At the smaller end of the nuclear industry, tangible progress is becoming easier to find every week. Equipment is getting manufactured and delivered, safety reviews are being completed, and uranium is being split apart.

This is painfully contrasted against what the grid-scale reactor side of the house has to show for the past couple years of the American nuclear renaissance: big announcements about fancy plans…

Start with Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL) MARVEL reactor. INL announced DOE approval of the final safety analysis covering zero-power criticality. Its primary coolant system has arrived, and criticality is anticipated in December.

MARVEL is the sodium-cooled microreactor design that the reactor being commercialized by Aalo Atomics is based on.

Last Energy followed up the MARVEL news the next day with DOE approval of the final safety analysis for its Texas A&M reactor pilot. The project now advances into the final stages of preparation before startup authorization. Its full-scale core and conventional low-enriched uranium fuel connect the experiment directly to the company’s commercial design.

Deep Fission, the reactor company placing their pressurized water design underground, received DOE approval of its nuclear safety design agreement in August.

The company also lowered and retrieved a prototype canister simulating their reactor design. The test reached 100 feet, well short of the proposed mile-deep reactor deployment, but it tested actual hardware.

Even if they have nothing to show for getting an AP1000 actually deployed, Westinghouse wasn’t to be left out of the headlines. They’ve been making progress with their eVinci microreactor program, having recently completed high-temperature criticality experiments in September.

Radiant Nuclear at least deserves a place on the watchlist with their gas-cooled Kaleidos reactor installed at INL’s DOME. The company could announce criticality on their test reactor by the end of the year. 

Now compare all of this to what the grid-scale reactors have been up to. Even the most recent $120 billion U.S.-Korea framework is relatively hollow: the terms are non-binding and sites haven’t even been selected…

The demand for nuclear energy has never been stronger, but it’s not a demand for greenfield projects. Hyperscalers are in the process of contracting every single existing nuclear megawatt they can find.

Existing, not new. 

Power generation comps: nat gas still cheapest but grid queue now up to 5 years. Restart and uprates of nuclear more expensive but wait time much less. https://t.co/EI9F9GbrLE

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 6, 2026

The only new megawatts data centers seem to be interested in are the ones they can squeeze from already operating plants.The recent deal between Google and Constellation could lead to as much power from a collection of uprates as an entirely new reactor plant being built.

We’re even seeing tech companies more interested in resurrecting dead plants than building new ones.

It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to microreactors and gigawatt-scale plants like the AP1000. But, it is disappointing to see the lack of serious and specific project announcements for restoring reliability to the national grid.

Summary:

• Hurricane Isaias Landfall Forecasted For Late Friday/early Saturday 
• Major US Refineries In Hurricane’s Projected Path 
• 63% Of US Offshore Gulf Oil Output Shut 
• 25% Of US Offshore Gulf Oil Output Shut As Hurricane Isaias Nears, Threatens Refineries

Hurricane Isaias Shutters 63% of US Gulf Oil Production

Bloomberg cites data from the Marine Minerals Administration showing US Gulf offshore oil producers have halted about 1.28 million barrels per day, equivalent to shutting in 63% of regional output.

Natural gas shut-ins reached 1.127 billion cubic feet a day, equivalent to 57% of the region’s production.

By noon Central Time, workers from 121 offshore platforms had evacuated, while four rigs had moved outside Hurricane Isaias’ cone of uncertainty.

This is a massive temporary hit to US crude supply. For NatGas, the national production impact is much smaller.

The next big issue is that refineries may see a decline in crude supply as offshore platforms reduce flows. Any refinery outage from storm-related damage would reduce fuel product production as a global refining crisis deepens.

Major Refineries In Crosshairs

Jefferies consumer staples analyst Kaumil Gajrawala warned clients ealrier today: “Hurricane Isaias is a fuel supply event hitting a system already stretched by the Iran war. ~25% of Gulf crude output is shut in (~4% of US production), but fuel inventories are low and diesel is $6.30 vs. $3.68 a year ago. A small disruption now has outsized price consequences. The second-order effect is freight cost, which favors asset-light models like KO (Buy), where bottlers carry the fleet and fuel exposure.” 

As we noted earlier today, any abrupt westward shift in the hurricane’s cone of uncertainty would put major refineries at risk, including Chevron’s Pascagoula refinery on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. It refines 369,000 barrels of crude a day into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and premium base oils.

Landfall impacts for portions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle are expected late Friday into Saturday morning.

25% Of US Offshore Gulf Oil Output Shut As Hurricane Isaias Nears, Threatens Refineries

Hurricane Isaias forced offshore oil and natural gas producers in the Gulf of America to halt a sizable amount of production as the Atlantic’s first hurricane of the season churned toward the coast, with potential landfall impacts across portions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle.

Isaias had sustained winds of 75 miles per hour and was about 460 miles south-southwest of the Mississippi River mouth overnight, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Producers with offshore rigs have already shuttered 25% of crude output and 16% of NatGas production and evacuated workers from eight platforms and two rigs.

Models increasingly point to landfall late Friday night or early Saturday morning east of major energy assets onshore and offshore in Mississippi and Louisiana. 

An abrupt westward shift in the hurricane’s cone of uncertainty would put major refineries at risk, including Chevron’s Pascagoula refinery on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. It refines 369,000 barrels of crude a day into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and premium base oils.

The disruption to offshore oil and NatGas rigs comes as a global refining crisis deepens, and there is little room for error in the US, as refineries operate near full capacity.

