Cassidy: AI cloud’s debt-fueled data-center sprint is picking up—and somebody eventually has to make those monthly payments.
Cassidy: If you’re joining us mid-arc, here’s the short version: Specialist AI infrastructure providers aren’t just pitching GPU access anymore.
Cassidy: They’re turning contracted demand into real capacity—and long-term obligations.
Cassidy: CoreWeave had $104.2 billion in backlog and raised its 2026 capex plan
Cassidy: Together AI was tied to a 10,000-GPU L&T Chennai project
Cassidy: and Cerebras said it had more than 600 MW live or under contract by end-2027.
Bill: This is AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: Today, the debt gets longer, the hardware claims get louder, and a Grok security finding cuts straight into the agent stack.
Bill: We start with Nebius.
Bill: This story isn't over: Neocloud spending and backlog boom.
Bill: Follow us wherever you're listening, and the next chapter comes to you.
Cassidy: Rashika Singh, Ananya Palyekar, writing in The Economic Times:
Quote: AI cloud provider Nebius Group on Wednesday upsized its debt offering to $5 billion from $4.5 billion
Quote: as it seeks to ramp up investments in data centers and computing capacity.
Quote: The Amsterdam-headquartered company plans to issue private convertible notes worth $3 billion maturing in 2030
Quote: and notes worth $2 billion maturing in 2034.
Cassidy: Nebius took this to $5 billion, split between $3 billion due in 2030 and $2 billion in 2034.
Cassidy: Investors are underwriting two different things here: this GPU cycle, then sustained AI-cloud demand through the next hardware generation.
Bill: By 2029
Bill: Nebius needs a convincing answer on that 2030 tranche: enough cash flow to repay or refinance it without turning the whole GPU fleet into a
Bill: debt-management exercise.
Cassidy: The neocloud buildout keeps piling up: CoreWeave and Cerebras had backlog; now Nebius is raising $5 billion in debt.
Cassidy: Its June cash balance was $8.04 billion, but it spent $5.66 billion on property, equipment, and intangibles in one quarter.
Cassidy: Financing has to keep pace with the construction appetite.
Bill: A nearly 10% drop on Wednesday tells you the market isn’t handing out gold stars for that headline.
Bill: Nebius is financing the build; the question is whether its full-stack cloud can produce an inference margin before those 2030 notes come
Bill: due.
Cassidy: From Tobias Mann at The Register:
Quote: The chip newcomer unveiled its next-gen Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) and Nexus rack systems on Tuesday.
Quote: Cerebras aims to extend that lead by boosting throughput per watt tenfold over the previous generation.
Bill: Cerebras doubled dense FP16 from 12.5 to 25 petaflops and memory bandwidth to 43.2 petabytes a second—on the same 5-nanometer wafer and the
Bill: same four trillion transistors.
Bill: The trick, apparently, is cranking the clock up and feeding it a whole lot more power.
Cassidy: And “a whole lot” means 33 kilowatts per wafer, versus 15 before; the full-system estimate goes from 23 to 46 kilowatts.
Cassidy: So yes, faster inference—but nobody gets to say “per watt” and skip the watt line.
Bill: Exactly. Sparse FP16 at 250 petaflops makes for a beautiful slide.
Bill: I want the cost per token on a messy, mixed-precision production workload, with rack cooling and the power bill included.
Bill: That’s where this either changes a latency budget or becomes very expensive clock tuning.
Cassidy: We just covered Nebius borrowing $5 billion to finance the buildings.
Cassidy: Cerebras wants a slice of what those buildings spend on inference.
Cassidy: If Nexus really packs three times as many chips into a rack, power delivery stops being an engineering footnote very quickly.
Cassidy: From Yahoo Finance:
Quote: Bitcoin (CRYPTO: $BTC) mining company Bitdeer Technologies Group's (NASDAQ: $BTDR) artificial intelligence division
Quote: Bitdeer AI has secured a five-year contract covering roughly half of its A102 AI data center in Malaysia before the facility is energized.
Quote: The undisclosed customer
Quote: described by Bitdeer as being of "high credit quality," has committed to approximately 50% of A102's 9.5-megawatt capacity
Quote: according to a Wednesday announcement.
