News linked to this event type.
Brokerage firm TD Cowen lowered Sharplink's target price from $16 to $13, as it reduced its Ethereum price forecast for the end of 2026 to $2,371. However, TD Cowen still maintains a "Buy" rating on Sharplink, stating that the company recently completed a $75 million financing, purchased 10,000 ETH, and initiated a 2.13 million share buyback, indicating that its capital reserve execution continues to advance.
Odaily News: Investor Mark Cuban and "The Big Short" investor Michael Burry have recently issued warnings about valuation risks in Nvidia (NVDA) and AI stocks. Cuban stated on X that the current AI capital cycle bears similarities to the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, arguing that Nvidia is playing the role the IPO market did back then, fueling continuous capital inflows by supporting customers' purchases of AI chips.Burry, meanwhile, has focused on the rising cost of Nvidia's credit default swaps (CDS), noting that the scale of the "circular financing" driven by Nvidia is expanding. He believes that some AI demand relies on financing support, and future revenue may be built on complex capital cycles.Earlier, Nvidia's stock price fell approximately 5% in a single day, erasing about $250 billion in market value. The IMF and the Bank for International Settlements have also previously flagged potential systemic risks from AI circular financing. However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed such criticism as "absurd." (TheStreet)
According to TechFlow Research, UBS pointed out in its research report on July 29 that SK Hynix's stock price has fallen 52% from its high on June 22, with a current price-to-book ratio of only 1.66x, implying a long-term ROE of 18.9%. However, UBS predicts the average ROE from 2027 to 2031 will reach 40.2%, a difference of 21 percentage points between the two. DRAM bit demand growth is expected to increase from 22% in 2026 to 36% in 2027, HBM capacity will increase from 230,000 wafers/month at the end of 2026 to 270,000 wafers/month at the end of 2027, and SK Hynix will maintain a 48% shipment share in the HBM industry in 2026. UBS believes the market valuation downward revision lacks basis, AI agents are driving accelerated memory demand, 10 long-term agreements have been signed, and although LTAs suppress ASP in the short term, they benefit profit margins in the long term. UBS maintains a Buy rating, lowering the target price from 3.2 million Korean won to 3 million Korean won, expects to launch a share buyback of about 12 trillion Korean won in the second half of 2026, and will use 50% of free cash flow for shareholder returns in the long term.
Odaily News: AI hedge fund Situational Awareness, while facing margin pressure from lenders, had sought to sell some of its private company holdings to raise cash and reached out to institutions including Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks. However, after Situational Awareness reached a deal with Citadel to sell most of its public stock portfolio, the fund ultimately decided not to sell its private assets.Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks, and Situational Awareness all declined to comment. (Bloomberg)
Odaily News: AI hedge fund Situational Awareness has dropped approximately 67% since July, hit by a major pullback in AI stocks. In a letter to investors, fund founder Leopold Aschenbrenner said, "This month we let everyone down." Despite the severe drawdown in July, Situational Awareness is still up about 80% year-to-date. As of end of May, the fund's returns this year had reached approximately 270%.Previously reported, massive losses led Situational to sell a large portion of its public stock holdings to Ken Griffin's Citadel to raise cash and meet lender margin requirements. Additionally, the fund had previously planned to sell approximately $3.5 billion worth of Anthropic equity to a consortium of investors led by Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, but later withdrew from the deal. (WSJ)
According to Bloomberg, the South Korean government plans to inject 20 trillion won (approximately $13.9 billion) into the sovereign wealth fund Korea Investment Corporation (KIC), specifically for strategic investments in artificial intelligence, data centers, and infrastructure. This move marks the first time the fund has expanded its investment scope to domestic assets, against the backdrop of recent sharp declines in tech stocks. Funding sources include equity contributions from public institutions such as policy banks, with an initial scale of no less than 20 trillion won.
According to Bloomberg, Thailand's True Internet Data Center is seeking a loan equivalent to approximately US$2 billion to construct new data center facilities, aiming to assist Thailand in developing into a regional AI and cloud service hub. In terms of financing structure, the loan will be divided into three tranches, with approximately US$1.8 billion denominated in US dollars and the other two tranches denominated in Thai baht. Sources familiar with the matter requested anonymity, and details of the transaction have not been publicly disclosed.
