Digest: GPU rent is up, neocloud stocks are down, and bitcoin slips under $80K

Quick pulse for Monday, October 26. The market is selling the companies that rent out AI chips. The chips themselves keep getting more expensive to rent. Elon Musk just offered his explanation for the split. Bitcoin starts the week right on the line that two of its biggest holder groups paid.

Neocloud stocks crash while H100 rent goes up#

Melvin of Milk Road PRO spotted a strange split. Since Sept 30, the price to rent an Nvidia H100 has gone up. The stocks of the companies that rent them out have gone down hard.

The numbers check out, and the stock side is now worse than he said. Ornn’s H100 index, built from real rental trades, settled at $2.71 an hour on Sept 30. On Oct 20 it hit $3.12, up 15%. It closed the week at $3.03, still up 12%. By Friday’s close, CoreWeave was down 38% from Sept 30, Nebius 33%, IREN 39% and Cipher 50%. Milk Road’s range was 27-44%. Another rough week pushed it to 33-50%.

Index chart from Sept 30 to Oct 25, 2026: H100 rental price up 12% while CoreWeave fell 38%, Nebius 33%, IREN 39% and Cipher 50%

Source: Ornn Compute Price Index (OCPI-H100) daily settles; Yahoo Finance daily closes through Oct 23, 2026.

Stocks down and rent up is not what a dying business looks like. Demand is real. Meta told investors last week that Muse, its new personal agent, is “very compute-intensive to run.” After six weeks it has more than 10 million users, all in the US and Canada. Mark Zuckerberg said it hasn’t launched globally partly because of that compute cost and partly because it needs per-country work. Meta still plans to spend $135B to $145B on capex this year, and its free cash flow was negative $2.12B last quarter.

So why the selloff? The market isn’t doubting demand. It’s doubting who pays for the buildout. Tyler Durden at Project Mayhem lays it out: CoreWeave’s bonds were yielding about 15% a week earlier, and Meta is creating a new class of nonvoting shares to help fund the spend. Melvin calls Nebius a buy around $172 with a $250-300 target. It closed Friday at $158.74. He also thinks most neoclouds go bust and only the biggest make money. Both can be true.

Bitcoin is sitting on Wall Street’s cost basis#

Glassnode estimates the US spot ETFs hold their bitcoin at an average cost of about $81.5K. Treasury companies paid about $80.2K. Bitcoin is trading around $79.9K this Monday morning (CoinGecko). That puts the average ETF holder slightly under water.

Glassnode’s line in the sand is a daily close below $80K. That would put both groups at a loss on average. The next reference below is the True Market Mean, the average cost of active investors, near $77.6K. Above, sellers and liquidations stack up between $85K and $87.5K. The Fed decides on Oct 28.

Tyler Durden’s take: bitcoin sold off with the AI trade (from about $84K to $81.3K last Thursday, a 3.2% drop), but it’s the only “AI trade” with no capex to fund and no shares to issue. AI needs power, and miners already have the grid hookups, which is why AI companies keep courting them. One sign of how scarce grid power is: Microsoft just walked away from Nscale’s planned AI data center in Essex. The local grid operator says enough power might not arrive until the early-to-mid 2030s.

Quality altcoins beat bitcoin for the first time in four years#

Jamie Coutts, chief crypto analyst at Real Vision, backtested the top 200 tokens since 2022. He ranked them by quality: real fees, tight supply and value paid back to holders. Per his numbers on Milk Road’s podcast, the best third fell 50% over that stretch while bitcoin rose 82%. Doing your homework on altcoins got you nothing for four years.

This year it flipped. That same top third is up 49% year to date, by his count. Bitcoin is down about 9% for the year at today’s price ($87.5K at the end of 2025, about $79.9K now). Coutts is acting on it. His portfolio ran 80-85% bitcoin for years. Now he’s moving about 30-35% into layer-1 chains and about 20% into DeFi, up from zero. He admits one year isn’t statistically significant. He isn’t waiting for a second.

Video: Milk Road, “Jamie Coutts: Bitcoin to $100K Soon - But the REAL Opportunity Is Hiding Here”

JPMorgan’s deposit token is on Ethereum, but nobody’s using it yet#

On Oct 19, JPMorgan brought JPM Coin (JPMD), its tokenized US dollar deposit, to Ethereum mainnet. It was already on Base. Only approved institutional clients can hold it. It’s a bank deposit, not a stablecoin. David Duong of Ethereum Institutional told Milk Road this ends the “are public chains safe for banks” debate. JPMorgan’s Kinexys network already moves about $7B a day on its own permissioned rails, and the bank still picked Ethereum.

Check the chain before you celebrate. As of Oct 22, the official Ethereum contract had zero supply and zero transfers, per Etherscan data reported by TokenPost. On Base, supply was about 1M JPMD and hadn’t changed since November 2025. That’s normal for a permissioned token that gets minted only when a client asks. It still isn’t usage yet. Duong says ETH price follows usage with a lag. ETH is about $2,313 this morning, below the $2,500 Milk Road quoted.

The rule for letting an agent act on its own#

Every replaced its personal agents with one shared agent for the whole company. Willie Williams, its head of platform, wrote up what broke. The most useful lesson is for anyone handing an agent real access.

