Matt Wirz

Affirm Holdings has lined up $750 million in funding from Liberty Mutual Investments, the asset-management unit of insurer Liberty Mutual, bringing in additional capital to fuel its consumer-lending activities.

Artificial-intelligence evangelists such as Sam Altman want to reshape the world, but they need mountains of money to do it. Tech and power companies are raising cash every which way: issuing shares, loans and bonds on publicly traded markets and in private deals. Large firms, or hyperscalers, such as Amazon and Microsoft could easily spend about $3 trillion by 2030 to build and operate data centers for their businesses, according to BlackRock Investment Institute.

The financing bonanza echoes previous booms around fiber-optic cable and fracking.

Artificial-intelligence evangelists such as Sam Altman want to reshape the world, but they need mountains of money to do it. That is sparking a modern-day gold rush on Wall Street.

The money behind the first data center in Stargate, the high-profile AI project, is coming from an unlikely source: Blue Owl Capital. The asset-management firm, known mostly for its private-credit lending, is targeting big investment returns and asset growth from swopping into AI. Blue Owl was founded in 2016 by hedge-fund manager Doug Ostrover, plus Marc Lipschultz and Craig Packer, who were a lot more familiar with Wall Street than with Silicon Valley.

S&P Global Ratings jolted markets nearly 15 years ago when it stripped the U.S. of its triple-A credit rating, citing mounting debts and political discord. Moritz Kraemer was an executive in S&P’s sovereign-bond unit when it cut the U.S.’s rating, then others including France, Austria and eventually the U.K. Now an economist for German bank LBBW, he says the dysfunction in Washington has only worsened. WSJ: You were at S&P when the firm downgraded the U.S. in 2011.

Private fund manager Sixth Street Partners is investing $200 million in a joint venture with Figure Technology Solutions, the blockchain-based lender started by former SoFi Chief Executive Mike Cagney. F

Wall Street expects to sell more than $355 billion in asset-backed debt this year. Remember that conference in ‘The Big Short’? It just drew a record 10,000.

Pearse has spent more than six years in legal limbo while cooperating with U.S. authorities in two trials tied to $2 billion of fraudulent debt deals he helped arrange in exchange for bribes.

Blue Owl Capital is entering the scrum of private-credit managers offering funds to wealthy retail investors. The fast-growing firm filed registration documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week for a fund focused on “alternative credit” including asset-backed debt, loans and private-credit investments. Blue Owl already sells private credit to individuals through its business-development companies.