Rising "Neocloud" Demand from Financials

Jane Street has signed a $13bn , five year AI cloud contract with "neocloud" provider Crusoe, a former crypto-mining company (2018-2024) which pivoted into AI data-center infrastructure. Crusoe supplies AI compute to Meta, Oracle and now Jane Street. Financially, they recently raised $3bn at a $30bn valuation. Jane Street also has cloud agreements with CoreWeave in which it also has a $1bn equity stake.

JP Morgan Reportedly Curbs Financing to Market Makers

This comes in the light of market makers like Jane Street attempting to encroach on market share from banks, and poaching talent to do so.

Examples include Jane Street's expansion into Fixed Income markets, offering quotes on US Treasuries, the traditional remit of banks, as well as talent poaching, with Citadel poaching JP Morgan's head of high-touch trading.

JP Morgan has been estimated to have provided around 5% of Jane Street's total leverage, which will now decline. It remains to be seen if other banks follow suit, putting pressure on profitability of market makers.

CME Group Embraces ERCOT Trading

The CME ("Where risk meetings opportunity") has initially listed 53 electricity futures and options on ERCOT, effective 31 August 2026.

These are purely financial contracts - with the futures financially settled, and options exercised into financial futures. 

Example contracts include:

ERCOT North 345KV Real-time Peak Monthly 1MW Futures (NRK) 

Europe Imports Record Russian LNG in H1 2026

Data from Kpler suggests Europe has imported 9.89 million tons of LNG from Russia's Yamal LNG field in H1 2026.

Microsoft Fiscal Year Results, 18% Revenue Growth, 41% Growth in Azure

Annual revenue $331bn (+18%), MS Cloud $214bn (+27%), Azure $100bn+ (+41%). Models and copilots are a big future focus.

China Engineering out of Dutch Dependency in SemiCons

China has developed its own "immersion deep ultraviolet" (DUV) lithography machines.  Immersion DUV machines are used in the chip manufacturing process - controlled by one company, Holland's ASML ("Changing the World One Nanometre at a Time").

Multiverse Computing Bags Series C

Multiverse Computing has bagged 500m EUR in its Series C capital raise, seven years after its 2019 founding. This is a 2bn EUR valuation - making it Europe's newest unicorn!

The company specialises in AI model compression, using quantum computing-derived techniques to implement LLMs with reduced cost and energy consumption.

The funding round was led by Forgepoint Capital ("Backing Founders of the Digital Future"), BNPP SIVF and Bullhound Capital.