Enki Research risk modeler Chuck Watson said that oil and NatGas outages would likely last no more than a week if the forecast track holds.

Authored by AG News Staff via American Greatness,

The Treasury Department blocked $175 million in federal payments from going to deceased recipients in fiscal year 2026 as the Trump administration expanded efforts to prevent fraud and improper government spending.

Treasury screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totaling approximately $3.7 trillion during the fiscal year, identifying and returning about 13,500 payments that otherwise would have gone to people listed as deceased, according to the department.

The results represent another step in President Donald Trump’s push to tighten safeguards around taxpayer money. Access to Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system expanded from roughly 4 percent of federal programs at the end of fiscal 2025 to 99 percent in fiscal 2026.

“Treasury continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

The administration’s efforts received praise from Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., who spent years pushing legislation giving Treasury permanent access to Social Security death records.

“Unless you were playing Frisbee in the quad during Econ 101, you know the federal government shouldn’t be sending taxpayer money to dead people,” Kennedy said.

Congress advanced legislation to permanently authorize the Social Security Administration to share its full Death Master File with Treasury’s Do Not Pay system, giving federal agencies more complete death information when determining eligibility for payments.

Treasury has also added safeguards to verify bank account ownership and Taxpayer Identification Numbers associated with federal payments. Those capabilities became fully operational Sept. 30, allowing Treasury to flag payments that fail verification before the money leaves government coffers.

US aerospace and defense stocks have been tracking lower as Polymarket odds assign Democrats a higher chance of taking the Senate.

The chart below shows the S&P 500 Aerospace & Defense index approaching bear-market territory, down roughly 20% from its summer high, as Polymarket’s implied probability of Democratic Senate control topped 64%.

A nearly 20% slide in aerospace and defense stocks is drawing interest from trading desks looking to buy the dip, though stepping in now risks catching a proverbial falling knife.

Citi aerospace and defense analyst John Godyn sees an opportunity to begin adding exposure. In a note Wednesday, his team outlined that many of these stocks are “close enough to a major tactical bottom.” 

“Both aerospace and defense have simultaneously experienced major pullbacks and, while 3Q26 is set up to be a volatile EPS season, we think that we are close enough to a major tactical bottom in many stocks to again advocate for buying the dip selectively: Opening Positive Catalyst Watch on RTX,” Godyn said.

The market’s big disconnect is that Polymarket odds are weighing on these names, as fears of a Democratic sweep in the midterms early next month could cloud the outlook for military spending. But as Godyn pointed out, all of this uncertainty is happening while the proposed military spending pipeline keeps expanding.

The analyst continued, “Within defense, prefer SMID-cap defense stocks aligned with the highest growth multi-year megatrends through 3Q26 earnings: Opening Positive Catalyst Watch on HII today and revisiting others post AUSA.” 

“As usual, we conducted a supplier survey (sample size of 100) to validate company commentary and build conviction: Our top OE-levered pick remains HWM, where we have a pre-existing Positive Catalyst Watch,” he added. 

Godyn shows that aerospace and defense stocks in his coverage universe have taken a beating:

He notes that market positioning is more positive in aerospace names than in defense names.

For defense stocks, Godyn says the “outlook is strong,” but the funding debate still rages on.

Professional subscribers can read more on aerospace and defense here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Two weeks ago, Oracle told the world that Project Jupiter, its massive 2.45GW New Mexico mega-campus for OpenAI, was “on schedule.” It also sent a force majeure notice to the developer.

Today we found out how it plans to square that circle: with a lot of trucks.

According to Bloomberg, Oracle has been quietly keeping several data centers on track by hauling compressed natural gas (CNG) by road straight to the server farms, and is now weighing the same stopgap for Project Jupiter, where the gas pipeline that is supposed to feed the campus is running late and threatening the timeline. The plan would let Oracle bring the early phases online before the pipe enters service.

Oracle shares slid about 5.5% on the report…

…. while Bloom Energy (BE), which happens to have a 2.4GW fuel cell contract for Project Jupiter (fuel cells which, last we checked, run on natural gas), tumbled 8%

Regular Readers Will Recall…

Back on Sept 24, we reported that Oracle had sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl’s Stack Infrastructure unit over Jupiter, citing potential power delays, and that Oracle and Bloom immediately launched a reassurance tour insisting everything was fine. Our take at the time: companies don’t issue force majeure notices because everything is going fantastically.

Today’s story suggests we were, if anything, too polite.

The root of the problem is a pipeline. Energy Transfer (ET) had to reroute the line that will ultimately power Jupiter after state regulators rejected the proposed route (per DCD, the rejection came in July after an initial application was denied in March), pushing the in-service date from this summer to next year. Meanwhile, Oracle has also put out an RFP for 2GW of new renewables in New Mexico, which tells you just how many backup plans the “on schedule” project now requires.

The “Virtual Pipeline”

And it’s not just New Mexico. Per Bloomberg, trucked gas kept an Oracle data center outside Salt Lake City moving for more than a year while it waited for its pipeline, with Superior Plus’s Certarus doing the hauling. Oracle is also using it for initial work at its OpenAI campus in Shackelford County, Texas, where VoltaGrid is the supplier.

A small cottage industry of CNG haulers has spotted the opportunity and is now pitching “virtual pipeline” services to hyperscalers desperate to start generating compute before the actual pipes show up. Oracle, for its part, seemed thrilled, publicly thanking VoltaGrid on X for its “cost-effective power solutions” shortly after Bloomberg came asking questions.

