The CPU Trade Became a Seven-Year Contract as Anthropic Committed $11.6bn to Akamai. Hormuz Talks Pulled Brent Off $108.

Friday, September 25, 2026, written at 9:15 a.m. Eastern, forty five minutes before the open. Futures and pre-market levels below are indicative and can move before the bell. Shanghai and Shenzhen are shut through Sunday for the Mid-Autumn Festival and Seoul is still out for Chuseok until Monday, so for the second consecutive session the two markets that own the physical side of this cycle are absent.

The argument this desk has been running for four sessions acquired a contract last night. Anthropic committed $11.6bn over seven years to Akamai for CPU workloads, with an option to expand the relationship by a further $9bn for a potential total near $20bn. Akamai rose about 16% after hours and is up roughly 20% pre-market. Bank of America put the read in one line, saying the deal further supports CPU importance in the agentic era, and lifted its server CPU forecast to $211bn by 2030 from $61bn this year while taking AMD to $720 from $620. AMD printed a record above $629 on Thursday having crossed a trillion dollars of market value on Monday.

On Tuesday we wrote that we would take the direction of the CPU re-rating while declining the evidence offered for it, because twelve days of iOS download counts measure curiosity rather than demand, and that the datapoint worth owning was AMD raising channel prices 10% for the fourth quarter. A seven year purchase commitment from the second largest frontier lab is the harder version of the same receipt. Nobody signs a seven year infrastructure contract for a workload they think is a fashion. The thesis is no longer that agentic inference is compute intensive in a way the market has not priced. That part is now in a filing.

What deserves more attention than the headline is how the contract was paid for. Akamai issued Anthropic a warrant over non-voting convertible preferred equivalent to 7.7 million shares, roughly five percent of the company on an as-converted basis, with about two percentage points vesting against the initial $11.6bn and the remaining three tied to the expansion. Akamai also disclosed roughly $5.5bn of capital expenditure attached to the commitment and a $1.7bn increase to 2026 capex to pre-purchase supply chain components, memory among them, with no change to 2026 revenue guidance. So the vendor books a large multi-year backlog, spends about forty seven cents of capital for every dollar of contracted revenue, hands the customer an equity stake worth several billion at the post-announcement price, and recognises none of it this year.

This is the same structure the market applauded when Nvidia took equity exposure to OpenAI and when AMD wrote warrants against a purchase agreement, and it is now running through the general purpose compute layer as well. We are not calling it fraudulent or even unusual; a scarce supplier paying for offtake certainty with paper is a rational trade when the alternative is building for a customer that might not show up. We are saying that it changes what the announcement proves. It proves Anthropic wants seven years of CPU capacity badly enough to dilute its supplier by five percent to get it, which is a strong demand signal. It does not prove the economics are good for the supplier, and the twenty percent move prices it as though they are. Our position is that the workload call is confirmed and the equity is the wrong instrument to express it at this price. The cleaner expression remains the merchant silicon that sells into every buyer of this capacity rather than the single vendor that just sold five percent of itself to one of them.

The second order read matters more for next week. Akamai is spending $1.7bn early specifically to lock memory. Micron reports on September 30 into a company-guided $50bn quarter and an 86% gross margin, and a networking company that has never been a major memory buyer pre-purchasing components five days beforehand is a small, real, forward-looking datapoint on how tight that market is. It sits alongside a Taoyuan strike vote scheduled for early October.

The Tape: A Weekly Gain Rebuilt in Two Days

Futures are higher with the risk-on skew pointing exactly where you would expect. S&P contracts are 7,786 and up 0.24%, Nasdaq 100 futures are 30,913 and up 0.48%, Dow futures are 51,811 and up 0.18%, and the small cap proxy is up about 0.31%. Chipmakers are leading. That ordering, semiconductors over the index over the Dow, is the mirror image of Thursday morning, when a Dow bid against a Nasdaq offer was the market rotating out of duration.