Bill: This is the kind of pre-energization deal I can work with: 9.5 megawatts
Bill: roughly half already contracted
Bill: five years and service starting in Q1 2027.
Bill: Bitdeer gave us an audit date instead of waving around a giant pipeline number.
Cassidy: And it’s $400 million over that term from one high-credit-quality but unnamed customer.
Cassidy: We don’t know the customer, but we do know the commercial shape.
Cassidy: That puts A102 ahead of most “AI campus” announcements that never get past a PowerPoint and a local press release.
Bill: I’m not extrapolating a 350-megawatt-by-2028 target from one 9.5-megawatt site.
Bill: But GB300 NVL72s liquid cooling
Bill: and a signed five-year buyer—okay
Bill: now we can ask whether they hit the Q1 2027 turn-on without treating the whole thing as vapor.
Cassidy: Nebius is financing its GPU stack with $5 billion in convertibles; Bitdeer is pairing a smaller build with contracted revenue before the
Cassidy: lights are on. Different balance sheets, but both are betting AI demand will still be there when this hardware cycle rolls over.
Cassidy: This one's from The Logic:
Quote: AI firm Anthropic is planning to source a significant amount of compute capacity in Canada, including from new data centres in Alberta.
Quote: The San Francisco-based company is hiring staff in Canada to help acquire processing power
Quote: and to manage relations with the communities that will host its facilities
Quote: according to new job postings.
Cassidy: Anthropic’s Canada posting says “gigawatts,” but they’re still hunting sites
Cassidy: securing power financing projects
Cassidy: and shepherding construction.
Cassidy: It’s a development pipeline.
Cassidy: You can’t plug Claude into it yet.
Bill: And they’re hiring an Alberta community engagement manager alongside the compute lead.
Bill: Local permitting and power relationships are clearly on the critical path—not some cleanup task after the GPUs arrive.
Cassidy: Nebius is borrowing five billion dollars against future AI-cloud demand.
Cassidy: On the customer side
Cassidy: Anthropic is making the same long-duration bet: gigawatts in Canada suggests it expects demand to outlast more than one shiny hardware
Cassidy: cycle.
Bill: “Gigawatts” is a serious word.
Bill: Give us a site, a power contract, and an in-service date, then we can start treating it like capacity instead of ambition.
Cassidy: Ars Technica, with Dan Goodin:
Quote: Company researchers are calling the technique cryptographic context injection.
Quote: “Cryptographic Context Injection is one instance of a broader shift: attacks that manipulate not just the prompt
Quote: but the wider context an LLM treats as its own
Quote: such as tool outputs
Quote: runtime results and intermediate state” Adversa said.
Bill: The nasty part of Adversa’s cryptographic context injection is where it hits: tool outputs, runtime results, intermediate state.
Bill: Your agent can have a pristine user prompt and still get steered toward exfiltration by something it decides to trust halfway through the
Bill: job.
Cassidy: And encryption is the trick.
Cassidy: The safety layer sees ciphertext it can’t meaningfully inspect; the model decrypts it
Cassidy: treats it like a traceback
Cassidy: then follows the instruction buried inside.
Cassidy: A very efficient way to make a permission policy decorative.
Bill: Adversa got a related attack to produce restricted weapon content and reproduce Gemini system instructions.
Bill: So no, auditing the initial prompt is nowhere near enough.
Bill: Log the tool-call layer, constrain what tools can return, and assume an error message can be hostile input.
Cassidy: Grok is the headline; Gemini backs it up.
Cassidy: This failure mode cuts across vendors, and it matters a lot more than another glossy agent demo.
Cassidy: If you want more on AI policy and national security, check out Anthropic Pentagon Watch, a daily briefing on Anthropic’s fight with the DoD.
Cassidy: It tracks military AI use, autonomous weapons, and AI procurement blacklisting.
Cassidy: Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Cassidy: We’re watching for Bitdeer’s A102 services to begin in the first quarter of 2027, when it expects to recognize revenue and related costs.
Cassidy: We’re also watching its target of 350 megawatts of AI cloud data-center capacity by the first quarter of 2028.
Cassidy: Links to every story are in the show notes.
Cassidy: Take a look at anything you’d like to explore further.
Cassidy: That’s AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.