Shoutout to the Voltagrid team for finding cost-effective power solutions to ensure our customers can access OCI capacity on schedule. We’re moving at the speed of AI, which requires innovation, flexibility, and an unwavering commitment to success.

— Oracle (@Oracle) October 8, 2026

About that “cost-effective” part.

East Daley Analytics’ Jack Weixel told Bloomberg that once you add up labor, specialized equipment and the diesel to move the trucks themselves, delivered CNG costs roughly four times the price of gas at a major pipeline hub. The process is about as elegant as it sounds: gas is pulled off a pipeline, compressed into a trailer, driven for hours to the site, then decompressed to feed the generators. Even a modest AI data center needs trucks arriving constantly around the clock. Diversification at its finest.

There is a reason this approach has historically been reserved for remote mines and oil rigs far from the grid, not for the crown jewels of the AI buildout.

The Napkin Math Gets Ugly Fast

The real question is scale. SemiAnalysis energy analyst Ellie Holbrook told Bloomberg that if Oracle ran just 100MW of Jupiter (roughly 4% of its eventual 2.45GW) on trucked gas, each large trailer would supply only about 40 minutes of electricity.

Let’s do the (approximate) math:

• 100MW at 40 minutes per trailer = ~36 trailers a day, or one every 40 minutes, 24/7/365.
• Scale that to the full 2.45GW and you need roughly 880 trailers a day, or one pulling up to the gate every 90 seconds or so… forever.

Put differently, trucking can get the lights on in the lobby, not power a gigawatt-scale AI campus. It’s a bridge, and a very expensive one, to a pipeline that New Mexico regulators have already sent back to the drawing board once.

And Oracle can hardly afford expensive bridges right now: as Bloomberg notes, the company’s free cash flow is negative and expected to stay that way until more of its AI data centers are completed, while it has staked billions (and its reputation) on delivering capacity for OpenAI on time. Paying a 4x premium on fuel to keep the schedule intact is exactly the kind of cost that never shows up in the investor-day slides, right up until it shows up in the margins.

Bottom Line

As we have argued for a long time, the binding constraint on the AI boom isn’t GPUs, it’s power, and the “solution” of building on-site gas generation only works if the gas actually arrives. When the gas comes by truck at four times the price, the “behind the meter” model starts to look a lot like “behind the 18-wheeler.”

Oracle insists Jupiter remains on schedule, and maybe it does. But when the fallback plan for a $165 billion, 2.45GW campus is an around-the-clock convoy of CNG trailers, the more likely outcome is the one hinted at by the force majeure notice: delays, higher costs, or both, with Bloom, Blue Owl and the rest of the Jupiter financing chain along for the ride.

Then again, nothing says “AI supercycle” quite like a trucking dispatch schedule.

Two weeks ago, when SoftBank’s SB Energy pulled the marketing of its giant IPO meant to find its even more giant data center, we wrote that “slowly the data center dream is turning into a nightmare” (“SB Energy Delays IPO Funding World’s Largest Data Center Amid Investor Revolt, Public Outcry”, Sep 22). Two days later we went a little further:

SB Energy is next and then it’s all over

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 24, 2026

“All over” may be premature. “Next,” however, has arrived right on schedule.

Overnight, Bloomberg reported that Australian data center operator Firmus closed the books on its struggling IPO “without clear indication of the price or the deal structure,” as investors grew “increasingly concerned that the deal could be pulled.”

The Nvidia-backed company had been trying to raise as much as $5.5 billion at A$11 a share, which valued it at A$43.7 billion ($30.4 billion) and would have made it one of the largest listings in Australian history. By the time the books closed, the A$11 was gone: per the Australian Financial Review via Reuters Breakingviews, Firmus cut the price to as low as A$8, a 25% haircut, and was “scrambling” to hold it at A$8.25.

How’s the SB Energy IPO going?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 8, 2026

Put differently, the second mega data center IPO in a month has just hit the same wall as the first. This time the wall came with a twist, and that twist is why this story belongs in our long-running coverage of the debt holding up the AI supercycle.

Below we explain how Firmus got from a $5.5 billion private valuation to a $30 billion IPO in six months, why the “creative” valuation metric failed to sell it, and why at the reduced price the equity is worth less than the debt.

Books Closed, Price… TBD

The cracks were visible before the books closed. On Wednesday evening Goldman’s Sydney futures desk wrote in its morning comment that “the AFR reports bankers managing the IPO of Firmus are considering a potential cut in the listing price because of weak demand from foreign investors.” Within hours that “consideration” was a 25% cut.

Equity investors with direct exposure did not wait around. Shares of Firmus backer Maas Group fell as much as 30% in Sydney, the most on record, which prompted the company to note “significant market speculation and commentary” about whether the IPO would go ahead. Meanwhile Plato, an Australian fund manager running about $6 billion, called Firmus a “screaming short“, citing 30 “red flags” ranging from valuation to senior management.

Ten Cap’s Jun Bei Liu summed up the bookbuild on Bloomberg TV:

“I’ve never seen an IPO so polarizing. There was a lot of international investor interest, however, when it comes to the crunch, the demand seems like it isn’t there when they were asked to put up the capital that’s required.”

Translation: everyone loves AI infrastructure until they are asked to pay for it.

For the record, the bookbuild was pulled forward from Friday to Thursday just three days ago because of “early indications of demand in excess of the offer size.” That’s the same “oversubscribed” (just as the Paramount bond deal had over $100 billion in “demand” and its bonds are now crashing every day) deal now negotiating with itself over A$0.25 a share.

