Aggregator

It’s been a long two weeks since the last UFC event, as the promotion returns this weekend to Macau, China.

A new California Post poll finds Spencer Pratt and Karen Bass locked in a dead heat in the Los Angeles mayoral race as 62% of voters say the city is headed in the wrong direction. Homelessness, housing costs and public safety top voter concerns.

It’s been over two weeks since we last saw Austin Reaves on a basketball court. On Friday morning, Reaves was joined by his girlfriend, Jenna Barber, posing for a photo with a cake that read “Happy 28th,” as the couple was celebrating his birthday. But what was notable in the photo was Austin’s new haircut....

Even so, that does not mean there is nothing to take away from the spring. It’s our first chance to be around the team, watch them and listen to them. 

662 Billion Reasons To Worry: Moody's Raises AI Data-Center Funding Fears As Apollo Shops Huge Anthropic Debt Deal

Unless you have lived under a rock for the last year (or month), you will know that the explosive growth of artificial intelligence is fueling a massive infrastructure buildout.

In a chart book published nearly simultaneously with Moody’s report, Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok worked to put the enormity of data center spending into perspective.

With total capital expenditure on data centers estimated at roughly $646 billion, or about 2% of U.S. GDP, Slok noted that is roughly equivalent to the GDP for Singapore, Sweden, and Argentina. Defense spending in 2025, meanwhile, was around $917 billion.

However, as Moody's warned this week, the aggressive financing structures supporting this explosive growth are creating significant systemic risks that could ripple across global credit markets and the broader economy.

The most recent example of this buildout - and its coincident debt-funding - is the $36 billion debt financing package currently being shopped by Apollo Global Management and Blackstone to enable Anthropic’s large-scale acquisition of Google’s custom TPU chips.

As Bloomberg reports, this complex, high-leverage deal - partially backed by Broadcom - underscores how private equity and specialized financiers are channeling enormous capital into AI hardware and data centers through layered debt instruments.

The move would mark one of the largest-ever private credit deals and also the biggest chip-financing debt transaction.

It aims to tap Broadcom’s credit quality to provide computing-power access to Anthropic, which just eclipsed rival OpenAI in valuation (and its ecosystem has been dramatically outperforming)...

While such deals accelerate AI capacity, they also concentrate risk.

More concerning is the scale of hidden liabilities across the industry.

According to Moody’s Ratings, the five major U.S. hyperscalers (Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Oracle) have accumulated approximately $662 billion in future data center lease commitments that have not yet commenced.

Combined with other commitments, the total undiscounted future lease exposure reaches $969 billion.

To put the scale of this hidden obligation into perspective, Moody’s accounting analysts David Gonzales and Alastair Drake calculated that the unrecorded $662 billion is equivalent to 113% of these five hyperscalers’ most recent adjusted debt.

These obligations remain entirely off-balance-sheet under current accounting rules, despite representing binding long-term liabilities.

But as Gonzales told Fortune in a statement that it’s “not as if [these hyperscalers] have have avoided a liability through structuring,” characterizing the $662 billion at issue as “yet to be on the balance sheet,” rather than missing.

“More accurately,” he added, “they have not yet received the services to trigger this liability as of this time, but they will.”

This accounting deferral masks the true leverage in the system.

As these leases activate over the next decade, they will migrate onto balance sheets, potentially weakening credit profiles, elevating leverage ratios, and increasing refinancing pressures.

While the AI infrastructure boom promises transformative productivity gains, Moody's is basically highlighting that the current funding model - reliant on massive off-balance-sheet debt and complex private financing - builds hidden vulnerabilities into the financial system.

Regulators, investors, and policymakers should closely monitor these exposures.

Heightened Systemic Concerns

• Contagion Risk: Heavy interdependence among hyperscalers, private credit funds, and infrastructure investors means distress at a few large players could rapidly spread through debt markets and counterparty exposures.

• Concentration & Interconnectedness: A small group of tech giants and a limited pool of specialized financiers dominate this financing. Any material setback in AI monetization or power availability could create correlated losses across the sector.

• Broader Market Impact: The $662 billion in off-balance-sheet exposure represents a delayed but massive claim on capital markets. In an economic downturn, forced deleveraging or asset fire sales could amplify volatility, tighten credit conditions, and affect investor confidence well beyond technology.

• External Amplifiers: Power grid constraints, regulatory hurdles, and geopolitical supply chain risks further compound the fragility of these highly leveraged bets.

