What is Apollo?

Jonathan Thomas on the circular AI capex financing risk.

“Take that example times a thousand and everybody's lending andor equity investing in everyone else's projects and the concern is when the music stops all these people go for the chairs and a lot of people going to be left without a chair because some of those funding commitments are going to vanish as though they were a vapor.”

Jonathan Thomas explains how NeoCloud companies create a circular AI financing loop, with Nvidia financially backstopping GPU purchases by firms whose backing capital may itself be contingent or sourced indirectly from Nvidia.

“I start a Neocloud. I say I am building a data center. I have money from Saudi Arabia and maybe the Norwegians and everybody private equity Apollo's in blah. So, I'm gonna build this data center and I'm going to start my own NeoCloud. Jensen Wang calls and says, "I heard the news. I think it's great. We would like to sell you GPUs." Y and by the way, we will financially backs stop those purchases. You don't have the capital yet. We know you're good for it because we see that you have all this backing and therefore Nvidia is going to book that chip sale to me and I'm either using money that indirectly comes from them or I'm backstopping that to raise money from someone else.”

Apollo is rolling out daily estimated values across its entire credit business by end of September 2026, a transparency push that could set a new pricing standard for private credit.

“By the end of September, this will be across the entirety of our credit business.”

Data center financing check sizes are too large for most credit funds to syndicate across a diversified portfolio, leaving only mega-managers like Apollo able to participate.

“The check size is just so big that for credit where you need to have a lot more bets in a fund. it's really hard to be able to participate unless you are the Apollos of the world in a lot of this data center financing.”

IMAX lost manufacturing blueprints and engineering knowledge for its 70mm film projectors decades ago, mirroring how NASA lost the tribal knowledge to rebuild Apollo spacecraft.

“Sources at IMAX confirmed a variety that many of the parts needed to build these specialized film projectors were simply no longer exist. The original design files were created roughly half a century ago. but they never properly maintained. As a result, IMX no longer has complete manufacturing blueprint. And much like the lost tribal knowledge of the Apollo Aeros spacecraft, very few engineers working today fully understand the systems.”

Marc Rowan predicts global fixed income markets will shift from domination by 10 large banks to control by five large banks and five large tech companies, putting tech firms at the center of credit intermediation.

“The same thing, by the way, is happening in the global fixed >> Dominated historically by 10 large banks, it's about to be dominated by five large banks and five large tech companies. As much concentration as exists in the equity market, that's how much concentration is going to exist in the fixed income market.”

Apollo's insurance entities have estimated real capital of $4 to $6 billion, far below the stated statutory capital of $20 to $30 billion.

“I've calculated the real capital as more like 4 to six billion than 20 or 30 that they're saying statutory it's 4.1 or 4.2.”

The federal government released a photo of a triangle craft reportedly hovering over the 1972 Apollo space mission.

“Last Friday the federal government released a photo of a triangle craft hovering over the 1972 Apollo space mission.”