From $5.5 Billion To $30 Billion In Six Months

The rerating is the whole story. Firmus started out as a Bitcoin mining operation in 2019. In February it landed a $10 billion debt package led by Blackstone and Coatue. In April a Coatue-led round valued it at $5.5 billion. In August a $2 billion round with Nvidia, Coatue, Blackstone and Jane Street nearly doubled that to $10.5 billion. Then, less than two months later, the IPO asked public investors for three times the August price.

Behind that price tag, according to Breakingviews, Firmus has so far built just 42 megawatts of capacity out of a pipeline of about 1 gigawatt, or just over 4%. It recently shifted away from a mostly domestic partnership with CDC Data Centres toward Malaysia and Indonesia, to serve hyperscalers such as OpenAI and Meta. Per Reuters, the draft prospectus forecast a $77 million loss in the first half of FY27 and no forecasts at all beyond June 2027.

Australian fund managers were less than impressed. Morningstar’s Lochlan Halloway saw signs of a “boom phase,” pointing to the “wild increase in valuation in such a short period of time.” Merlon’s Kirit Hara said his process “prevents us from effectively buying into, kind of, the hopes and dreams.” Katana’s Romano Sala Tenna admitted “we are struggling with the fundamental arithmetic,” and Blackwattle’s Joseph Koh, who will not bid, put it more simply: “There are so many unknowns.”

Introducing “EV+1/EBIT+2”

When the arithmetic doesn’t work, you change the arithmetic. As Breakingviews’ Antony Currie explains, the deal leaned on a new valuation tool, “EV+1/EBIT+2.” It takes enterprise value using the net debt the company will have in 12 months and divides it by the EBIT it hopes to earn two years from now. 

The logic is that data center developers fund up to 90% of construction with debt and can start generating revenue within a year, so today’s numbers flatter nobody. The problem, as Currie notes, is that the metric is “easy to manipulate.” Capex assumptions can be inflated to pump up EV, and any delay in permits, equipment, power or water means “EV+1 becomes +2 or +3, with EBIT delayed to +3, +4 or beyond.” 

This is pure batshit insanity, and shows just how big the AI bubble has become for a company to realistically think that such “vibes” garbage can be credibly used an investment highlight for institutional investors. 

Regular readers know how that goes: Project Jupiter declared force majeure and Oracle’s 1.3GW Wisconsin “Lighthouse” campus slipped earlier this week, so “+1” is the optimistic case. Then again, nothing says “mature asset class” like a valuation multiple whose denominator is two years in the future.

Half The Deal To… The Existing Shareholders

A second detail also spooked buyers. Firmus planned to allocate about half of the IPO to “selected existing strategic and financial investors”, a list that includes Nvidia, Coatue, Blackstone and Jane Street. At the same time, pre-IPO holders could reportedly sell up to 20% of their stakes from day one. Bloomberg says this overhang was what turned potential investors cautious, on top of “what some investors see as an aggressive pricing strategy.”

Then there is where the money goes. IPO proceeds would fund purchases of Nvidia GPUs for Firmus’ first project in Batam, Indonesia, built with DayOne as part of an eight-year partnership with Nvidia. In other words, Nvidia invests in Firmus, Firmus raises money partly from its own backers, and the money goes back to Nvidia for chips. We have seen this kind of Nvidia circular financing before, just never quite this small.

One more detail: the four joint lead managers are Bank of America, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Morgans. That would explain the absence of sell-side research on the deal from three of the largest research shops in the world.

When The Equity Is Worth Less Than The Debt

This is where the deal stops being an IPO story and becomes a credit story. As one reader put it in a reply to our tweet, “At that point an AI data centre stops being a growth stock and starts being a credit.”

The napkin math is simple, and alarming. Morningstar estimates Firmus’ debt at about $30 billion, roughly six times its own forecast earnings. At A$11 the equity was worth about $30.4 billion, so the company was valued at about one dollar of equity for every dollar of debt. At A$8.25, and assuming the same share count, it is worth roughly A$33 billion, or about $23 billion, some $7 billion less than the debt it carries. At A$8 it is $22 billion.

In other words, at the price the bankers are now “scrambling” to defend, the shareholders’ stake would be worth less than what Firmus owes its lenders, before the stock trades for a single day. That is a leveraged credit with an equity ticker, and it lands at the worst possible moment for AI credit, which we summarized yesterday afternoon:

Credit remains the big story: here everything is falling apart. 1. Oracle bond yields, CDS record high 2. SpaceX bonds new all time low/YTW high 3. Bond behind Meta’s Hyperion data center (proj Beignet) hit record low 4. Paramount CDS trading at financial crisis levels https://t.co/bxEqe8IQFw

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 7, 2026

Throw in 10Y Treasury yields that hit 5.36% on Wednesday, a 24-year high, per the same Goldman Sydney note, and the cost of carrying $30 billion of data center debt only goes one way.

SB Energy, Then Firmus… Then Who?

