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🍋 Wall Street Builds Nvidia's Bank

🍋 Wall Street Builds Nvidia's Bank

Plus: Ackman's janitor is a millionaire, Blackstone is buying into a struggling airline's loyalty program, and Zuckerberg wrote 6,500 words about AI.

Short Squeez
August 11, 2026

Together With

“The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year does.” — Hemant Mohapatra

Good Morning! Bill Ackman says all 48 employees at his hedge fund, including janitors and receptionists, own millions in company stock. Rush coaches specializing in SEC schools like Alabama, Auburn, and Ole Miss are charging $6,500, with strong demand from out-of-state students in the Northeast. And Blackstone is nearing a $2 billion stake in Air Canada's points program at a time when the airline is expected to announce an 85% drop in net profit.

JPMorgan hiked its year-end S&P 500 target from 7,800 to 8,000 as AI spending starts paying off. Blackstone-owned Safe Harbor agreed to a $1.5 billion deal to buy MarineMax. And Zuckerberg dropped a 6,500-word manifesto on AI.

Plus: BlackRock signed a deal with labor unions for AI construction jobs, Boeing is folding its flying-taxi venture into rival Archer Aviation, and private equity firms are sitting on nearly 34,000 unsold companies.

Every deal deserves the same level of front-end diligence that the big deals get. Learn more about how your firm can enhance their commercial due diligence.

SQUEEZ OF THE DAY

Wall Street Builds the Bank of Nvidia

Nvidia has spent the entire AI boom selling companies ridiculously expensive chips. Now the most important company in the world has brought in the biggest names on Wall Street to help those same companies afford them.

Nvidia is partnering with Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to build financing platforms that could eventually mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure. Jensen Huang says he only approached those six firms, and every single one said yes. If it plays out at full size, this becomes one of the largest coordinated private financing efforts Wall Street has ever attempted, though it's not a $500 billion check landing tomorrow. It's a series of dedicated capital pools built to finance Nvidia's customers over the next several years.

Nvidia wants to turn compute itself into an investable asset class, with the biggest players in private capital providing debt and financing against GPUs, data centers, and the cash flows they generate. Apollo's president called modern compute a "mission-critical asset class" and Larry Fink said the debt could offer attractive yields and strong credit quality to investors already loaded up on equities. In other words, Wall Street is looking at a rack of GPUs and seeing a toll booth.

There's a very obvious reason Apollo, KKR and Blackstone all want in on this. The AI buildout is expected to need trillions of dollars for chips, data centers, and power infrastructure, way more than Silicon Valley can cover on corporate balance sheets alone.

And here's the genius part for Nvidia specifically. Every dollar that Apollo, KKR or Blackstone hands to an AI lab, cloud company or enterprise customer is another dollar that customer can use to buy more Nvidia hardware, without Nvidia ever putting its own balance sheet at risk. That money comes from third-party investors, not Nvidia itself. It gets to be the picks-and-shovels seller and let Wall Street handle the financing side entirely.

That's also where it gets a little uncomfortable. Nvidia sells the chips, helps its customers find the money to buy them, and in some cases has talked about backstopping that money itself. None of this means the AI boom is about to blow up, but it does mean the whole stack is becoming deeply interconnected. If one massive AI customer eventually can't generate enough revenue to justify all this infrastructure, the fallout wouldn't stay contained to that one company and could ripple straight through the chip supplier, the data center owner, and every credit investor who financed the buildout underneath them.

Takeaway: Nvidia already runs the AI boom as the dominant chip supplier. Now it's got Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman and KKR lining up to fund the buildout too, which is either brilliant risk distribution or the beginning of one very tightly wound feedback loop. The same six firms writing the checks to buy Nvidia's chips are also the ones underwriting the debt behind those same chips, and everyone gets paid as long as the AI factories keep humming. Nobody's really asked yet what happens to that $500 billion the day one of them doesn't.

PRESENTED BY DILIGENCESQUARED

Five of the Ten Largest PE Funds Use the Same New CDD Firm

DiligenceSquared is what happens when two former Principals, one from Blackstone’s PE team and one from BCG, decide the consulting model they grew up in deserves a rebuild. Their firm delivers investment-grade market research and commercial due diligence, with both senior ex-MBB consultants leading every engagement (and signing off on every finding) and AI agents gathering evidence at a scale no human team could staff.

The work runs the whole deal funnel: industry assessment, market sizing, competitive landscape, voice of customer, and live-deal diligence. DiligenceSquared’s reports land in one to two weeks, make every claim clickable back to the evidence behind it, and they do it at a fraction of what the big three charge.

Five of the ten largest PE funds in the world are already clients. Anyone who signs off on deals should know this firm exists.

See how it works.

