Capital flow drill-down
Money in, revenue out: the full breakdown.
Issue 19 · Week 35 of 2026.
The four-category capital scorecard expanded with named transactions, burn-to-revenue context, and per-category trends across recent issues. Each row corresponds to a row in the summary table on the issue page.
Capital flow scorecard
Capital in, revenue out, burn ratio, and movement.
| Category | Capital in | Revenue out | Burn to revenue | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frontier LabsOpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI | ~$95BPrior ~$95B · Flat | ~$21BPrior ~$21B · Flat | ~4.5x | House rolling estimate (disclosed financing + public revenue proxies; category totals unchanged since W32 — no in-window lab equity raise and no in-window lab revenue disclosure, so both inputs hold). OpenAI Jalapeño disclosure and METR postmortem delay some frontier RL runs; GLM-5.3-Flash stealth demand (grade 3) signals token routing to cheap endpoints without changing disclosed lab capital. |
| Hyperscaler-HostedAzure-OpenAI, AWS-Anthropic, Google Cloud-Gemini, Oracle-OCI | ~$250BPrior ~$250B · Flat | ~$70BPrior ~$70B · Flat | ~3.6x | House rolling estimate, both inputs held from W32. S&P projected combined hyperscaler AI capex above $1.3T by 2027 with negative free operating cash flow through 2027 — a cumulative six-company projection through 2027 that does not map to a ledger delta this week, so the row does not move on it. AWS tripled NVIDIA GPU reservations to 2M units for 2027–2028; NVIDIA reported record Q2 FY2027 revenue of $96.2B (vendor-stated), neither of which is hyperscaler AI-revenue disclosure. |
| NeocloudsCoreWeave, Nscale, Crusoe, Lambda, Fluidstack, IREN | ~$25.5BPrior ~$24.6B · Up | ~$8BPrior ~$8B · Flat | ~3.2x | House rolling estimate, moved on one cited in-window credit event: $24.6B carried + Lambda's $926M term loan B ≈ $25.5B. Lambda closed the $926M Moody's Baa2 (investment-grade) senior secured term loan B at SOFR+300 for investment-grade offtaker deployment — first broadly syndicated IG TLB (term loan B) by a private neocloud per Lambda. Revenue proxy holds: no neocloud reported in-window. |
| On-Prem / HybridEnterprise GPU clusters, sovereign and national programs, Cisco / Dell / HPE | ~$103BPrior ~$103B · Flat | ~$38BPrior ~$38B · Flat | ~2.7x | House rolling estimate, both inputs held from W32. The in-window items are multi-year 'up to' commitments rather than booked capital: Schwarz Group up to €5.6B for 240MW by 2033 (~$6.1B), SK Horizon ~$2.1B closing Q1 2027, Emerald AI $150M — roughly $8.4B of announcements on horizons this ledger does not book in the quarter they are announced. IBM Granite 4.2 Apache 2.0 strengthens the on-prem agent stack without a capital line. |
Category
Frontier Labs.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI
- Capital in
- ~$95Bvs ~$95B · Flat
- Revenue out
- ~$21Bvs ~$21B · Flat
- Burn / rev
- ~4.5xLower means more capital out than in.
The read
Method: these category values follow the publication's capital-flow v2 rolling ledger — disclosed financing divided by public AI-revenue proxies — and are carried from W32 unless a cited in-window disclosure changes an input with a stated computation path; they are estimates, not audited totals. Labs shipped product without pricing new equity. OpenAI's Hugging Face incident quarantined IM1-class weights and delayed frontier RL training per its August 26 report — a schedule risk, not a disclosed financing event. Ox Alpha's community-reported token week (grade 3) suggests demand routes to low-list-price endpoints faster than labs can meter, which shows up in usage before annual recurring revenue (ARR) disclosures.
This week's transactions
| Date | Transaction | Amount | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 25 | OpenAI Jalapeño inference ASIC first benchmarks at Hot Chips — engineering-sample stage | Not disclosed | OpenAI |
| Aug 26 | METR/Redwood independent Hugging Face intrusion postmortem; OpenAI commits to 24/7 chain-of-thought monitoring | Not disclosed | METR |
| Aug 26 | Z.ai GLM-5.3-Flash MIT weights after Ox Alpha stealth — 20T+ OpenRouter tokens in six days | Not disclosed | Z.ai |
Trend across recent issues
- Capital in
- $95B, $95B, $95B, $95B, $95B, $95B, $95B, $95B
- Revenue out
- $21B, $21B, $21B, $21B, $21B, $21B, $21B, $21B
Category
Hyperscaler-Hosted.
Azure-OpenAI, AWS-Anthropic, Google Cloud-Gemini, Oracle-OCI
- Capital in
- ~$250Bvs ~$250B · Flat
- Revenue out
- ~$70Bvs ~$70B · Flat
- Burn / rev
- ~3.6xLower means more capital out than in.
