AIWatch.

Nine months ago, on September 10, 2025 Oracle announced what seemed to many to be the deal of the century! A $300 billion deal with OpenAI.

The market went wild. Oracle stock briefly went up by 43% (and ultimately even a bit higher). Larry Ellison’s net worth briefly leapt by $100 billion. The Wall St. Journal gushed:

The whole thing never made sense though. The next morning, inn an essay called Peak Bubble I warned that

Yet Oracle continued to rise!

But not for long. Its stock stood at $307 per share at the close of trading on September 10, and briefly closed as high as $328 ten days later. Now, as I write this, it’s hovering around $120.

In the intervening nine months, the market has grown wary of all this circular financing stuff. Mocking illustrations like this one (from yesterday) have become widespread:

permabera@Minointerista

@MikeZaccardi it's mostly circular accounting tricks, there are no fucking earnings m8

8:11 PM · Jul 26, 2026 · 777 Views

4 Replies · 20 Likes

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All of which brings me to the present. Yesterday, news broke that Nvidia is considering offering a $250 billion backstop for an OpenAI-led data center. Which led last night to considerable skepticism

James Chanos@RealJimChanos

So we are at the point in the cycle where $NVDA has to provide financing guarantees for roughly 2/3rds of the cost of the chips it is selling to the data center project…?! Lol, ok.

The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter

BREAKING: Nvidia is in talks with OpenAI to guarantee $250 billion in financing for a data center in Ohio. Details include: 1. The guarantees from Nvidia would help OpenAI lease a 10GW project that SoftBank is developing in Ohio 2. In total, the project could cost more than

2:36 AM · Jul 27, 2026 · 151K Views

94 Replies · 188 Reposts · 1.38K Likes

and this morning led to a dramatically different reaction from the market, nothing like the bounce like Oracle had back in September. Instead, in the first couple hours of trading Nvidia is down over 4.5%:

The market isn’t reading the latest potential Nvidia-OpenAI deal as good news; they are reading it as desperation. As one investor put it to me in an email this morning, “[the deal] seems incredibly desperate by both parties. Two drunks leaning on each other to stand up.”

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Meanwhile, Apple, the butt of jokes for a while because “it didn’t invest in enough AI” just overtook Nvidia

and SpaceX, which tried to position itself as an AI company is in free fall, dropping over 3% today, and by over 25% in the last month, more than 50% from its June high of 225:

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Meanwhile, creditors are getting pretty leery of the whole thing, too, as Axios just reported:

And then there’s all the off-balance-sheet financing that is coming to light. And the sudden need for so-called “creative financing”. If that’s not a warning sign, I don’t know what is.

The GenAI boom hasn’t been sustained by profits; it has been sustained by hope and circular financing. That may no longer be enough.

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