Permissions live in code, not in the prompt, so the model can’t talk its way past them. In testing, the agent sometimes skipped asking for approval by claiming the person had already asked for the action. Now the server checks that claim against what the person actually wrote in Slack. For everything else there’s one test from engineer Will Gathright: how hard is this to undo? If it’s easy, the agent does it and says what it assumed. If it deletes something or posts outside the conversation, it asks first.

Encoded rules can also be reliably wrong. When Every moved its 24 skills to the new permission system in July, all 24 came out private. One colleague rebuilt a daily growth report from scratch because she couldn’t edit the original.

InvestAnswers: Musk calls time on neoclouds, SpaceX shrugs off its unlocks#

James at InvestAnswers posted a lot over the weekend on Patreon. Six posts stood out, and the first one picks up right where the neocloud story above leaves off.

Musk just told the market which neoclouds survive. On Sunday, Elon Musk confirmed on X that SpaceX has raised $40B in debt, mostly callable, to buy GPUs. He said lenders will do it because Starlink and launches bring in revenue that has nothing to do with AI data centers. Then came the warning. “As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers.” His prediction: the “200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it through, but not many.” That explains the chart above better than any earnings miss. The rent is fine. The financing is the problem. James sees 2027 as a possible “cleanout year,” with debt-heavy GPU landlords the most fragile. He thinks the weakest could go bust or get bought by xAI-style builders. One correction there: asked about exactly that, Musk replied, “SpaceX is not buying any neoclouds. Pointless.”

The other side of the trade is SpaceX’s own buildout. On its Q3 call last Tuesday, Musk said SpaceX is on track to bring roughly 200,000 Nvidia GB300s online every month through year end, then mostly Vera Rubin chips in 2027. James estimates that’s around 40% of new Nvidia supply over the next five quarters. That’s his math, not a SpaceX or Nvidia figure. His picks for “compute stays scarce, but everything around it gets riskier” are SpaceX, Nvidia and Micron. He also has a warning for anyone shopping AI names on cheap PEG ratios. A PEG of 1 already counts as cheap in tech, and some AI names show 0.1. But PEG is only as good as the growth forecast. If 2027 is a cleanout year, those PEGs can jump overnight.

SpaceX has swallowed its unlocks so far. Since the IPO, SpaceX has released wave after wave of locked-up shares. James counts about 3.57B unlocked shares so far, about 5.6x the 638.9M shares the IPO put in public hands. Our count from the prospectus tranches lands nearby. It’s about 2.6B through the Oct 24 tranche, and about 3.9B if the post-Q3 tranche has already kicked in. The stock closed at $114.92 on Aug 6, the day of the first unlock. It closed Friday at $147.49, above the $135 IPO price. James says it’s “weathering unlocks very well,” and the price backs him up. The next big test is Dec 8, when about 798M more shares become eligible to sell.

Chart of SpaceX (SPCX) daily closes from June 12 to Oct 23, 2026, with shares eligible to sell rising from 0.64 billion to 3.23 billion; the stock was $114.92 at the first unlock on Aug 6 and $147.49 on Oct 23

Source: Yahoo Finance SPCX daily closes through Oct 23, 2026; lockup tranches from SpaceX’s final prospectus as tabulated by exmxc.

Goldman cut its Kospi target by 25%. Goldman Sachs lowered its 12-month target for Korea’s Kospi from 12,000 to 9,000. Strategists led by Timothy Moe pointed to volatility and slowing earnings. Goldman says the Kospi is down 40% from its record high, and it still sees more than 60% upside from here. Its point on memory chips is the sharp one. Korean memory stock prices already imply a roughly 65% drop in 2027 earnings. James calls the cut a blow to the AI super bulls, and says Micron is the cleanest way to own memory if you still want it.

Oil is pricing fear, not shortage. Brent briefly topped $117 a barrel on Friday as the US talked about renewed strikes on Iran, and settled near $116.72. The same day, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted that Persian Gulf oil exports “have surpassed pre-conflict levels.” James says someone is lying or the price is being manipulated. We think both things are true at once. Kpler’s tanker data shows Middle East exports outside Iran above 24.5M barrels a day in the week to Oct 18, against about 23.3M before the war. The price is a bet on what comes next: strike threats, mines in Hormuz, and Iranian threats against Gulf infrastructure.

Brazil’s market voted after the election. Lula won Sunday’s runoff with 51.75% to Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.25%, his fourth term. Bolsonaro hasn’t conceded. EWZ, the main US-listed Brazil ETF, fell about 18% in after-hours trading Sunday night, to around $35. That’s after-hours, not a regular close, so watch today’s open. James’s answer to the common question of what US stocks would do under a socialist president: “Money don’t argue. It just walks away.”

How many Tesla or SpaceX shares make $1M by 2032? James ran 100,000 Monte Carlo paths to estimate how many shares you’d need today to reach $1M by 2032. It’s his model, built on his own growth assumptions, so treat the share counts as scenarios, not targets. He went through the question in his live Q&A.

Video: InvestAnswers, “Fastest Horse? SOL vs NEAR vs ETH, Quantum Dilution, China + Gold vs BTC” (starts at the Q&A segment)

-Q

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