Firmus is the second data center mega-IPO to stumble in three weeks. SoftBank-backed SB Energy postponed marketing its IPO in late September after more SEC questions and investor pushback on a valuation of around $60 billion, and on its dependence on a single customer, OpenAI. Nvidia had agreed to guarantee up to $105 billion to help OpenAI lease SB Energy’s Ohio data center, while also investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy itself. Back then we asked the obvious question:

Is it a coincidence that the 2 key data centers of OpenAI’s Stargate are suddenly on the ropes? Project Jupiter (4.5GW) loans trading < 90, major delays… SB Energy (8GW) delaying IPO, major delays. Without these two DCs having clear timeline/funding, OpenAI can just cancel IPO

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 23, 2026

And the line behind them is long. Singapore’s DayOne, which also happens to be Firmus’ partner in Batam, wants to raise up to $5 billion at a $20 billion valuation in a US listing as soon as November. Switch has filed confidentially, Vantage and CyrusOne are exploring listings, and London’s Nscale just raised $3.36 billion in pre-IPO convertibles. As Shenton Research’s Ke Yan told Reuters, “the dividing line is whether demand is contracted and already energised, or only planned.” Firmus, with 42MW built against a gigawatt pipeline, is firmly on the “planned” side of that line.

Goldman: $1 Trillion Of AI Spending… And Everyone Hiding In The Mag 7

None of this means the AI spending boom is slowing. Goldman’s Global Corporate Access team flagged in Wednesday’s IR Kick-Start (available to pro subs) that GS Research now estimates global AI investment will exceed $1 trillion this year, with the US and Asia accounting for more than 80% of net data center additions (Europe gets about 10%).

The question was never whether the money gets spent. It’s who funds it, and at what price. Goldman’s Asia sales desk answered part of that overnight in “Power Back On” (also available to pro subs): hedge funds have “certainly re-engaged in tech as a result of macro uncertainty,” with net exposure to the Mag 7 as a share of total US exposure on GS’ prime book at ~22%, the highest since the start of 2022.

Put differently, investors still want AI, but they want it through companies with balance sheets that can fund a trillion dollars of capex, not through a 42-megawatt former Bitcoin miner levered six times its forecast earnings. The same GS desk notes that “the positioning within AI and large-cap tech no longer seem to be tailwinds,” which means the crowd is all on one side of the boat, and it’s not the side Firmus is on.

Bottom Line

This week, Mike Novogratz told the Greenwich Economic Forum that AI is the “biggest bubble of our lifetime,” but that it can’t burst yet because it “isn’t spectacular enough” (which we discussed earlier). Ray Dalio disagreed and speaking at a CEO conference in Singapore, called it a “classic bubble” nearing its bursting point because of rising rates and the debt behind AI infrastructure.

We side with Dalio, and the reason is the IPO window. Bubbles don’t end when the bulls run out of narrative; they end when the marginal buyer refuses to take paper off the hands of the early investors at the asking price. That has now happened twice in three weeks, first with SB Energy and now with Firmus. Each time the issue was the same: too much debt, too little contracted revenue, and existing backers looking for an exit.

Having warned since October 2025 that AI is a debt bubble too, something that virtually everyone – even the WSJ – now accepts, we’ll allow ourselves another prediction: when the equity cushion under a data center is smaller than the debt, the equity investors stop pricing a growth story, and it becomes the bondholders’ problem. Just ask Oracle’s lenders.

Firmus is scheduled to lodge its prospectus on October 12 and start trading on October 23, assuming there is still a deal. We’ll see whether the “+1” in EV+1 refers to years, or to the number of IPOs that follow it into the wall.

Much more in the full Goldman “Power Back On” and “IR Kick-Start” notes, both available to pro subs.

Ukrainian drones have hit a major Russian industrial hub and oil refinery which lies very far away from the front lines of fighting, in Western Siberia, north of the Kazakh border.

The Omsk Oil refinery and industrial complex is located well over 1500 miles from the Ukrainian border. Regional Governor Vitaly Khotsenko announced Telegram that several drones were shot down by air defenses, but that one made it through to impact.

Ukraine’s General Staff was quick to own up to the Thursday attack, stating, “The destruction of such facilities is the exercise by Ukraine of its inalienable right to self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter and is aimed at reducing the military-economic potential of the Russian Federation.”

While the extent of potential damage to the refinery itself remains unknown, images from local residents showed explosions and fire in the area near the oil refinery.

Emergency crews are active at the scene of the facility, Russia’s largest, which is owned by Gazprom Neft

8 October 2026: Multiple channels report a sustained Ukrainian long-range drone attack on Russia’s largest oil refinery in Omsk, with 15 or more explosions so far. The governor confirms an ongoing drone attack in the region. Gazprom Neft’s refinery can process about 22 million tonnes annually, roughly 440,000 barrels per day, or about 1/15th of Russia’s total refining capacity. #OSINT #Russia

— OSINT Intuit™ (@UKikaski) October 8, 2026

The same remote refinery was forced to halt operations when it came under a similar long-range drone attack previously in July. Bloomberg provides some additional details:

• In a separate statement, Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said Ukraine’s forces attacked Russia’s largest oil refinery, over 2,500 km from the border, with upgraded FP-1 drones, confirming a hit 
• Omsk refinery, owned by Gazprom Neft, processed ~22m tons of crude (~440k b/d) in 2024, producing 5m tons of gasoline and 8m tons of diesel.

Some regional reports have said that motorists in the same city have been forming long queues at gas stations, amid what has already been a situation of national fuel shortages.

Ukraine reportedly struck Russia’s Omsk oil refinery, located beyond the Ural Mountains, more than 3,000 km from the Ukrainian border. It is Russia’s largest oil refinery. https://t.co/cY6xGxqSHY

— Clash Report (@clashreport) October 8, 2026

Russian Data Center Attacked in First of War

Also, in the overnight hours there’s been another reported first of the war: Russian tech giant Yandex has reported its data center in the town of Sasovo, in Ryazan region, was attacked and caught fire.

“The attack marks the first confirmed strike against Russian data infrastructure since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, weeks after Moscow launched attacks against Ukrainian data centers,” The Moscow Times underscores. 

