Friday, October 23, 2026 · 5 min read
Together with
Meta's own filing shows $825 billion of future bills for data centres and AI computing. Its shares fell 7% on Thursday, and most of the AI trade went down with them.
OpenAI is raising $30 billion at a lower price than it asked for a month ago. One of Anthropic's security chiefs says the hacking is about to get worse.
Let Meerkat explain.
Meta's $825 billion tab
OpenAI marks itself down
AI's bond pile, in one chart
The Fed, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon next week
SCOREBOARD
NVIDIA | MICROSOFT | ALPHABET |
META | AMAZON | ORACLE |
S&P 500 | NASDAQ | VIX |
Thursday close. S&P down 1.2%, with Meta, Amazon and Nvidia among the biggest fallers. On the week: Nvidia −2.3%, S&P −1.0%, Nasdaq −2.6%. Prices via CNBC.
ON WATCH
Meta's $825 billion tab
The S&P 500 fell 1.2% on Thursday, and Meta led the slide with a 7% drop. The Nasdaq lost 2.6%, and chip-equipment maker Lam Research fell almost 12% after a forecast that disappointed.
The trigger was Meta's own quarterly filing. It shows $825 billion of future leases and contracts, mostly for data centres and AI computing, up from about $700 billion in July.
That's $454.5 billion of cloud and other contracts plus $355.7 billion of data-centre leases that haven't started yet. Some begin as late as 2036 and run for up to 30 years.
The total is more than three years of Meta's sales at this quarter's pace. In the quarter itself, its building bill of $34.9 billion was bigger than the cash its business brought in.
The cost of insuring Meta's debt against default hit a record on Thursday, according to Markit data. The same gauge rose for Oracle, Microsoft and Broadcom.
The case against the panic is that the business underneath still throws off cash: $32.8 billion in three months, about $131 billion a year at that pace. And the bills are spread over leases that run for decades.
MEERKAT'S TAKE: Thirty years of rent is a big promise for anyone. Meta's betting that AI will pay it, and Meerkat would like to see a bit more of that AI income before the leases start.
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THE MACHINE
OpenAI marks itself down
OpenAI is close to raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, CNBC reported on Thursday. A month ago, Bloomberg said it was asking $1.4 trillion.
Let Meerkat translate. That's about $150 billion off its own asking price in a few weeks, in the same week investors sold AI stocks.
Coatue and investors from the UAE are leading, and the UAE money could come with a deal for more computing power. The round is a bridge to a stock-market listing, after OpenAI filed confidential paperwork in June.
Terms are still being negotiated and could change, and OpenAI declined to comment. Anthropic, its rival, is reportedly aiming for $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion when it lists.
To be fair, $1.25 trillion is still about 47% more than the $852 billion OpenAI was valued at in March. It'd also make OpenAI the most valuable private company ever.
QUICK PAUSE. WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? When OpenAI lists, this round is the last private price before ordinary buyers get theirs. That price slipped $150 billion in a month, and the terms still aren't signed.
SOMEONE SMART SAID
As bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
Clinton is one of Anthropic's top security people, and he posted this on X on Thursday, after a week of emergency fixes. He didn't say which incidents he meant.
He told security bosses to go to their boards and ask for help now, "not for AI, for the basics." He says they'll need to hold on for about 18 months.
He also warned of a coming "vulnerability tsunami" that could leave power and water operators without time to patch, and wants sensitive networks cut off from the outside world. He thinks the bug-finding skill of today's top models will reach small, cheap ones within those 18 months.
THE CHART
AI's borrowing moves into bonds
Outstanding data-centre ABS and CMBS ($bn), Barclays via SFA Research, 2020 to 2026 so far
Bonds backed by data centres barely existed six years ago. Barclays counts $61 billion outstanding this year, up from $4 billion in 2020, as builders refinance their construction loans.
They're getting dearer. Barclays' Elana Lipchak says these bonds now move with "all the debt supply on the AI infrastructure trade," and in September they paid 1.5 percentage points over five-year Treasuries, 0.16 points more than a year earlier.
Set against that, the bonds backed by the buildings have held up better than the companies' own debt. Spreads on the big cloud firms' corporate bonds widened 0.31 points over the same year, almost twice as much.
WHAT TO WATCH: If Alphabet and Microsoft lift their spending plans on 28 October, watch the cost of insuring their debt the next morning. If it jumps the way Meta's did, the AI builders are paying more to borrow, not just Meta.
HEADS UP
OpenAI's leak suspicion now has a name · The WSJ says OpenAI suspected its three fired safety researchers of leaking model designs to researcher Ryan Greenblatt, partly via disappearing Signal chats. They dispute OpenAI's account.
SK Hynix shelved a US listing · The memory-chip maker stopped preparing a US stock-market listing for its Solidigm unit, citing market conditions, as chip stocks slid this week.
Etsy banned AI-made recipes and patterns · Sellers also can't post listings generated by bots with no human involved, under clearer AI rules Etsy set out on Thursday.
Claude wrote crash-proofs for 123 libraries · Anthropic says Claude proved, on its own, that some open-source programs can't crash under set conditions. Checking one operating system kernel once took 20 person-years.
AI agents left alone on an island started playing · MIT researchers left 13 Claude-based agents on a virtual island for 30 hours. The ones that played later beat identical agents that hadn't.
ON THE HORIZON
When (ET) | What |
|---|---|
Tue 27 Oct | Fed meeting begins |
Wed 28 Oct · 2:00pm | Fed decision, press conference at 2:30pm (Fed calendar) |
Wed 28 Oct · after close | Alphabet and Microsoft quarterly results |
Thu 29 Oct · after close | Amazon quarterly results |
Fri 6 Nov | Preliminary hearing in the case of the former OpenAI engineer accused of bugging a conference room |
MEERKAT ON YOUTUBE
The Education System Is Losing To AI! A lab wired up students' heads while they wrote with an AI, and minutes later most couldn't quote a line of the essay they'd just handed in. Meerkat asks what the shortcut is taking out of a mind. Watch on Meerkat Explains.
THE BURROW
Quick vote. Meta has signed up for $825 billion of future bills for data centres and AI computing. What do you make of it?
Meta has signed up for $825 billion of future bills for data centres and AI computing. What do you make of it?
Trivia. In March 2000, the company that sold the networking gear behind the internet briefly became the most valuable in the world. Which company was it? Answer's at the bottom of the email. No peeking.
ALSO WORTH YOUR INBOX
The daily crypto brief from the same burrow. Crypto Nutshell is Bitcoin, the news and the numbers in a five-minute read.
HOW DID WE DO?
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Back Monday at 6:30. The Fed and three of the biggest AI spenders all report next week.
Forward this to whoever in the family chat still thinks AI is free money.
Meerkat is not a financial adviser, and nothing here is advice. Meerkat is a small animal with a whiteboard and a gym membership it can't cancel until 2036. Please do not sue Meerkat.
TRIVIA ANSWER
Cisco. It was briefly worth more than any other company in March 2000, then lost more than 80% of its value in the dot-com bust. More on Cisco.