Oracle 305 bp, +12 on the week; Intel 147, +49; Amazon 100, +16 — chips wider, enterprise tighter; CDX IG tightened 1 to 61.6

Two structures are easy to confuse. The industry stack is who sells what to whom — tokens at the top, electrons at the bottom, money flowing down and capacity flowing up. Each player's capital stack is who gets paid first when that player's money stops. The page's readings only make sense against both, so the primer draws each, marks who depends on whom, and marks the rungs that are actually long the GPU collateral — the secured lenders and lessors who hold it, and the vendor who guarantees it.

Single-name CDS from the SEC security-based swap tape — the file that names the reference entity — for hyperscalers and model owners, chips, enterprise hardware, data-centre landlords, power, sponsor-financed capacity and the leveraged tier. Five-year protection as a daily median of prints; upfront-quoted names converted to a running spread. The last column is the market's own classification: the share of a name's prints written on the 500 coupon, the high-yield convention, rather than the investment-grade 100 — a name migrating towards 500 is being reclassified by dealers whatever its rating says. Beneath it, the whole single-name market: the busiest names and the biggest movers, whoever they are.

The SEC's single-stock swap file names the underlier and carries the traded price on every print, so the equity leg comes from the tape rather than a vendor: each name's price is the daily median of the prices its total-return swaps traded at, with the day's 10th–90th percentile range, and the activity columns count the synthetic financing and short book written on the name. OTC single-stock options are rare on this file and are counted where they appear; the listed-index volatility complex is on the Equity page. Prices are swap prints, not exchange closes: they bracket the day rather than mark it.

GPU-secured leases and loans are written against hardware with no public mark — bare clusters clear in private requests for quote — so the nearest observable curve is the rental rate: weekly provider-median on-demand rates across the cloud GPU market, in dollars per GPU-hour, with the prior-generation discount (H100 against B200) and the 12- and 36-month reservation medians where listed. The rental rate bundles the chip with power, cooling and a building; the chip without those is worth less, and the difference is the price of a megawatt slot. An implied residual value backed out of this curve, net of power and curtailment, is in preparation; its method will be published here before the series goes live. The observations that bare hardware clears bilaterally with no public mark, that operators in power-capped halls retire working chips when the megawatts earn more under denser racks, and that the sub-50 MW tier buys power unhedged at the node are Dean Lee's, in correspondence, 26–28 October 2026, and are used with his permission.

What the parsed Schedule D rows of eight life-insurance books show of each layer of the chain, at book value and as a floor rather than a total. The insurers are not the leveraged edge — the neocloud credits are almost absent — but their lower-stack exposure is the real estate: securitised colocation leases whose tenants are the chain, carried as investment grade and repriced only when leases are. Refreshed when statements are filed; no position is attributed to a filer here.

The order things moved in October — single names first, equities second, the index last — is the page's organising claim, and these are the readings that would confirm or break it. Each is a series on this site or a public record it links to; none is a forecast.

Further reading. Dean Lee, whose observations on the collateral are credited above, writes on the same economics from the operator's side: The eight-hundred-billion-dollar depreciation schedule and Why deep pockets cannot cure accelerated depreciation (2 November 2026) — the duration mismatch between a 36–48-month asset and fixed-coupon debt, and why a deep-pocketed buyer at thirty cents is an auction, not a rescue — and The ten trillion dollar financing wall (3 November 2026), on what $2 trillion a year of AI debt asks of a $20 trillion bond market and why lenders look through the vehicle to whoever bears the demand risk. On the revenue side of the same ledger: The late token tax (4 November 2026), on what long-context generation costs the operator, and The five-dollar conversion ceiling (7 November 2026), on the first causal field estimate of what a retail tenant earns from inference — about $5 per consumer a year, all of it conversion, none of it basket size. Not affiliated with the Observatory.

Longer pieces written from these series. Each is a PDF; the figures can be reproduced from the published JSON.