Russia has itself long been going after data centers in Ukraine, however. The Kremlin has argued that these data centers support Ukrainian military operations, with the same accusations now being hurled the other way as well. 

According to more from the same publication:

NASA’s fire monitoring service FIRMS showed a fire in Sasovo early Thursday morning. Outage tracking platform Downdetector recorded more than 1,300 user reports of disruptions affecting Yandex Cloud, Yandex Documents and Yandex Tables, while core consumer tools like search and taxi services remained online.

Yandex shares dropped more than 3.4% during Thursday morning trading on the Moscow Exchange.

A key element of Ukraine’s drone warfare strategy is to keep hammering away at Russian energy and industrial infrastructure in hopes of devastating the economy amid US-led sanctions, in order to ultimately force President Putin to the negotiating table on terms acceptable to Kiev and the West.

Mass Civilian Casualties in Ukraine

The Kremlin has of late made known that it would increasingly targeted Ukrainian civilian infrastructure as a result of Kiev forces doing the same in Russian territory with its nightly drone assaults.

This has already had tragic effect amid mass casualty events this week. The NY Times writes Thursday, “At least 30 people were killed in a Russian strike on a commuter bus in the country’s east, officials said, a day after an attack on an apartment building far behind the combat zone killed 22.”

Moscow has not commented on these alleged attacks. “Images posted by local prosecutors showed the burning metal shell of the bus along with debris and some of the victims on the road,” BBC also reports. It happened mid-morning and appears to have involved an aerial bomb dropped on a bus stop.

Far from being closer to some kind of US-mediated peace talks that President Trump is hoping for, the tit-for-tat strikes are getting nastier as the war continues to spiral. Ukraine’s President Zelensky is vowing revenge.

Speaking of the killings in the Donbass region, Zelensky said: “This strike will not go without our response.” He said further on Telegram: “Russia is trying to destroy all life in Donbas, and the world needs to react to this. React harshly – exactly as the Russians deserve for all the deaths they have caused.”

Chipotle Mexican Grill shares jumped in the early US cash session after a Financial Times report said Starbucks has explored acquiring the Mexican-style quick-service food chain.

FT says Starbucks executives have worked with advisers in recent months on a takeover proposal for Chipotle, which has a market value of nearly $41.3 billion. The report is based on people familiar with the potential transaction, but no formal offer has been submitted.

Marrying the two chains would combine businesses that generated nearly $50 billion in sales last year. Starbucks operates about 41,000 owned and licensed stores worldwide, while nearly all of Chipotle’s 4,200 restaurants are in the US.

One of the biggest potential benefits would be combining Starbucks’ global reach with Chipotle’s restaurant model, giving the group more ways to grow beyond coffee and breakfast sandwiches on the international level. 

Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol has been working on a turnaround strategy for the chain since taking the helm in September 2024. He previously headed up Chipotle from 2018 to 2024 and held executive roles at Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Procter & Gamble.

Chipotle’s shares have plunged 39% since Niccol left the chain.

Meanwhile, Starbucks shares have traded mostly flat since September 2024.

Market action this morning: Chipotle surged up to 8.6% in New York, while Starbucks tumbled up to 6.7%.

FT noted, “A potential takeover of Chipotle would eclipse Burger King’s $11.4bn acquisition of Canadian coffee-and-doughnut chain Tim Hortons in 2014.” 

Any credible turnaround plan for Starbucks should include automation and robotics …

… to replace this … 

… and this. 

New name for the potential marriage … Chipotbucks? 

In the last 24 hours, the Trump administration has announced three major efforts to crack down on foreign worker/student visa fraud.

First, US ⁠Vice President JD Vance ​said on Thursday that the ‌federal government is suspending tech giant Microsoft from a program to apply for green cards for workers who come to the U.S. to live and work using an H-1B visa as it accuses the company of fraud.

“If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” said Vice President JD Vance in a White House news conference announcing the decision.

Secretary of Labor Keith ​Sonderling added that some of ⁠the largest ⁠IT firms ⁠in the ​world would also be suspended ​from that ⁠program, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCO and Capgemini, as well ⁠as Adobe.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to ⁠a request for comment.

Second, the Trump administration is going after nine elite universities on suspicion of visa fraud, accusing them of unlawfully benefiting financially from hiring and admitting foreign nationals.

Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT are under examination by federal investigators, Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday, suggesting the schools are exploiting the J-1 visa program to import cheaper students from overseas and skirt employment obligations to US citizens.

“Something weird is going on at these universities,” said Vance.

“They’re using these visas way too much. They’re using them to undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers, and it simply has to stop.”

The Labor Department is establishing a visa fraud strike team as part of the probe and subpoenas have already been sent to the schools.

“Nobody will be getting a free pass because their name is carved into an expensive building,” said Labor Department watchdog Anthony D’Esposito, who reported that 61% of post-grad students at US universities come from overseas.

“American taxpayers send billions of dollars to these universities to support research and innovation. They deserve to know where that money is be, where is going, and whether it’s being used lawfully.”

And finally, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is considering a new rule that would impose major fees for foreign students seeking to work in the United States.

The proposed rule, announced by the Trump administration on Oct. 7, would require colleges and universities to pay a $70,000 fee for each nonimmigrant student applying to participate in the Optional Practical Training program.

The program authorizes foreign students to temporarily work in the United States in jobs related to their field of study either during or after their time in school.

