Nvidia Buys Into the Grid: Up to $3B for Stargate Power Developer
U.S. markets are closed for the weekend; the next open is Monday, August 10 at 9:30 a.m. ET (4:30 p.m. in Istanbul). The week's most structural story landed as the bell rang: according to The Information, Nvidia has taken roughly a 20% stake in Texas power developer Lancium for $2 billion, with up to $1 billion more to follow if the company clears certain thresholds — chief among them completing grid hookups. The deal values Lancium at about $10 billion; its 1,000-acre campus in Abilene is the first operational site of Stargate, the SoftBank–OpenAI–Oracle venture planning as much as $500 billion in infrastructure spending, and Lancium is weighing an IPO in 2027.
The mechanism matters. For two years Nvidia has propped up its largest customers through vendor financing; it is now stepping past that into owning the electricity that runs its hardware. Tying the final tranche not to chip sales but to an interconnection approval from the ERCOT grid is the clearest admission yet that the bottleneck in AI capex has moved from compute to power — and it explains why independent power producers like Vistra, which reported Friday morning, now trade on the AI story.
The second theme is memory. The industry is in its tightest shortage in 15 years, with second-quarter DRAM and NAND contract prices up as much as 75%, and Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron all holding supply tight. The cost is now reaching the end product: grew iPhone revenue 22% while explicitly flagging memory cost inflation, and Elon Musk said over the weekend that prices will keep climbing — margin for the memory makers, a line item for everyone who buys from them.
