TechFlow Intelligence: SpaceX Takes on $40 Billion in Debt to Buy GPUs; Ripple Finally Wins U.S. National Trust Bank Charter

AI / Large Models

Anthropic Officially Files for Nasdaq IPO Under Ticker 'ANT'

The prospectus shows revenue reached $16.3 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2026, compared with only $1.2 billion in the same period last year, while net losses reached $80.7 billion. Customers generating annual revenue above $100,000 increased from 950 to 11,900.

> Hot take: Revenue grew 13x in a year, and losses exceeded the GDP of many countries—in AI, the more you earn, the more you burn.

Source:Jin10 Data | SEC Filings

Anthropic Commits Up to $120.5 Billion Over Five Years to Purchase Compute from SpaceX AI

This compute procurement agreement is tied to SpaceX's GPU infrastructure, with Nvidia chips as the primary beneficiary. Wall Street banks and Blackstone have lined up to provide $63 billion in financing to support Broadcom supplying AI chips to Anthropic.

Source:Reuters

Meta Expands Deployment of Nvidia Vera Rubin Chips and Invests $3 Billion to Participate in Meta's Equity Offering

The Nvidia-Meta relationship deepens further as the Vera Rubin platform, Spectrum-X networking, and Bluefield-4 DPUs are fully rolled out. The trend of the two companies being each other's largest customer and supplier is becoming increasingly clear.

Source:Nvidia

Circle Faces Up to 20% Revenue Risk from AI Agents; Mizuho Cuts Price Target

Investment bank Mizuho believes AI agents could bypass Circle's stablecoin services and use other settlement methods directly. USDC's intermediary role in payment scenarios may be eroded by AI-native payment protocols.

Source:The Block

Crypto / Web3

Ripple Receives Final OCC Approval to Establish U.S. National Trust Bank

Ripple will manage $2.5 billion in RLUSD reserves, bringing RLUSD formally under the federal regulatory framework. This is the first U.S. national trust bank charter received by a crypto company, and XRP rose in response.

> Hot take: After five years of litigation with the SEC, Ripple has used a bank charter to turn regulation into its moat.

Source:Bloomberg | The Block

Akash Network Approves Proposal to Migrate to Solana with 98% Approval

Decentralized cloud computing network Akash will migrate from the Cosmos chain to Solana, and the AKT token will be reissued in SPL format. This is a major loss for the Cosmos ecosystem and another win for the Solana DePIN narrative.

Source:ZetaChain

Morpho On-Chain Loans Grow by $1.62 Billion in 90 Days, Total Size Reaches $5.73 Billion

Coinbase, Robinhood, and Société Générale are all building services on Morpho. On-chain credit is moving from an experiment to real infrastructure, with traditional financial institutions beginning to rely on DeFi protocols.

Source:KaiaChain

Chainlink and Anchorage Launch CustodySync to Connect Assets Held in Custody with DeFi Lending

For the first time, qualified custodians can allow clients to participate in DeFi lending without assets leaving custody. Of the approximately $700 billion in digital assets held in custody, less than 0.5% has entered DeFi, leaving enormous potential.

Source:Chainlink

Upbit in South Korea Lists KRW Trading Pair for NIL Token

NIL has a market cap of about $51.1 million, marking the first exposure of Upbit's KRW market to the asset. Listings by Korean exchanges typically have a significant impact on short-term liquidity and price.

Source:bwenews

Chips / Hardware

Musk Says SpaceX Is Borrowing $40 Billion to Buy GPUs

The aerospace company is making a large bet on compute, with demand for GPUs from SpaceX's Starlink and AI businesses surging. This $40 billion of debt corresponds to the compute supply agreement between SpaceX AI and Anthropic.

> Spicy take: Musk is launching rockets while buying GPUs; SpaceX is becoming a compute cloud provider disguised as an aerospace company.

Source:Zhihu

Goldman Sachs: Semiconductors now exert far greater influence on financial markets than oil

The AI chip cycle is driving global market sentiment, with earnings and capacity data from TSMC, SK hynix, and Samsung moving stock indices more than OPEC decisions. The combined market capitalization of the four memory giants has exceeded $2 trillion, and amid soaring profits the market is beginning to worry that AI capex is peaking.

Source:Cailian Press

TSMC plans to raise advanced packaging prices by up to 20%

Capacity for AI chip packaging such as CoWoS is in short supply, and the price increase will directly push up costs for chips from Nvidia, AMD, and others. Advanced packaging has become the most critical bottleneck in AI compute.

Source:Cailian Press

Tech Companies

Apple launches iPad mini 8, first with OLED screen, starting at RMB 5499

The iPad mini line receives its biggest upgrade in years; the OLED panel is actually capable of 120Hz refresh rate but is locked to 60Hz. Users are again unhappy with Apple's old practice of artificially limiting hardware capabilities in entry-level products.

Source:Zhihu | IT Home

Apple says many customers have canceled iPhone Duo orders

The iPhone Duo has seen a wave of order cancellations after launch, with specific reasons related to early supply channel confusion and price positioning. Apple made a rare public acknowledgment of an abnormal cancellation rate, and investors are beginning to reassess demand for the product.

Source:Zhihu

US Stocks

Pop Mart Q3 overall revenue down 45%-50% YoY, Americas down as much as 75%

The blind-box giant is under broad pressure in overseas markets, with the Americas market nearly halving and then halving again. Pop Mart had previously been seen as a benchmark for Chinese consumer brands going global, and this data has significantly weighed on sentiment for China-consumer stocks.

Source:Wall Street CN

Finance / Macro

Multiple universities in Jiangsu will pay salaries in digital yuan

The digital yuan is moving from retail testing into institutional payroll scenarios, meaning the central bank digital currency is being embedded into real fund flows. The key difference from paying salaries via bank cards is that the payment path runs entirely through the central bank system, without third-party clearing.

> Spicy take: University teachers receive salaries in digital yuan while students pay tuition with Alipay—the monetary systems of two generations are parting ways on the same campus.

Source:Zhihu

Memory giants' earnings week begins, Goldman Sachs warns of AI capex peaking risk

The combined market capitalization of four memory giants including SK hynix has exceeded $2 trillion, and soaring profits are now obvious. But the market is beginning to worry that cloud vendors' pace of AI chip procurement is slowing, and discussions about the memory cycle peaking are heating up.

Source:Cailian Press

OSMO token inflation hits zero, staking rewards now fully funded by protocol revenue

The Osmosis community passed a proposal with 91.1% approval, reducing the daily new minting of 91,324 OSMO to zero. This is an important experiment in PoS chains shifting from subsidy-driven to revenue-driven models.

Source:Osmosis

Today's Undercurrent

AI companies are no longer satisfied with renting compute—Anthropic is spending $120.5 billion over five years to tie up with SpaceX AI, while SpaceX is borrowing $40 billion to buy GPUs, and Wall Street is providing another $63 billion in financing for the deal. Money flows from capital markets to AI companies, then to compute suppliers, and finally becomes chip orders and memory profits. Meanwhile, Ripple obtaining a banking license and Jiangsu universities paying salaries in digital yuan show that the digital transformation of the monetary system is also progressing in parallel. The two threads intersect at the same node: AI is devouring capital from the physical world, while crypto is rebuilding the foundation of the financial world. Pop Mart's collapse in the Americas is just a reminder that not all genuine demand from going global can withstand cycle testing.

Source: Shenchao TechFlow