As Timothy Frudd reports further for The Epoch Times, the new proposal comes after the Trump administration was blocked last month from implementing limitations on F-1 visas, which allow nonimmigrant students to live and study in the United States.

DHS said Wednesday that the proposed rule is intended to reduce the influx of cheap labor into the United States, curb fraud and abuse, protect American workers, and strengthen the integrity of the immigration system.

“Optional Practical Training was never meant to be a back door into the American workforce, a subsidy for cheap labor, or a prize for those who game the system,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement.

“DHS is upskilling OPT to require foreign students to justify their worth to employers. American workers should not have to compete against a program that has been turned into a pipeline for cheap foreign labor.“

In addition to the initial $70,000 fee for each nonimmigrant student participating in the optional practical training program, colleges and universities would also be required to pay a $30,000 fee for each renewal or extension of the program’s authorization for students.

Under the program, F-1 nonimmigrant students are required to receive a recommendation from a designated school official before applying for employment authorization with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Students participating in the program are typically eligible to work in the United States for one year after graduation.

However, some students with degrees in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics are eligible to work for an additional two years.

More than 294,000 foreign students participated in the optional practical training program during the 2024-2025 academic year, according to the President’s Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

In Wednesday’s announcement, DHS said it was proposing the new rule in response to fraud and abuse discovered by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program.

As the program has expanded, schools, officials, employers, and F-1 nonimmigrant students have attempted to exploit regulations, including “problematic worksites and ‘pay-to-stay’ visa schemes,” according to DHS.

The department suggested the fees would encourage colleges and universities to employ additional oversight and be more selective of students recommended for the training program.

In response, Fanta Aw, CEO of nonprofit NAFSA: Association of International Educators, said in a statement that the program provides foreign students with the opportunity to have hands-on experience.

She said international students involved in the program also fill labor shortages in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics fields.

“Imposing this new fee structure on Optional Practical Training is the latest in a series of developments that creates deep uncertainty for international students,” Aw said.

“Driving away the talents, perspectives, and aspirations of international students will only hurt American innovation, economic growth, workforce development, and global leadership.“

A federal judge blocked another Trump administration rule on Sept. 14 that would limit students on F-1 visas to four years in the United States before requiring them to seek approval from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to stay longer.

DHS said the limitation on F-1 visas was needed to address national security risks, including foreign spying at universities in the United States.

Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, who blocked the Trump administration from implementing the law while a legal challenge moved forward in court, said DHS did not explain how the rule would deter future spying or acts of sabotage.

In May 2025, the Trump administration attempted to revoke Harvard University’s certification to enroll foreign students under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program.

Harvard responded by suing the administration, and a federal judge blocked the government from preventing the university from enrolling foreign students through the program.

Last week NANO Nuclear bought the license to handle the back end of the fuel cycle. This week, the front end showed up in a cylinder.

On Thursday morning, LIS Technologies (LIST), the privately held laser enrichment company in which NANO Nuclear (NNE) is a shareholder and strategic partner, announced that it has accepted its first shipment of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) at its Demonstration Test Loop facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the footprint of the former K-25 gaseous diffusion plant, a cornerstone of the Manhattan Project. In other words, uranium is back at K-25, only this time it’s going in front of a laser.

It’s a milestone that matters well beyond a private startup’s press release, because, as we explained in “NANO Nuclear Buys The One Thing You Can’t Speed Up: A Fuel-Cycle License” last week, NANO is quietly assembling something no other microreactor developer has: an end-to-end domestic fuel chain, from enrichment to deconversion to fabrication to transport to reactor. Today, the enrichment link went from slideware to “licensed material on site.”

What Actually Happened

The UF6 will feed LIST’s CRISLA-4G process (Chemical Reaction by Isotope Selective Laser Activation), a patented technique that uses infrared lasers to selectively excite molecules of the desired uranium isotope so they can be separated from the rest. LIST says the shipment lets it begin proof-of-concept testing, process optimization, materials qualification, UF6 systems commissioning and integrated loop testing.

COO Lloyd Jollay noted the shipment arrived “in just under a year” after LIST received its Radioactive Material License from the State of Tennessee (Dec 23, 2025), and added a detail that says a lot about the state of the US fuel supply chain: the shipment required developing a new process with LIST’s supplier, because the quantity was smaller than what the industry normally moves. When the system has to invent a procedure just to ship less uranium, you know it was built for a handful of giant customers and nobody else.

President and co-founder Christo Liebenberg laid out the next step:

“Over the past 2 years, LIST has worked to engineer and integrate all of its proprietary laser enrichment hardware. This UF₆ feedstock will enable us to optimize our laser enrichment process in the coming months and mature the technology to a Technology Readiness Level 5 on the nine-level scale used by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Energy to assess technology maturity.”

Translation: the hardware is built, the uranium is in the building, and the next few months are about proving the laser separates isotopes the way the patents say it does. TRL 5 means component validation in a relevant environment. It is not a commercial plant (that’s TRL 9), and LIST’s own fine print says it can only make realistic economic predictions after a Phase 2 pilot plant. But every enrichment technology that has ever worked had to pass through exactly this stage, and most of the would-be US enrichers are still well short of it.

The Bigger Plan: “LIST Island” And Project F.U.E.L.

The test loop is the appetizer: Executive Chairman and CEO Jay Yu (who is also NANO’s founder) tied today’s shipment to LIST’s flagship commercial site on the 206-acre “LIST Island” in the heart of the K-25 zone, the base for what the company calls Project F.U.E.L.

