WuBlockchain’s WhiteLine Daily said market pricing is being shaped by two forces at the same time: higher oil risk after direct military exchanges resumed between the United States and Iran, and continued spending on AI infrastructure, including custom chips, GPU cloud capacity and data center cooling.
Direct US-Iran exchanges lift crude prices
According to Reuters, the United States and Iran resumed direct military exchanges for the first time since July this year. Rising concern over disruptions to Middle East oil supply pushed Brent crude up 1.3% to $91.67 a barrel, while WTI crude rose 1.48% to $87.03.
WhiteLine Daily noted that shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has still not returned to normal. About 20% of global oil supply typically moves through the waterway.
Its brief analysis said the renewed US-Iran conflict has raised the risk premium in crude again, supporting energy stocks, while inflation and interest-rate pressure may weigh on richly valued technology shares.
Nvidia buys $3.5 billion in MediaTek convertible bonds
Nvidia has invested in $3.5 billion of convertible bonds issued by MediaTek. The two companies will expand cooperation in AI infrastructure, local AI computing and smart vehicles.
MediaTek will adopt Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion platform to design custom XPUs for cloud service providers, hyperscale data centers and model developers, and connect those systems to Nvidia’s rack-scale NVLink infrastructure.
WhiteLine Daily said the investment extends Nvidia’s reach beyond GPUs into interconnect, memory and rack-scale systems tied to custom XPUs.
Anthropic signs about $35 billion cloud compute deal with Lambda
Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Anthropic has signed a cloud compute agreement worth about $35 billion with Nvidia-backed AI cloud provider Lambda.
The compute capacity will come from a roughly 350-megawatt data center that Hut 8 is building in Texas, supporting demand for generative AI products including Claude Code.
The report added that Lambda recently completed about $1 billion in private debt, a $926 million loan and a $1 billion credit facility to buy Nvidia GPUs and expand data center capacity.
WhiteLine Daily said the $35 billion order directly links Anthropic’s compute demand, Nvidia GPUs, Lambda’s cloud services and Hut 8’s data center buildout, while also backing Lambda’s recent debt-funded expansion.
SLB agrees $4.1 billion Kelvion acquisition
SLB has signed an agreement to acquire thermal management and heat-exchange equipment maker Kelvion through about $3.4 billion in cash and the assumption of about $700 million in debt, valuing the deal at about $4.1 billion.
Kelvion is expected to generate $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion in revenue from data centers in 2026. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
SLB plans to raise revenue from the combined data center solutions business to $4.5 billion to $5 billion by 2028.
WhiteLine Daily added that Kelvion is expected to contribute $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion in data center revenue this year, and that the acquisition would lift SLB’s revenue opportunity per gigawatt of data center capacity to more than double.