Nebius, an Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure provider, is issuing $4.5 billion in convertible bonds due in 2030 and 2034 to fund data centre expansion and GPU purchases. The company is raising $2.75 billion in notes maturing in 2030 and $1.75 billion due in 2034. This capital supports Nebius's existing multi-billion-dollar supply contracts with Meta and Microsoft and enables further buildout of its GPU-powered cloud infrastructure.
Etched, a startup making inference chips for running trained AI models, raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation in a round led by trading firm Jane Street, which also became its first production customer. The funding round valued the company at double its July valuation of $10.3 billion, with over $1 billion in customer orders already secured. Etched's competitive position strengthened after Groq was acquired by Nvidia and Cerebras went public, leaving few independent inference chip makers still operating.
Relativity Networks raised $22 million in funding to deploy hollow-core fiber optic cables that transmit data 30% faster than conventional fiber by routing light through a vacuum chamber instead of glass. The company achieved a signal latency reduction from five microseconds per kilometer to three and a half microseconds, with a hyperscaler also committing to a $40 million follow-on order. This speed improvement allows data centers to span larger geographic distances before latency becomes problematic, potentially reshaping where AI infrastructure can be built as compute scales across multiple campuses.
Memory prices have surged 500% in 12 months, with 128GB DDR5 kits now ten times more expensive than historical lows, while hyperscalers have locked in nearly all global DRAM production capacity through 2027 with advance deposits. DRAM chips now cost over half as much per kilogram as solid gold, reversing Moore's Law for memory as AI infrastructure demand outstrips supply. This shortage is forcing AI companies to secure multi-year supply commitments and fundamentally reshaping hardware economics for training and inference systems.
Nvidia and major financial firms including Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR are collaborating on a $500 billion financing program to establish compute as a tradeable asset class. The deal treats GPU chips as revenue-generating assets with long operational lifespans and fungible characteristics. This creates a new investment vehicle for hardware infrastructure, though the excerpt does not detail how this affects existing cloud or AI markets.
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