Thursday itself did almost nothing at the index level and a great deal underneath. The S&P finished 7,704.13 for a loss of less than two points, the Nasdaq Composite added 3.34 points to 26,939, the Dow fell 161.70 to 51,350 and the Russell fell 0.11% to 2,835. Energy led at up 1.46% with health care up 0.95% and communications up 0.59%, while technology fell 1.23%, materials 1.06% and industrials 0.93%. A session in which energy beats technology by two and a half points and the index closes flat is not a quiet session, it is a violent rotation with the volatility hidden inside the aggregate.

The VIX is 15.68 and higher by 3.3%, which continues to say nothing. We have stopped arguing with it. The relevant volatility this month has been in rates and in single stocks, and the index measure has been an accurate reading of an index that keeps ending up near where it started.

Rates and the Dollar: The First Break in Two Weeks

Bonds are recovering after a selloff that took global yields to multi-decade highs. The thirty year printed 5.446% on Thursday, the highest since 2004, the ten year closed 5.16% after trading above 5.15% and is giving back roughly three basis points this morning, and the two year sits near 4.91%. The dollar snapped a five day run of gains after touching 101.231, having posted its best two week run in six months, and the yen outperformed at 158.26.

Be careful about what this is. Yields falling three basis points after a twenty basis point two day move is not a reversal, it is the bid that shows up when a market that has gone one way for two weeks runs out of sellers ahead of a weekend. October is still priced somewhere between 54% and 64% depending on which venue you read, which is a wide enough spread to tell you the market has not settled the question. Three Fed speakers today will not settle it either: Schmid at 9:20, Goolsbee in Grand Rapids, and Hammack at two o’clock on a panel with the European Central Bank’s Vujcic at a joint inflation conference in Cleveland.

The data today is the more interesting half. Durable goods at 8:30 were expected at minus 0.3% against a prior of plus 1.1%, with core capital goods orders expected at plus 0.6%. The University of Michigan final at ten o’clock is where the tension sits, because sentiment is expected at 47.5 against 47.8, with one year inflation expectations at 4.7% and the five year at 3.4%. Hold that next to Wednesday’s composite purchasing managers index at 58.4, the strongest in more than five years. American business activity is running at a five year high while the American household is sitting near the worst sentiment ever recorded and expecting almost five percent inflation. That gap is not a contradiction, it is a description of who is paying for this cycle. Firms are enjoying an artificial intelligence capital boom. Households are buying diesel at $6.51 a gallon. Only one of those two shows up in the survey the Committee quotes when it justifies restraint, and only one of them shows up in the survey that decides an election.

Gold is the asset agreeing with the household rather than the firm. It is bid about one percent to roughly $4,339 and a fresh cycle high on the same morning the dollar broke a five day winning run. Gold rising while the real yield sits at a two decade high is not a rates trade. It is a bid for something that is nobody’s liability, running underneath a market that is otherwise taking risk.

Energy: The Ban Has Moved From the Crack Into the Barrel

Two things happened in crude and they point in opposite directions, which is the most useful thing on the page today.

Brent touched just over $108 on Thursday and settled $106.60 after a 3.41% gain, then gave back 0.88% to about $105.70 this morning when Bloomberg reported that American and Iranian negotiators are exploring a phased deal in which Tehran reopens the Strait of Hormuz and Washington lifts its blockade of Iranian ports. Foreign Minister Araghchi has put a seven day timetable to the Americans that could start the moment Washington accepts, Qatar is mediating, and Tehran has reportedly agreed to move its demand for transit fees out of the main agreement and into a side attachment because ending the blockade has become the more urgent objective. That is the first version of this negotiation with a mechanism and a clock attached rather than a photograph of two delegations in the same building.

Now the other direction. Brent is up about two percent on the week. WTI is down about seven. The spread reached $12.02 on Thursday, the widest since May 6, against a spread that has not been inside four dollars since July 7. The reason is domestic and it is policy. A market that expects American refiners to lose roughly 1.2m barrels a day of diesel export demand against 5.1m barrels a day of production also expects those refiners to buy less crude, and analysts put the potential run cut near twelve percent with Gulf Coast storage filling inside about a month. So the export ban proposal has now stopped being a story about the crack and started being a story about the price of the American barrel itself.

