons.

The proprietary version of Muse Spark 1.2, released earlier this month, is currently ranked seventh—behind Anthropic and OpenAI’s frontier models as well as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Alibaba’s new open-source Qwen3.8 Max model—on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a comprehensive benchmark for AI models’ capabilities across math, science, coding and reasoning.

Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, said in a post on X that the new Muse Glimmer, despite its small size with 30 billion parameters, can operate as a fully capable agent, “just like much larger models.”

4.	Intel to Raise $15 Billion in a Stock Offering to Fund Expansion By Martin Peers Source: The Information

Intel is raising $15 billion in a public offering of its stock, taking advantage of the enormous improvement in investor sentiment it has enjoyed in the past year to raise money. Intel stock is up 175% over the past 12 months. Intel shares fell 4% Monday.

The iconic chip maker, which has lost its strong market position over the past few years to rivals such as TSMC and Nvidia, has shown signs of a nascent turnaround in recent months under a new  CEO, Lip-Bu Tan. It reported a 25% lift in second quarter revenue last month, which the company said was its strongest growth in 15 years, driven by 59% expansion of its Data Center and AI group.

Intel is benefiting from a shortage of central processing units that has emerged lately, reflecting growing use of CPUs in data centers alongside specialized AI chips. Intel retains a strong position in the CPU sector. The company has also developed a technique for chip packaging—assembly of different pieces of silicon into a single unit—that has even drawn attention of customers and its rival, TSMC.

The company said on Monday it would use the money to “pursue the growth opportunities ahead,” including in areas such as physical AI, “purpose built silicon” and “advantage packaging.”

The offering will add to a rising volume of U.S. stock sales, which are on track for a record this year. Bankers have been pitching big tech companies such as Intel on such sales, The Information previously reported.