HEADLINES

Markets Rundown

Market Update

Stocks edged lower as Houthi attacks on a Saudi refinery pushed WTI crude up more than 4%, above $80.
Energy led sector performance while real estate, utilities, and consumer staples lagged.
TSMC reported July revenue growth of 44.7% year over year, while NVIDIA fell on a reported $500 billion AI infrastructure funding partnership.

Earnings Season

With roughly 90% of the S&P 500 reporting, earnings growth is tracking near 48%, more than double the 24% starting estimate.
Markets now price less than a 50% chance of a September rate hike after Friday's weak jobs report.
July CPI is expected to ease to 3.4% and core inflation to 2.5%, both due later this week.

Movers & Shakers

(+) MarineMax ($HZO) +46% after agreeing to be acquired by Blackstone portco Safe Harbor in an all-cash deal valued at $1.5 billion.
(+) Archer Aviation ($ACHR) +12% because the company will acquire Boeing's electric aircraft unit with Boeing taking an equity stake.
(–) Intel ($INTC) -4% after the company announced a $15 billion offering to meet AI demand.

Prediction Markets

Core CPI YoY numbers come out tomorrow at 8:30am EDT.
Trade on real-world events with Kalshi. Use code OWS to get a $10 bonus when you trade $10.

Private Dealmaking

I Squared Capital acquired oOh!media, an Australian outdoor advertising firm, for $634 million
Cambridge Aerospace, a British air defense tech startup, raised $300 million
HappyRobot, an AI workforce management platform, raised $150 million
Acrab, a developer of agentic AI compute infrastructure, raised $130 million
LearnVector, an AI education startup founded by Andrew Ng, raised $100 million
P-1 AI, a developer of AI engineering software, raised $50 million

For more PE, VC & M&A deals, subscribe to our Buysiders newsletter.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Cherry Baby

Description:
A tender, funny, and emotionally complicated novel from Rainbow Rowell about identity, love, marriage, and starting over. Cherry's husband has turned their private life into a wildly successful webcomic, and a character based on Cherry is now being brought to the big screen. As her marriage falls apart, Cherry reconnects with Russ, an old college crush who knows her as the person she was before fame, marriage, and public expectations changed her life. The novel explores what happens when you have to figure out who you are after the life you thought you wanted no longer exists.

Book Length: 416 pages
Release Date: April 14, 2026

Ideal For:
Readers who enjoy contemporary fiction, second-chance relationships, complicated characters, and stories about identity, self-acceptance, and reinventing yourself.

Sometimes finding yourself means figuring out who you are when everyone else's version of you disappears.

DAILY VISUAL

The Financial System Is Changing

Source: Apollo

PRESENTED BY MOSAIC

Anthropic and Apollo Discuss the State of AI in PE

Anthropic recently hosted a session for private markets deal teams called “Claude for Investing Teams,” featuring Apollo walking through how their firm uses AI day to day. 95% of PE funds report AI initiatives meeting or exceeding original business goals, according to FTI’s 2026 Private Equity AI Radar cited in the session.

Apollo’s own rollout started small: an AI chat pilot in March that scaled firm-wide within two weeks, then expanded into automated research briefings, spreadsheet modeling, and reporting. Apollo now relies on tools, like Mosaic, to automate its LBOs with a standardized workflow.

Mosaic is used for LBO screening, citing the platform’s built-in workflows rather than building that capability in-house.

The takeaway from the session: firms are drawing a hard line between what they build in-house (proprietary data, judgment, strategy) and what they buy off the shelf for high-volume, repeatable workflows.

Explore how Mosaic can scale your firm’s capabilities.

DAILY ACUMEN

What Sticks

Ask someone to estimate the odds of a plane crash right after a widely covered one makes the news, and the number will run far higher than the statistics justify, even though the actual risk has not moved at all.

The mind does not calculate probability from data. It estimates probability from how easily an example comes to mind, and vivid, recent, emotional events come to mind far more easily than boring, common ones ever will.

This quietly distorts a lot of financial judgment. The crash everyone just lived through feels more likely to repeat than the calm decade before it, even though the calm decade was the more statistically normal state.

A single dramatic blowup at a well known fund gets treated as a warning about the whole strategy, while the many quiet successes using that same strategy never register, because quiet success makes for a forgettable story.

The correction is noticing when a judgment is being driven by a vivid memory rather than an actual base rate, then going looking for the boring data specifically because it is boring. What is easiest to recall is rarely what is most likely. It is simply what left the deepest impression.

ENLIGHTENMENT

Short Squeez Picks

The power of starting a habit on Wednesday
What to do when you’re too upset to think straight
How Gen-Z fell out of love with work
How to be a good roommate
Is intelligence related to happiness?

MEME-A-PALOOZA

Memes of the Day

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