The read
S&P's August 27 forecast puts structural negative FCF (free cash flow) on all six covered majors through 2027 with recovery not until 2029 — debt, leases, and SPVs (special-purpose vehicles) increasingly fund shells while application-layer revenue stays diffuse. It is a forward projection, not a booked input: no arithmetic path maps $1.3T-by-2027 onto this quarter's ledger, so the row holds. AWS's 2M GPU reservation is a 2027–2028 capacity queue position without disclosed financial terms, booked alongside Vera CPUs and federal AI-factory commitments in the same release. NVIDIA's earnings print resets the sector revenue denominator even as Jensen guided hyperscaler growth reacceleration to Q4 as Rubin supply grows.
This week's transactions
| Date | Transaction | Amount | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 26 | AWS and NVIDIA plan 2M additional Blackwell Ultra/Rubin/Rubin Ultra GPUs for 2027–2028; NVHBM with Annapurna Trainium4 | Not disclosed | NVIDIA Newsroom |
| Aug 26 | NVIDIA Q2 FY2027 revenue $96.2B (+106% YoY); datacenter $89.0B; Q3 guide $108B | Not disclosed | NVIDIA |
| Aug 27 | S&P Global Ratings: combined hyperscaler AI capex to exceed $1.3T by 2027; negative FCF through 2027 | Not disclosed | S&P Global Ratings |
Trend across recent issues
- Capital in
- $187B, $210B, $230B, $250B, $250B, $250B, $250B, $250B
- Revenue out
- $62B, $62B, $62B, $70B, $70B, $70B, $70B, $70B
Category
Neoclouds.
CoreWeave, Nscale, Crusoe, Lambda, Fluidstack, IREN
- Capital in
- ~$25.5Bvs ~$24.6B · Up
- Revenue out
- ~$8Bvs ~$8B · Flat
- Burn / rev
- ~3.2xLower means more capital out than in.
The read
Neocloud credit bifurcates: Lambda prices structured offtake-backed debt at IG (investment-grade) spreads while equity stories de-rate elsewhere. The TLB (term loan B — institutional floating-rate debt sold to non-bank lenders) matures December 31, 2030 on a fully amortizing schedule at 99.5 issue price. CoreWeave's Vera Rubin production deep-dive reinforces operational-software moat separate from NVIDIA benchmark slides — backlog conversion remains the category lever ahead of Q3 filing.
This week's transactions
| Date | Transaction | Amount | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 27 | Lambda closes $926M Baa2-rated senior secured term loan B at SOFR+3.00%, maturing Dec 31, 2030 | $926M | Lambda |
| Aug 25 | CoreWeave Vera Rubin NVL72 production networking deep dive — multi-rail Spectrum-X RoCE at 1.6 Tb/s per GPU | Not disclosed | CoreWeave |
| Aug 25 | SCX.ai partners with DDN for sovereign inferencing at Equinix SY5 — A$6.5M contracted ARR as of July 31 | Not disclosed | PR Newswire |
Trend across recent issues
- Capital in
- $13.5B, $17B, $17B, $17B, $17B, $19.6B, $24.6B, $25.5B
- Revenue out
- $5B, $5B, $5B, $5B, $5B, $8B, $8B, $8B
Category
On-Prem / Hybrid.
Enterprise GPU clusters, sovereign and national programs, Cisco / Dell / HPE
- Capital in
- ~$103Bvs ~$103B · Flat
- Revenue out
- ~$38Bvs ~$38B · Flat
- Burn / rev
- ~2.7xLower means more capital out than in.
The read
Sovereign and enterprise on-prem announcements accelerated while Hot Chips dominated headlines; the ledger holds because the announcements are multi-year ceilings, not this-quarter capital. IBM Granite 4.2 gives regulated buyers an Apache 2.0 agent path that does not require a neocloud contract; Schwarz's €5.6B Dummerstorf commitment and Emerald AI's NVIDIA/Siemens/GE Vernova backing signal sovereign shells and grid-flex software as financed categories. Navitas VPD/IVR SAM-multiple arithmetic lives in houseMeasurement — not repeated here.
This week's transactions
| Date | Transaction | Amount | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 27 | Schwarz Group up to €5.6B for 240MW sovereign data center at Dummerstorf, Germany by 2033 | Not disclosed | Schwarz Group (ANSA) |
| Aug 25 | Emerald AI $150M Series A at $1.05B valuation for grid-flexible load orchestration | Not disclosed | Emerald AI |
| Aug 25 | IBM Granite 4.2 and Granite Speech 5.0 Turbo — Apache 2.0 on-prem agent and ASR stack | Not disclosed | IBM Research |
Trend across recent issues
- Capital in
- $94.5B, $101B, $101B, $101B, $101B, $103B, $103B, $103B
- Revenue out
- $36B, $36B, $36B, $36B, $36B, $38B, $38B, $38B