Meta Platforms Faces Earnings Test as AI Spending and Cloud Ambitions Take Center Stage

SpaceX is reportedly preparing to issue $40 billion in new debt to buy Nvidia chips for its data centers, according to Bloomberg, sending shares down 2% in early trade Wednesday. The financing would be split into $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt, with Apollo Global leading the financing and bond giant PIMCO looking at the deal. SpaceX's data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, known as Colossus 1 and 2, are generating billions per month in recurring revenue from AI compute services, and CFO Bret Johnsen said last month the company believes it is on track to hit $100 billion in annual recurring revenue, after closing another hosting deal worth about $1.11 billion a month starting December 1st of this year, or roughly $13 billion of additional ARR. Yorkville Ives analyst Dan Ives said the deal provides firepower for SpaceX's AI buildout, adding that the contracted AI backlog and Starlink's cash generation give the company the capacity to service the leverage; Ives has an Outperform rating and a $225 price target on the stock. Earlier this week, Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas wrote that SpaceX stock was cheap and that now was the time to buy ahead of the upcoming Starship 15 launch, likely scheduled for late October or November.

Behavox has signed an $8 million GPU commitment with UK sovereign cloud and AI platform Civo to secure dedicated UK capacity for processing regulated customers' sensitive data locally. The agreement covers GPU capacity in the United Kingdom to run the AI models behind Behavox's products, keeping data from global banks, hedge funds, asset managers, commodity traders and insurers within the UK region. It follows Civo's September 22, 2026 announcement of its flagship edge data centre in Hertfordshire, the first of 40 planned UK sites, and its deployment of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform targeted for 2027, alongside Behavox's $175 million preferred equity investment from HPS Investment Partners, part of BlackRock, in June 2026. The Civo commitment is part of a wider build-out in which Behavox is securing AI compute with other neoclouds amid very strong demand from regulated industries for affordable tokens and agentic AI. That capacity is sold through Behavox's affiliated company Gigatokens, which offers frontier models on UK sovereign infrastructure with zero data retention by default.

CoreWeave Inc. announced it will establish its first data centers in India through a partnership with AdaniConneX Pvt., a joint venture between Adani Group and EdgeConneX. The AI cloud-computing provider will utilize 240 megawatts of capacity at AdaniConneX's Taloja campus in Navi Mumbai, with an option to expand to 480 megawatts, and plans to open an office in India. The total investment is projected to reach multiple billions of dollars throughout the project's duration, with the first data centers scheduled to begin operations in mid-2028. CoreWeave will install Nvidia Corp. Vera Rubin chips at the facilities for tasks including training and operating models, managing reasoning functions, and supporting AI agents. The move follows CoreWeave's initial Asian entry in August with projects in Indonesia, and comes after CEO Mike Intrator said last month the company is largely sold out of capacity; CoreWeave reported approximately 4.2 gigawatts of contracted power in August.

Reflection AI, a New York City startup valued at $25 billion, is rumored to be on the verge of releasing its first open-source AI model, according to a report from Axios. Founded about 2.5 years ago by two former Google DeepMind researchers who worked on the foundations of Google Gemini, the company came out of stealth at a $545 million valuation and has since raised $2 billion from Nvidia, which led its next round. Reflection AI has committed upwards of $7 billion on compute before its first model ships, including roughly $150 million per month paid to Elon Musk's SpaceX AI for compute access, and it does not own any of its own chips. The company's pitch centers on an "AI factory" model in which enterprises pay for model weights, download them, and run them privately on their own infrastructure so proprietary data never reaches a centralized lab. The launch would mark a rare Western attempt to compete in open-source AI, where Chinese models now account for 58 to 80 percent of usage among US AI startups, and where Reflection AI's $7.4 billion compute spend amounts to only about 1.4 percent of the $0.5 trillion Anthropic plans to spend on compute over the next 5 to 10 years.

Cerebras Systems has secured a deal with Gimlet Labs, which agreed to use its wafer-scale chips inside a new disaggregated inference cloud targeting ultrafast agentic and real-time AI workloads for paying customers. The partnership lands after a volatile stretch for Cerebras, during which conflicting headlines around its OpenAI relationship swung sentiment and short-term trading. Even with recent rebounds on Altman's public backing, the stock's share price return is still down 15.7% over 30 days and 43.1% year to date. Cerebras last closed at $177.10, while the most followed narrative values the stock at $415.54, framing a large gap between trading price and perceived long-term potential. The story could still unravel quickly if OpenAI pulls back on spending or if the mid November share unlock floods the market with selling.