According to The Defiant, Paris-based startup Kulipa suddenly ceased operations due to solvency issues, causing the simultaneous disruption of card projects for approximately 20 crypto wallets and fintech companies it served. Self-custody wallet Ready (formerly Argent) and Solana wallet Solflare were both affected, with user card services immediately disabled. Since both wallets utilize a self-custody architecture, funds are deducted from user wallets only at the time of spending, so user assets remained unaffected. Notably, Kulipa completed a $6.2 million seed funding round co-led by Flourish Ventures and 1kx in April this year, only about 4 months prior to its collapse.
According to TechCrunch, AI startup Simile announced the completion of a $200 million Series B funding round, reaching a valuation of $2 billion, just five months after its $100 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Greenoaks, with participation from Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, CVS Health Ventures, and others. Simile was founded by Stanford University PhD Joon Sung Park and focuses on providing simulated user services for marketing and product research, with CVS Health being one of its key clients.
According to Yonhap News Agency, AI cloud computing company CoreWeave was forced to make significant concessions in a $2.6 billion loan project collateralized by compute supply contracts with Anthropic due to sluggish investor demand: raising the annual yield on the loan to 9.1% and adding a "Cash Flow Lockbox" protection clause to ensure revenue generated from Anthropic contracts is prioritized for debt repayment, a clause that will remain in effect until 50% of the loan principal is repaid or the server utilization rate falls below a specific level. Following the adjustment of terms, subscription demand reversed rapidly—buy orders received on the morning of July 30 totaled as high as $9 billion, exceeding the target financing amount by more than three times. A CoreWeave spokesperson expressed satisfaction with the financing results, describing the term revision as a "natural process of introducing innovative financial structures in a volatile market environment."
Tokenized asset company Ondo Finance is evaluating a potential acquisition deal with a valuation range of $250 million to $500 million. Sources familiar with the matter revealed that the company has not yet appointed formal advisors and is considering expansion through mergers and acquisitions. Trading activity in the crypto sector remains active in 2026, with tokenization and institutional infrastructure being the acquisition directions that enterprises focus on when seeking to scale up.
Meta disclosed in its quarterly securities filing that it has approximately $278.99 billion in operating and finance leases that have not yet commenced and are not recorded on the balance sheet, primarily related to AI data centers. These leases cover data centers, colocation facilities, and some network infrastructure, with leases scheduled to begin from the remainder of this year through 2036, with terms ranging from over one year to 30 years.This figure represents an increase of about 53% compared to the $182.88 billion in future leasing obligations Meta disclosed in its first-quarter filing three months ago. Meta also disclosed that in July, after the quarter ended, the company added approximately $68 billion in new data center lease commitments, expected to commence in 2027 and 2028, with lease terms of 18 to 20 years.Earlier this month, Meta announced the expansion of its Hyperion AI data center in Louisiana, targeting a computing capacity of 5 gigawatts, with the project's expected cost exceeding $50 billion. During the second-quarter earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that a significant portion of the company's computing power will be used to train AI models, power AI agents, and support core business operations.In addition to future leasing obligations, Meta disclosed $349.31 billion in non-cancellable contract commitments, covering both short-term and long-term arrangements. The company stated that these commitments primarily involve third-party cloud capacity arrangements, as well as investments in servers, network infrastructure, data centers, and Reality Labs consumer hardware products. Of this amount, $53.52 billion and $81.65 billion are due in 2026 and 2027, respectively.
Apple will release its earnings report after the US stock market closes on Thursday. The market will focus on whether it can sustain its strong performance as a beneficiary of the "Anti-capex AI Trade." So far this year, Apple's stock price has risen by 24%, making it the best performer among the "Magnificent Seven" tech stocks, and it has repeatedly broken the $5 trillion market capitalization mark.Analysts suggest that investors are shifting towards Apple due to concerns about the returns on massive AI capital expenditures, as the company maintains relatively lower capital spending. However, Apple's current forward price-to-earnings ratio for the next 12 months has risen to about 35 times, the highest since 2008. Meanwhile, rising memory chip costs and pressure on profit margins may become key points of focus in this earnings report. (Bloomberg)
Aave 创始人 Stani 表示，近期对 Aave 上低采用率资产及网络的逐步收缩，不应被解读为对任何 L1 或 L2 的立场判断。此举主要是为了降低 Aave 在运营、技术及经济层面的风险敞口，从而将资源集中于更具影响力的重点方向，包括扩大现有高价值市场以及拓展证券融资业务。
BitcoinTreasuries.NET posted on X that Hyperscale Data GPUS announced the sale of 100 Bitcoins to fund the construction of its AI data center in Michigan. CEO William Horne stated that this is "converting one balance sheet asset into another" and clarified that its confidence in BTC remains unchanged. It ranks 44th in the Bitcoin 100 ranking.