We have argued since September 19 that the binding constraint in this complex is refining rather than extraction, and since Tuesday that a ban adds no capacity and simply relocates the shortage. The market has now taken that one step further than we did. It is not only widening the international crack, it is marking down American crude for the refining demand the policy would destroy. Freight is telling the same story from the other end, with a very large crude carrier from the Gulf Coast to Asia at roughly $50m against $16m before the war, so even the arbitrage that would normally close the gap has had its breakeven pushed from about four dollars to about eight.

Nothing on the supply side improved. Diesel set a record $6.528 a gallon this week and was still $6.514 on Thursday. Ukraine struck the Lukoil refinery at Perm overnight, about 1,450 kilometres inside Russia, along with plants at Ulyanovsk and Voronezh, and Kyiv’s General Staff now claims strikes have removed more than 45% of Russian refining capacity. A Hormuz reopening would be a genuine and large change to the crude leg. It would do very little for a distillate shortage whose largest marginal pool is being destroyed by drones and whose second largest is being threatened with an export ban.

Corporate: Banks Look for an Exit and a Planemaker Finds Corrosion

UBS rose about 2.5% on a Semafor report that it has revived discussions about moving out from under Swiss regulation, including through a combination with a foreign bank, after parliament voted to bind roughly twenty billion dollars of additional capital. This is worth more than a one line mention. A globally systemic bank publicly exploring redomicile as a response to capital rules is the clearest sign yet that the post-Credit Suisse Swiss settlement has a price its largest survivor is unwilling to pay, and it puts a live acquisition question into a sector that has spent two years being priced as a rates trade. It also moved an American bank’s shares on Thursday, which tells you the market is already guessing at counterparties.

Airbus identified a corrosion protection defect affecting more than 500 A321neo aircraft, roughly 250 of them still in production. The company says it is not a safety risk and the work is inspection and rework. Take that at face value and it is still a delivery schedule problem in the tightest narrowbody market in a decade, arriving at a manufacturer whose order book is the constraint on half the world’s airline capacity plans.

Elsewhere, BP is weighing a bid of two to five billion dollars for Devon Energy’s Eagle Ford position, which is a supermajor buying American shale into a WTI discount rather than away from it. HelloFresh cut full year guidance and blamed a pronounced reduction in third quarter marketing spend, which is a company choosing margin over customers and saying so. SpaceX has Starship Flight 14 on the pad for a 75 minute window opening 8:15 a.m. Eastern on Monday, the vehicle’s first orbital attempt, carrying 26 Starlink V3 satellites, which lands three days after the 328 million share unlock we flagged on Wednesday.

Earnings: Costco Beat and the Tape Did Not Care

The complex that matters produced nothing again. What reported was the consumer, and the read is the same one we have carried for five weeks.

Our take. Costco is the cleanest read in American retail and it was good: net sales up 11.2% to $93.9bn, comparable sales up 9.4% and 6.7% excluding fuel and currency, digital up 19.5%, membership fee income up 7.3% to $1.85bn, 150.4 million cardholders and an 89.8% worldwide renewal rate. Two things stop it being a clean bullish datapoint. Fifteen cents of the $6.75 came from non-recurring tariff refunds, the same one-off item that flattered AutoZone’s margin on Monday and that is now showing up in enough prints to be a pattern rather than a quirk. And the six point seven percent core comp is being helped by exactly the environment that hurts everyone else, because a household paying $6.51 for diesel trades down to the warehouse. Costco is not evidence the consumer is fine. It is evidence the consumer is economising, and the stock finishing flat on a twenty cent beat at a forty five times multiple says the market read it the same way.

TD Synnex is the more interesting line and it got no attention. An IT distributor beating by more than a dollar, twenty two percent above consensus, is the plumbing of the artificial intelligence buildout reporting volume, and the stock fell three percent. When the layer that physically moves the hardware beats by a fifth and gets sold, the market is telling you it has already paid for the volume.

The substance is Wednesday. Micron and Jabil report the same morning, September 30, into memory inventories under ten days, a guided $50bn quarter with an 86% gross margin, and a Taoyuan strike vote in early October. That single session carries the two hardest reads on the physical buildout anyone will get this quarter, and as of last night it also carries a networking company’s decision to pre-buy memory.

