Borrowing for Silicon: Samsung Books a Record Quarter as Chip Buyers Line Up Private Credit
Samsung guides to a record 107.4 trillion won quarter and TSMC posts another record month, Broadcom, Oracle, and SpaceX are reportedly lining up private loans for chips, Finland halts two Google sites, and Google’s Wyoming campus gets its own gas plant.
Today’s Signals
- Samsung Q3 guidance – operating profit ~107.4T won (range 107.3T-107.5T) vs 12.17T a year earlier; sales ~195T won; full results Oct 29 — preliminary guidance.
- AI chip financing – Broadcom seeking $50B+ for OpenAI’s custom chip; Oracle in talks with Apollo and Goldman; SpaceX discussed $40B for Nvidia chips — early-stage talks reported by WSJ.
- Google Finland – regulator LVV ordered work halted at Muhos and Kajaani pending environmental assessments, no later than Oct 23; follows a $15B Finland pledge — order issued, Google complying.
- Black Hills – Google Cheyenne – $1.8B for 564 MW of new gas generation; up to 590 MW of grid service plus ~2.1 GW via private microgrid; first power late 2027 — agreements signed.
- CoreWeave India – 240 MW with AdaniConneX in Navi Mumbai; three 80 MW buildings; Nvidia Vera Rubin; first phase mid-2028 — planned deployment.
The Big Story
The AI buildout is outgrowing the bond market, and the chip bill is moving to private credit. Broadcom has spent recent weeks trying to arrange more than $50 billion of financing for the custom chip it is building with OpenAI, approaching Apollo and Blackstone, according to The Wall Street Journal. Oracle is in talks with Apollo and Goldman Sachs to fund a large chip purchase, likely through a separate entity that buys the hardware and leases it to Oracle. SpaceX has discussed a $40 billion financing for Nvidia chips, talks the Financial Times reported first. All three are early-stage, sizes could change, and Broadcom and Oracle are aiming to close before year-end. Cloud providers paid for earlier rounds from cash flow and hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds, but newer buyers such as OpenAI and Anthropic lack the balance sheets to buy hardware outright. Lease structures keep debt off the borrower’s books, but they make true leverage harder to see and spread any AI revenue wobble across more lenders. The terms will matter as much as the size.
AI
Samsung just guided to the biggest quarter in its history. Preliminary third-quarter operating profit came in at about 107.4 trillion won, up from 89.49 trillion in the second quarter and 12.17 trillion a year earlier, on sales of about 195 trillion won. Euronews notes that, if confirmed, it would top the $63.7 billion of operating income Nvidia booked in its latest quarter. It also cleared the 106.1 trillion won consensus. TSMC kept pace: September revenue was NT$511.86 billion, up 54.6 percent from a year earlier and down 0.6 percent from August, with third-quarter earnings due next week. On the cloud side, CoreWeave is entering India with 240 megawatts at AdaniConneX’s Taloja campus in Navi Mumbai: three 80-megawatt buildings running Nvidia Vera Rubin, a first phase in mid-2028, and room to double. KT Cloud will build a 50-megawatt-class AI data center in Incheon’s Cheongna district, due in early 2030. Chipmakers are banking the boom; clouds are planting flags in Asia.
Money
Lenders are getting choosier, and sponsors are filling the gap with guarantees. In Korea, Naver and Brookfield are discussing up to $9 billion of financing to take Naver’s Gak Sejong AI factory from 55 megawatts to 200 megawatts, with Nvidia planning to invest $1 billion, the Korea Herald reports. The initial 12-week negotiating window expires next Wednesday, and Korean banks are still weighing GPU utilization and how fast the hardware ages. In the U.S., AMD has agreed to backstop a $300 million Goldman Sachs loan to Crusoe for AMD chips at its Springfield, Ohio campus, according to The Information. If Crusoe cannot fill the capacity, AMD leases the chips back, and that promise helped price the loan near 6 percent. Together they show where the risk is landing: on whoever is willing to stand behind the hardware.
Energy & Power
Google is building power plants into its campus plans. Black Hills will invest $1.8 billion between 2027 and 2029 in 564 megawatts of new gas generation for Google’s planned data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The utility provides up to 590 megawatts of grid service, while about 2.1 gigawatts of third-party resources run through a privately managed microgrid. Power starts in late 2027, the contracts run through 2048, and Google bears the cost of serving the site. BKV signed for about 1,200 megawatts of gas-fired equipment for a prospective Texas plant, with an unnamed investment-grade hyperscaler covering about 90 percent of payments until March 31, 2027, when BKV can walk away if offtake terms are not agreed. Meanwhile PJM, where capacity prices have risen more than elevenfold since 2024, has proposed that data centers bring their own power or accept remote curtailment at peaks. The grid connection is becoming the smaller half of the power plan.
Government Power
Permits are biting in Europe’s favorite data-center frontier. Finland’s licensing and supervision agency ordered Google’s local subsidiary to stop building at Muhos and Kajaani until environmental impact assessments are done, no later than October 23, a month after Google pledged $15 billion for Finland. Google said it had fallen short of its own standards and will comply. In Russia, drones hit Yandex’s Sasovo data center, causing a fire and suspending operations at a site with tens of thousands of servers, the first major attack on a Russian data hub in the war. In California, Oakland passed its own unanimous 45-day moratorium on new data centers the same day as San Francisco. And in Washington, the bipartisan Senate permitting bill would make new data centers of 20 megawatts or more pay the incremental costs they impose on the power system, plus their share of existing transmission; floor debate is targeted for November. Permission now comes with an invoice.
Startup and Small Business Signal
The cheapest megawatt is the one you do not waste. Clockwork.io raised $31 million, bringing its total to $73 million, for software that keeps AI jobs running through GPU, network, and server failures instead of restarting from a checkpoint. Volantis raised an $88 million Series A for a photonic system that links compute to pooled memory, with first deliveries to customers planned for 2027. For small firms, the opening is utilization: tools and services that squeeze more useful work out of hardware that buyers are now borrowing billions to own.
AMP Bottom Line
Samsung’s record 107.4 trillion won quarter says AI demand is real; the financing talks say meeting it is getting expensive. Broadcom, Oracle, and SpaceX are reportedly turning to private credit, Naver’s lenders are testing utilization, and Google is paying for its own gas plant in Wyoming. Watch TSMC’s earnings next week and whether those chip loans close by year-end.