MEXC, in collaboration with CoinGecko, has released the latest report "How Crypto Exchanges Are Reshaping Traditional Asset Trading," which provides an in-depth analysis of the rapid expansion of traditional financial assets on centralized crypto exchanges and the shift in global investor behavior.Key findings of the report:1. The TradFi (Traditional Finance) trading volume of six major centralized exchanges surged from $3.46 billion in January 2025 to $393.15 billion in June 2026, representing a growth of over 100 times. Among this, perpetual contracts accounted for 98.5% of the total trading volume in June 2026.2. In June 2026, US equities surpassed precious metals to become the largest TradFi asset class, with monthly trading volume increasing by 337.4% to $189.84 billion, capturing a 48.3% market share. Meanwhile, precious metals trading volume decreased by 48.2% from its March peak, falling to $122.59 billion.3. MEXC's TradFi monthly trading volume grew approximately 59 times, rising from $1.54 billion in November 2025 to $91.12 billion in May 2026. Between January and May 2026, MEXC maintained the second-largest market share among the six exchanges for five consecutive months.4. In precious metals trading, MEXC ranked first among the six exchanges for two consecutive months, with trading volumes reaching $72.12 billion and $85.15 billion in April and May 2026, respectively.5. Among native crypto users, 61.9% have begun trading traditional assets through crypto exchanges.6. Among users with traditional finance experience, 74.2% have transferred some or all of their traditional asset trading to crypto exchanges.7. Across all respondents, 83.3% indicated plans to further increase their scale of trading traditional assets on crypto exchanges.
According to TNW, AI security operations startup Mate Security announced the completion of a $35 million Series A funding round led by Canaan Partners, with participation from Insight Partners, Team8, and Microsoft's venture fund M12, bringing total funding to over $50 million. This comes less than a year after the company emerged from stealth mode. Mate Security was founded by former employees of Wiz and Microsoft. Its core product is the "Security Context Graph," which empowers AI security agents with business context by building an organizational knowledge layer, enabling them to make judgments based on actual enterprise operational conditions when handling alerts, effectively reducing false positive rates.
The Situational Awareness fund, managed by "AI Stock God" Leopold Aschenbrenner, accumulated a gain of 439% before June 2026. However, it suffered severe setbacks during the AI sector sell-off in July. The fund is currently communicating with existing investors and lenders to seek new capital and is offering some LPs the opportunity to purchase assets from its portfolio.Sources say this capital discussion appears more like an ad-hoc response than an organized new fundraising round. The fund had previously used leverage through prime brokers at several major investment banks to amplify its AI trading exposure, turning market drawdowns further into funding pressure.In a letter to investors on July 24, Aschenbrenner acknowledged that the fund failed to avoid this market shock, noting that Asian markets were particularly affected. However, he believes this sell-off could present the best buying opportunity since early 2025. He plans to open a window for new capital on August 1st and views Anthropic's potential IPO as a catalyst for the second half of the year.According to disclosures, some holdings saw significant declines in July. Oracle and AMD fell approximately 20% for the month, while Nebius, Saronic AI, Bloom Energy, Sandisk, and others saw even larger drops. The Nasdaq 100 index fell about 10% in July, and South Korea's Kospi index dropped by roughly one-third.Currently, lacking specific data on the fund's exact drawdown magnitude, it is difficult to determine whether this fundraising is a passive capital injection driven by leverage pressure or an active move to increase positions for an opportunity. However, market trends suggest it is closer to the former. If forced selling occurs, the deleveraging process could also create discount opportunities in assets whose fundamentals haven't materially changed.
According to Bloomberg, Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners CEO Mike Dorrell stated in an interview with Bloomberg Television on July 30 that banks, private equity, and capital markets currently show almost no signs of slowing down in supporting US AI infrastructure construction. However, he also warned, "You don't need to be a finance professional to see that this state cannot last forever," implying potential risks in the current financing boom.
According to Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs Group is gauging investor appetite for a potential $5.4 billion debt issuance plan, with the proceeds to be used to support the QTS data center project under Blackstone tied to Microsoft. The debt structure includes approximately $4.9 billion in secured bonds and approximately $500 million in term loans. Affected by recent sell-offs in AI-related debt, the issuance timing is still under discussion, and the plan remains uncertain.