Friday, and the buildout doesn't take the weekend off.

Galaxy Digital just priced a $3.5 billion senior secured note round to fund phase 2 of its Helios AI campus at a coupon of nearly 10%, a reminder that even the best-collateralized compute still prices like high-yield risk without an investment-grade counterparty.

That's today's lead. Below it: a record quarter from the biggest data-center landlord, a $1B fiber deal that shows where the next bottleneck is, and the AI giants lobbying Washington to keep open-weight models legal.

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Even a long-dated lease to a marquee tenant still clears the market near 10% if they aren’t investment-grade.

Galaxy Digital (NASDAQ: GLXY) priced $3.507 billion in senior secured notes on Thursday through its Galaxy Helios Data Centers II subsidiary, providing key details for the private offering it announced Wednesday. The notes carry a 9.875% coupon and mature August 1, 2031.

The money funds the next phase of Galaxy’s Helios campus in Dickens County, Texas: two buildings and eight data halls on ~260 acres, built to 400 MW of utility capacity and 260 MW of deliverable critical IT.

So, the big question is, how does Galaxy’s cost of capital stack up to the competition?

Hut 8 is the only one in this cohort who carries fully amortizing notes, whereas the rest — including Galaxy Digital — have partially amortizing notes, meaning they will have to refinance at maturity. For Hut 8’s Beacon Point deal, the fully-amortizing structure is just as important as the tenant’s credit profile (NVIDIA is reportedly the counterparty here, boasting a AA credit rating).

For the others, the tenant’s credit rating is doing the heavy lifting.

DI Metrics points out that Cipher is pledging AWS cash flows for Stingray and Black Pearl, and TeraWulf’s Lake Mariner campus, with capacity contracted by Fluidstack, is backstopped by Google. Hut 8 also counts Fluidstack as a tenant at its River Bend site, with the same Google backstopping pledge, and once again the notes’ structure here is pushing down the borrowing cost.

Meanwhile, Galaxy's Helios offtaker is CoreWeave, and CoreWeave's own unsecured paper sits at 9.75% ($2.8B) and 10.00% ($2.0B due 2030, $1.75B due 2031), with secured GPU term loans running SOFR-based at 9–15%.

Helios II is essentially priced off CoreWeave's curve, not Galaxy's. The datacenter bond market is underwriting the lease counterparty and treating the operator as a servicer.

Bloomberg reporting has confirmed NVIDIA as Hut 8’s Beacon Point tenant, as highlighted by Rittenhouse Research in a post that (fittingly for today’s newsletter) shows that data center bond spreads are starting to stretch.

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Meta (NASDAQ: META) and 22 other organizations urged U.S. policymakers Friday to protect open-weight AI models from broad restrictions. The coalition’s open letter, published July 24, says open-weight models are systems that anyone can download, look over, change and run on their own infrastructure. Signatories include Andreessen Horowitz, Hugging Face, IBM, The Linux Foundation, Mistral, Palantir, Perplexity and Y Combinator.

Digital Realty Trust (NYSE: DLR) raised its 2026 Core FFO outlook on Thursday after second-quarter revenue rose 29% year over year to $1.92 billion. Core FFO reached a record $2.65 per diluted share, up from $1.87 one year earlier. Core funds from operations (Core FFO) measures the recurring earnings generated by Digital Realty’s data center business.

CEO Dan Schulman said Friday that Verizon has struck a deal with Google worth more than $1 billion to supply dark-fiber links for the search engine giant’s data centers. Schulman disclosed the contract during Verizon’s post-earnings call, according to Reuters. The companies did not provide details about the agreement’s duration, geographic scope or deployment schedule.

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