Asia and Europe

Tokyo did the work. The Nikkei rose 1.3% to 66,364 for a fifth consecutive advance, with the gain split between technology and banks, Kioxia up 2.2%, Advantest up 2.8%, Ibiden up 4.2%, and Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo Mitsui and Mizuho all up between 3.6% and 4.2%. A simultaneous rally in memory-adjacent manufacturers and in domestic lenders is a market pricing a strong global capex cycle and a higher domestic rate path at the same time, which is the most coherent thing any equity market has done this week. The yen at 158.26 is the counterweight, because the carry structure funding a meaningful share of this buildout is still intact a week after a Bank of Japan hike.

Hong Kong went the other way and fell 1.17%, having been down 1.69% at 24,343 by the midday break with the Hang Seng Tech index off 2.14% and Chinese technology and property the two drags. That is a fourth consecutive session of Chinese equities selling into a summit their own president is attending in Washington. With Shanghai and Shenzhen shut for Mid-Autumn until Monday, Hong Kong is the only venue expressing a view, and the view is that nothing is coming out of this meeting that the tape has not already banked.

Europe is having its best morning in a fortnight. The Stoxx 600 was up 0.7% in early London trade and is heading for a 0.9% weekly gain, its first in four weeks, with banks leading on the UBS report. That follows a soft Thursday in which the DAX fell 0.61% to 25,256, the CAC 0.52% to 8,081, the FTSE 0.24% to 10,680 and the FTSE MIB 0.85% to 51,543. European equities rallying on an easing of American yields and a softer oil price, having sold off all week on the reverse, is a market with no domestic driver at all.

Geopolitics

The Iran war reaches day two hundred and nine and the Hormuz negotiation now has a structure. A phased deal trading the reopening of the strait against the lifting of the American port blockade, a seven day Iranian timetable, Qatari mediation, and a reported Iranian concession on transit fees is a materially more advanced position than the mediated contact reported on Tuesday. Neither side has claimed a breakthrough and the war is approaching seven months. Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia continue, which is why a Hormuz deal removes one chokepoint risk rather than the chokepoint risk.

The Trump and Xi state visit closes today with a tea session and a site visit between 10:30 and 11:00 Eastern, which is the ceremonial end of a three day meeting whose only announced deliverable was extending the tariff truce to January. The substance was always rare earths, where China holds roughly ninety percent of global refining and effectively all heavy rare earth processing, and four months after the May framework the implementation record is mixed: progress on the two hundred Boeing aircraft, agricultural purchases running below the agreed level, and the new trade and investment boards still not operating. Hong Kong has now sold this summit for four straight sessions, and on the evidence it has been right to.

Key Events Today and This Week

Accountability

The CPU layer call is confirmed and confirmed on the right evidence. On Tuesday we took the direction of the re-rating and refused the download data offered as proof, arguing the receipt was AMD’s ten percent channel price increase. An $11.6bn seven year commitment with a $9bn expansion option is the hardest possible version of that receipt, and it arrived three sessions later. We will take it, and we will hold ourselves to the distinction we drew, which is that a confirmed workload thesis and a twenty percent move in a single vendor are two different things.

The distillate thesis is working and the market has now overtaken us. We said a ban would lower the domestic crack and widen the international one. The market has extended that into the crude itself, marking WTI down seven percent on the week against Brent up two and pushing the spread to a May wide. That is the correct second order conclusion and we did not draw it. Credit to the curve.

The crude discipline rule held and that is the only reason we are not marked against. On Wednesday we concluded that we should not carry a directional crude view at all while the strait is the marginal input. Brent has since gone from $98.99 to above $108 intraday to $105.70 inside three sessions. Having no view was the correct view.

The volatility framing stays where we left it. We buried the equity volatility call on September 19 and revised it on Thursday to say the mispricing sat in rates rather than equities. Bonds recovering today while the VIX sits at 15.68 is consistent with that, and we are not reviving anything on one session of relief.

The float call gets its test on Monday. SpaceX fell four percent into Wednesday’s 328 million share unlock and now flies its first orbital mission three days later. A successful flight against a freshly expanded float is the cleanest single read available on whether this complex is constrained by demand or by supply of paper, and we will mark it here on Tuesday either way.