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H100 Prices Surge 22%, SoftBank's $11B Bond & Intel Foundry Reality Check
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
H100 GPU rental prices jumped 22% in a single month as AMD crossed the trillion-dollar threshold and Intel's foundry still bleeds $2.1B in quarterly losses. Today's briefing unpacks compute scarcity, chip smuggling enforcement, and TSMC's Taiwan ecosystem bet.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
AMD crossed one trillion dollars in market capitalisation on Monday. Shares climbed nine percent to six hundred thirteen dollars and ninety-two cents, and for the first time AMD joined Nvidia and a handful of others in the most exclusive tier of public markets.
Intel's rebound tells a more complicated story. Shares climbed seven percent to one hundred nineteen dollars and fifty cents, driven by analyst price-target raises citing Xeon demand, Intel's eighteen-A process progress, and early discussions around a potential SK Hynix partnership.
Back to AMD. The durability question is whether its competitive moat holds if Intel successfully closes the foundry gap or partners its way into better manufacturing.
One data point that cuts across the entire valuation story: H100 GPU rental prices jumped twenty-two percent in a single month. Prior-generation chips are supposed to get cheaper as newer models arrive.
SoftBank launched an eleven-billion-dollar junk bond offering to fund its OpenAI investment. Largest single-company speculative-grade bond issuance ever.
TSMC broke ground on a technology validation lab and talent centre in Taiwan's Baipu Industrial Park. Operational target is the fourth quarter of twenty twenty-nine.
The through-line across all of this is straightforward. AI spending is large enough to lift multiple companies at once, but the capital requirements, the compute scarcity, and the geopolitical friction are all intensifying simultaneously.
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