The numbers behind it are not small. In January, LIST announced plans to invest $1.38 billion in a commercial-scale laser enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, after buying the former Duct Island for $8 million and closing a 240% oversubscribed $17 million round that took total capital raised to roughly $64 million. Groundbreaking is targeted for 2026, subject to licensing and permitting, with initial commercial operations targeted before 2030, which, not coincidentally, is right when Goldman expects the uranium supply deficit to bite (more below).

For context on how fast things are moving: LIST’s seed round in August 2024 raised $11.88 million. NANO wrote a $2 million check into it. Two years later, the company has a state license, a site, a nine-figure plant plan and its first uranium. That is not how the nuclear industry usually measures time.

Why NANO Shareholders Should Care

NANO doesn’t own LIST outright, but the two are joined at the hip: they are related parties through common ownership and shared officers and directors, and under their November 2024 collaboration agreement, LIST is NANO’s preferred supplier of enriched UF6. More interesting is the economic structure the two laid out at the time: the parties intend that LIST will provide NANO with enriched UF6 at no cost, to be fabricated and sold to customers, with LIST compensated through a profit-sharing arrangement still to be agreed.

And here’s the part the market seems to keep missing. Under that same agreement, NANO’s job was to build the “supportive capabilities” on either side of LIST’s enrichment: deconversion and fuel fabrication. Which is exactly what NANO went out and bought last week, when it paid $13.5 million for the NRC-licensed Radnostix deconversion site near Hobbs, NM.

Put the two announcements side by side and the plan comes into focus:

• Enrichment: LIST’s CRISLA-4G laser process, now running on real UF6 in Oak Ridge (today), with Enveniam as lead integrator for the commercial plant (Sep 5).
• Deconversion and fluorine recovery: the 40-year NRC license in Lea County, NM, acquired last week.
• Fuel supply and fabrication: the HALEU Energy Fuel subsidiary.
• Transport: Secured Transportation Services, the $13M acquisition that made NANO revenue-generating overnight.
• Reactors: KRONOS at UIUC, where the NRC has begun its technical review of the construction permit, plus ZEUS and the space-focused LOKI.

Here is the map we drew last week. As of this morning, the enrichment box at the top has something in it:

Regular readers will recall that NANO’s own pitch put the logic best back in May: “what good is a fancy new car if there’s no gas stations to fill it?” Last week NANO bought a licensed place to handle the exhaust. Today the gas station got its first delivery of gas.

Why Enrichment Is The Choke Point

None of this would matter if fuel were easy. It isn’t. As DOE Deputy Secretary James Danly put it recently, “If we are going to have this nuclear renaissance, we are not going to be able to do it without fuel.” The US has exactly one commercial enrichment plant (Urenco’s Eunice facility, 30 miles from NANO’s new New Mexico site), the Russian import ban waivers expire in January 2028, and SWU prices are sitting at all-time highs.

Goldman’s clean energy strategist Brian Lee made the same point in his note on the $120 billion US-Korea reactor package last week, warning that the eight new large reactors are “likely to further exacerbate the anticipated uranium supply deficit in the 2030 time frame” (full note available to pro subs). That’s eight gigawatt-scale reactors’ worth of new enrichment demand landing on a Western supply chain that is already short before a single SMR is switched on.

Goldman’s own uranium supply/demand math shows exactly where the trigger point sits: after raising its demand forecast to account for SMRs (while leaving production unchanged), the bank’s U3O8 demand line breaks above supply in 2026-27 and never looks back, with the gap blowing out after 2030 as mine supply peaks and then rolls over. By the mid-2040s demand is roughly triple supply.

Which is also why Washington is throwing money at the problem. In January, DOE handed out $900 million each to Centrus’ American Centrifuge Operating, General Matter and Orano, plus $28 million to Global Laser Enrichment. LIST, despite being one of the six companies selected for DOE’s LEU Enrichment Acquisition Program in December 2024, got nothing in that round. Getting real UF6 into a real laser loop is the most direct way to change that the next time the checkbook opens.

What Could Go Wrong

• Lasers have a history. The US already spent billions on laser enrichment once: the government’s AVLIS program was shelved in 1999 when USEC pulled the plug. GE-Hitachi’s SILEX-based Global Laser Enrichment has been at it for over a decade and still isn’t commercial. CRISLA is a different (molecular, lower-power) approach, but “laser enrichment is around the corner” has been said before.
• TRL 5 is the middle, not the end. The Phase 2 pilot plant, NRC licensing for a commercial facility and the $1.38 billion financing all still lie ahead, and LIST is pre-revenue.
• Related-party optics. Common ownership and shared directors between NANO and LIST will invite scrutiny of the eventual profit-sharing terms. The 2024 deal was approved by NANO’s independent directors, but the market will want to see the final economics.

Bottom Line

Jay Yu summed up LIST’s goal this morning as becoming “a world leader in cost-effective and energy-efficient enrichment.” That’s still a promise. But a week ago NANO’s enrichment link was a license and a test loop with no uranium in it. Today it has feedstock, and NANO has a licensed site waiting at the other end of the chain.

We have argued for years that modular, behind-the-meter reactors are the only real long-term answer to AI’s insatiable power demand, and that whoever controls the fuel will collect the rent long after the reactor startups finish raising money. NANO, it seems, read the same memo: while most of its peers are still waiting in line for fuel, NANO is building the line. With the stock still trading like a single-reactor story, we suspect the market will figure that out (later rather than sooner, as usual).

The next test: LIST’s optimization results over the “coming months” and whether it hits TRL 5. We’ll be watching.