Goldman Sachs

AI Funding Risks: Hedge Fund Collapse and Nvidia Financing

A recent rout in AI and chip stocks exposed fragilities in the AI funding boom, illustrated by Situational Awareness — a leveraged San Francisco hedge fund led by Leopold Aschenbrenner — which sold its public stock portfolio to Citadel after margin calls created a liquidity crisis. The piece flags vendor financing risks as Nvidia has made large, hardware-linked investments and commitments (including a reported $5 billion commitment to Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and reported talks to guarantee up to $250 billion for OpenAI). Corporate venture capital and new financial actors (big managers and private credit) now dominate AI financing, while special purpose vehicles (SPVs) are outpacing direct secondary trades on some platforms, underscoring evolving—and potentially systemic—financing risks for the AI buildout.

Shein Posts Q1 Loss Ahead of Hong Kong IPO

Shein, the China-founded online fashion retailer headquartered in Singapore, reported a net loss of $99 million for Q1 2026, reversing a prior-year profit of $395 million, according to its Hong Kong IPO prospectus. Revenue rose modestly by 1.1% to $9.05 billion in the quarter, while operating profit fell 26% to $258 million. Shein attributes the deterioration primarily to the removal of the US "de-minimis" import duty exemption for packages under $800 (May 2025) and to forthcoming EU changes that introduce minimum duties, both of which have weighed on US sales and margins. The company recorded full-year 2025 revenue of $41.9 billion, has seen its valuation decline since 2022, and has received Chinese regulator approval to list in Hong Kong with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPM advising the debut.

Ramp Launches Free LLM Router and AI Spend Dashboard

Ramp has opened public access to its LLM Router — an OpenAI-compatible proxy that routes requests to the cheapest model meeting a quality threshold — and is coupling it with a free AI Token Spend Management dashboard for finance teams. Ramp reports the router adds ~30ms latency and, by its internal metrics, reduces LLM costs by ~30%. The company says the router has run in production for three years across 100+ AI features, serving 70,000 customers and pushing 2.75 trillion tokens per month. The newsletter also summarizes H1 2026 fintech funding: ~$28–31B raised, deal counts down ~26%, and capital concentrating into a small set of mega-rounds and category leaders.