In a stressed scenario - such as slower-than-expected AI revenue growth (the end of tokenmaxxing), rising energy costs, or higher interest rates - the simultaneous activation of these liabilities could trigger widespread credit rating downgrades and liquidity strains.

Specifically, Moody’s warned that these opaque accounting practices mask the true economic risk facing the tech industry. While leasing reduces upfront capital investments, carrying such massive future commitments severely limits a company’s financial and operating flexibility, especially if AI industry conditions change rapidly.

Because these liabilities are hidden, Moody’s concluded, in its own jargony way, that it is considering new ways to look at this issue.

“The accounting liability is unlikely to reflect certain plausible future scenarios … With this in mind, we will continue to assess cash exposures and debt-like adjustments as time progresses and the dates of new leases draw nearer. We may make a nonstandard adjustment to Moody’s adjusted debt based on our expectation of likely cash outflows.”

Without greater transparency and more resilient capital structures, the race for AI supremacy risks generating systemic stress that could undermine broader economic stability.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 18:50

A wide pitch of Manhattan will fall under "gridlock alert" during eight 2026 World Cup matches to deal with an expected crush of soccer fans, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Friday.

More details have emerged about Brendan Sorsby’s gambling activity.

Sebastian Berhalter was invited to exactly one national team youth camp. He thinks it was a U16 camp, and remembers feeling like it was the biggest deal. 

The left is making the officers enforcing US immigration laws the targets of their misplaced blame — just like they attacked my dad when he returned from Vietnam.

A Southern California mother was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to her role in torturing her 7-month-old son to death and concocting a kidnapping story to cover up the sickening crime. Rebecca Haro, 41, pleaded guilty Friday to charges of felony child abuse and involuntary manslaughter stemming from her...

Score big, save bigger!

“This is just another attack on the US and our ability to be competitive," Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said.

“During the effort to break up the fights, one officer suffered an injury,” the police department said.

The Dodgers are optioning Hyeseong Kim back to the minor-leagues, a source with knowledge of the situation told The California Post on Friday, and re-signing former All-Star utilityman Santiago Espinal less than a week after designating him for assignment.

Japan Crude Imports Fall 66% To Record Low

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Amid the supply disruption in the Middle East, Japan’s crude oil imports crashed by 66% in April from the same month last year, dropping to an all time low, official Japanese data showed on Friday.

Japan imported 4.07 million kilolitres, or about 850,000 barrels per day (bpd), of crude oil last month, down by 65.7% from the April 2025 levels, the monthly petroleum statistics of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) showed.

Crude imports from the Middle East region, which delivered more than 90% of Japan’s total crude imports before the war, plunged by 68% in April from a year earlier.

Japan’s imports from Saudi Arabia crashed by nearly 58%, and supply from the United Arab Emirate (UAE) to Japan plunged by 69.4%, the Japanese government data showed. Of the total severely reduced crude supply, the Middle East continued to account for more than 90% of Japanese crude imports, at 93.7% in April.

Japan in April imported the lowest volume of crude oil from the Middle East on record dating back to 1979 as the Iran war and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz choked supply from the region.

Japan’s crude imports from the Middle East plummeted by 67.2% in April compared to the same month of 2025, provisional trade data from Japan’s Finance Ministry showed last week. The April 2026 volume, estimated in Japan at 3.843 million kiloliters of crude oil, was the lowest since data collection began in 1979.

Japan has just welcomed the first shipment of Middle East crude via the Strait of Hormuz since the Iran war began on February 28.

Japan is also releasing crude from its strategic reserves as part of an IEA-coordinated global effort to release 400 million barrels of crude and oil products.

The ongoing oil stocks release, which is Japan’s biggest ever, is helping Japanese refiners increase throughput. So is alternative supply from producers outside the Middle East, including rare cargoes from Azerbaijan and Latin America.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2026 - 18:25

Why was this individual driving a dangerous device on a path meant for slower-moving cyclists? Lack of effective rules and enforcement.  

“She was 17. She’s a dumb kid. She didn't do it on purpose.''

Conspiracy theories that Vladimir Putin has died and been replaced by body doubles are alight again after a Russian politician appeared to call the president by a completely different name -- Pal Laich.

Vallejo lost to French teenager Moise Kouame on Thursday after a tense five-set battle that lasted nearly five hours on Court Suzanne-Lenglen.

Xavier Taylor, a player with Maple Shade Youth Baseball, was struck in the neck by an errant baseball.