AI Today: Nvidia Rents What It Can't Buy

This digest went dark for ten days, so today's is a catch-up on the stories that actually moved rather than a strict 24-hour slice. The through-line across all of them is financing structure. Nvidia found a way to take a startup's technology and most of its model team without triggering an acquisition. Broadcom is trying to raise as much debt as some countries carry. Anthropic is about to test whether public markets will underwrite any of it.

Business & Industry

Nvidia is paying Poolside $6B to license its model factory
Newcomer broke it on the 20th, and the structure is the story. Nvidia gets a non-exclusive license to Poolside's Model Factory — the system that builds its Laguna family of open-weight coding models — plus offers to 109 employees who worked on it, plus a $1 billion investment at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. What it does not get is Poolside. The three co-founders stay, the company keeps operating independently, and no regulator gets an acquisition to review. Call it the license-and-hire: all of the talent and IP transfer of an acquihire, none of the antitrust surface. Nvidia stock ended that week down 5%.

Anthropic's annualized revenue passed $65B ahead of its IPO
I covered the IPO on August 13 as an investor-relations exercise with no numbers attached — the pitch was reassurance about growth, Chinese models, and data-center backlash. Here are the numbers. Run rate hit $65 billion by the end of July, more than sevenfold up from where it sat at the end of last year. Q2 preliminary revenue was over $11.5 billion against $787 million in Q2 2025, a roughly 14-fold jump, following $4.73 billion in Q1. Q2 also posted positive adjusted operating income, which is the line that separates this from most of the sector. Citigroup was added to the bank syndicate on the 20th, and the company may file publicly as soon as the end of this month. It filed confidentially back in June.

Infrastructure

Broadcom is seeking more than $60B in debt for AI chips
The senior secured tranche runs $60–70 billion with Broadcom guaranteeing part of it, plus a junior tranche around $30 billion — potentially $100 billion total, issued through a special-purpose vehicle. Blackstone and Apollo are in talks to participate, the same pair behind Broadcom's $35 billion deal in June. The stated goal is enabling more than 20 gigawatts of capacity for frontier labs including Anthropic and OpenAI by 2028. Two weeks ago Nvidia lined up $500 billion in third-party capital and I described it as compute risk migrating onto Wall Street's books. This is the same migration, with leverage attached.

Autonomy

Nevada cleared Tesla, Uber, and Waymo to run thousands of robotaxis
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla's full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on the 20th, authorizing up to 5,000 vehicles over twelve months across Clark County, with Uber and Waymo cleared for around 1,000 each. The reversal is worth noting: days earlier Tesla's interim order capped it at 10 vehicles at 45 mph with airport trips banned, after it had asked for 5,000. Tesla says it will start with a handful rather than the full fleet, and still has inspections, insurance, and fare filings to clear — roughly 30 days out.

Policy & Content

Apple Music will label AI-generated songs
Apple emailed music-industry partners on the 20th about "Made With AI" labels shipping later this year. Labels and distributors will be required to tag any song where "a material portion of the content" was AI-generated, building on the Transparency Tags system Apple announced in March. Tidal and Deezer already label; Beatport bans fully AI-generated tracks outright. No launch date given, and "material portion" is doing a lot of undefined work.

Skipped as already covered: Cloudflare's Kitesurf browser is circulating again in this week's roundups — I covered it on August 9, and nothing has changed. Nvidia's $500B financing platform ran on August 12. Grok 4.6 shipped on the 12th and is no longer new.