Credit Default Swaps Surge for AI-Heavy Tech Firms as Market Picks Winners and Losers

IREN's fair value estimate has been trimmed from US$80.93 to US$79.03, a modest adjustment reflecting a mix of growing AI cloud contracts and ongoing questions around execution and supply build out through 2027. The revision lifts revenue growth assumptions to 168.01% from 125.79% and net profit margin expectations to 11.73% from 5.79%, while the future P/E assumption drops to 31.26x from 90.29x and the discount rate rises to 9.41% from 8.83%. On the bullish side, JPMorgan shifted IREN from Underweight to Overweight with a US$65 price target, citing a partnership with Nvidia, new customer signings and higher industry pricing, while H.C. Wainwright raised its target to US$90 after IREN announced US$2.8b of new multi year AI cloud contracts and lifted its 2026 AI cloud annual recurring revenue target to more than US$4b. Northland initiated IREN at Outperform with a US$99 price target, and Freedom Capital upgraded the stock from Hold to Buy. Freedom Capital nonetheless flagged execution on supply additions over the next two years as a central risk, noting the story depends heavily on adding capacity on schedule.

Nscale, the London-based AI data center developer backed by Nvidia and Microsoft, filed publicly for an initial public offering in New York, seeking to raise as much as $3 billion. The company reported a net loss of $1.02 billion on revenue of $140.6 million for the six months ended June 30, compared with a net loss of $368.9 million on revenue of $10.4 million a year earlier, according to its Friday filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Spun off from a cryptocurrency mining operation in early 2024, Nscale was valued at about $14.6 billion in a March Series C round led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries, with Nvidia and Nokia Oyj also participating. The company has agreed to add more than 30,000 Nvidia chips to an existing rental agreement with Microsoft at its Narvik, Norway gigafactory, and Anthropic has agreed to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from its flagship West Virginia data center development. The offering is being led by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, with shares expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NSCL.

Manus is in advanced discussions for a $500 million funding round at a $4 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg, following Beijing's NDRC blocking of Meta's $2 billion acquisition of the firm in April 2026. Co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao were summoned and barred from leaving China, forcing the company to pivot from a potential US acquisition target into a cornerstone of the domestic Chinese AI ecosystem, though the round is not yet closed and terms remain subject to change. In Seoul, Enhans, which raised a $38 million Series C confirmed in a September 17, 2026 press release, is embedding its AgentOS into Korean manufacturing and finance, with the round co-led by TIMEFOLIO Asset Management and Stonebridge Ventures and strategic participation from POSCO Investment, LG CNS, and Lotte Ventures, whose chaebol groups already run the technology in live production. Huawei, meanwhile, launched its AI Cluster Service and agent-specific tools including Agentic MaaS and the AgentArts platform at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, with Dr. Peter Zhou emphasizing that infrastructure must evolve to support secure, reliable agent workloads in production; the Agentic Infra paradigm already serves over 3,500 customers, and while AICS is available in China starting September 30, global availability is not slated until November 30. Together these moves signal that the agent market is splitting along regional lines of data structuring, compute hosting, and regulatory oversight, leaving open whether these silos will converge through open standards or harden into permanent, incompatible zones.