The AI capex chain: credit, equity, the collateral and who holds it, from two regulators' public tapes and the statutory blanks
The companies building, financing and powering AI capacity, followed through every public record that names them: five-year protection from the SEC's single-name credit file, traded prices and synthetic-financing activity from the SEC's single-stock swap file, the rental rate of the hardware that secures the leverage, and what life insurers' statutory blanks say they hold of each layer. The CFTC index tape — CDX, iTraxx and their options — stays on the Credit page; the index and volatility complex on Equity. This page is the names.
Credit: single-name protection
Single-name CDS from the SEC security-based swap tape — the file that names the reference entity — for hyperscalers and model owners, chips, enterprise hardware, data-centre landlords, power, sponsor-financed capacity and the leveraged tier. Five-year protection as a daily median of prints; upfront-quoted names converted to a running spread. The last column is the market's own classification: the share of a name's prints written on the 500 coupon, the high-yield convention, rather than the investment-grade 100 — a name migrating towards 500 is being reclassified by dealers whatever its rating says. Beneath it, the whole single-name market: the busiest names and the biggest movers, whoever they are.
Five-year protection, the chain vs CDX IG, bp
The chain, latest prints
Busiest single names, last 20 sessions
Biggest movers, last 20 sessions vs the 20 before
5y medians · names with six or more priced prints in each windowEquity: the same names on the single-stock swap tape
The SEC's single-stock swap file names the underlier and carries the traded price on every print, so the equity leg comes from the tape rather than a vendor: each name's price is the daily median of the prices its total-return swaps traded at, with the day's 10th–90th percentile range, and the activity columns count the synthetic financing and short book written on the name. OTC single-stock options are rare on this file and are counted where they appear; the listed-index volatility complex is on the Equity page. Prices are swap prints, not exchange closes: they bracket the day rather than mark it.
Traded price, rebased to 100 at the window start
The chain, latest prints
Single-stock swap prints on the chain, per day
The collateral: what an hour of a GPU rents for
GPU-secured leases and loans are written against hardware with no public mark — bare clusters clear in private requests for quote — so the nearest observable curve is the rental rate: weekly provider-median on-demand rates across the cloud GPU market, in dollars per GPU-hour, with the prior-generation discount (H100 against B200) and the 12- and 36-month reservation medians where listed. The rental rate bundles the chip with power, cooling and a building; the chip without those is worth less, and the difference is the price of a megawatt slot. An implied residual value backed out of this curve, net of power and curtailment, is in preparation; its method will be published here before the series goes live.
Weekly medians
Advertised prices, not transactions; medians move when providers join or leave as well as when anyone reprices. Source: GetDeploying, GPU rental price history, CC BY 4.0. Cross-checks: the SemiAnalysis H100 composite and Silicon Data's rental indices, both published on Bloomberg.
Who holds it: the statutory books by layer
What the parsed Schedule D rows of eight life-insurance books show of each layer of the chain, at book value and as a floor rather than a total. The insurers are not the leveraged edge — the neocloud credits are almost absent — but their lower-stack exposure is the real estate: securitised colocation leases whose tenants are the chain, carried as investment grade and repriced only when leases are. Refreshed when statements are filed; no position is attributed to a filer here.
Holdings by layer, with the layer's most-traded name in protection
What to watch
The order things moved in October — single names first, equities second, the index last — is the page's organising claim, and these are the readings that would confirm or break it. Each is a series on this site or a public record it links to; none is a forecast.
On the tape
Off the tape
- The rental curve
- H100 spot against purpose-built inference capacity; the 36-month H100 reservation ceasing to clear; then the on-demand median. Spot cracks first.
- Power
- Interconnection completions against H100 rent (the second life ends when the megawatts are reallocated); negative compute-spread hours in ERCOT and PJM; whether operators hedge at all.
- The vendor
- Contingent support becoming contractual: hour-linked revenue in a filing, or a lease where the vendor rather than a vehicle is lessor. The day the maker sells hours, its CDS becomes the series to watch.
- The tenant
- Lease terms against the tenant's commitment terms in securitisation documents; termination-for-convenience language in capacity contracts; the first non-renewal notice at a powered site.
- The books
- Q3 statutory statements, 15 November: new neocloud names, data-centre ABS concentration, the Oracle position.
- The futures
- CME's H100 and B200 rental-index futures, pending review: the first public forward curve for the collateral's earning power, to be set against the reservation-implied forwards here.
Research notes on the chain
Longer pieces written from these series. Each is a PDF; the figures can be reproduced from the published JSON.
Method & caveats
Two regulators' public tapes, one open rental dataset and the statutory blanks; nothing licensed.
- Two files, two regulators
- Index credit (CDX, iTraxx) and index equity derivatives report to the CFTC and appear in its Part 43 files, which mask single-name underliers. Single-name CDS and single-stock swaps are security-based swaps and report to the SEC, whose public files name the reference entity and the underlier. This page is built from the SEC files; the Credit and Equity pages from the CFTC's. A move that happens in one and not the other — as in October 2026, when the chain repriced name by name while the index barely moved — is visible here and in neither file alone.
- Single-name CDS
- Entities keyed by RED code. Five-year = prints with 4.4–5.6 years to expiry, daily median of traded spreads. Where a name is quoted upfront on the 500 coupon, the running spread is implied with a flat hazard and 40% recovery and flagged *; the tape does not sign the upfront, so 100-coupon upfront prints are counted but not priced.
- Equity prices and activity
- Single-stock total-return and price-return swaps matched to the name by ISIN or RIC. Price is the tape's traded-price field: daily median with the 10th–90th percentile range. Notional is USD-equivalent at fixed rough FX for non-USD names. Prints count NEWT executions on the day; a print is a swap, not a share, and the same underlying exposure can print more than once along a dealer chain. Options are counted where the file carries them; they are few.
- Collateral
- GetDeploying weekly provider-median GPU rental rates (CC BY 4.0, attribution required): each provider's own median first, then the median across providers. On-demand, spot and reservation terms as listed. Shown on each day of the week in the chart builder.
- Holders
- CUSIP-level Schedule D Part 1 rows parsed from publicly posted annual and quarterly statements, grouped by issuer into the chain's layers; book value; coverage is measured against the blanks' own subtotals and is partial for some filers, so every figure is a floor.
Requests
Ask for a name, a series, a cut of the data, or a correction. Posts are visible to everyone with the page; sign with a name or handle if you want a reply, or write to rates@ruxton.ai.