The financing bottleneck and the asset-backed solution

With global AI capital expenditures projected to reach trillions this decade, the mechanisms used to fund that growth cause delays that create supply bottlenecks.

Filichkin, Compute Labs’ chief business officer, described the dynamic clearly: operators are currently caught between slow banks and the limitations of venture capital.

Under the traditional model, a neo-cloud must raise massive venture rounds just to afford the down payments required by banks, forcing founders to give up control of their companies simply to buy the hardware needed to operate.

Zhang added that underwriting processes and capital structuring take several months, delaying off-take customers and forcing them to go elsewhere simply because they need capacity now. “Many AI customers… will simply go to some other providers, or they will just go to the market and then buy the capacity at a very high spot price,” he explained.

Capital inefficiencies also increase computing costs. When neo-clouds cannot deploy on time, demand pressure builds on existing providers, which allows them to charge more.

To bypass these delays, Compute Labs, a fintech that bridges neo-clouds and investors, packages GPU clusters for asset-backed deals. The company vets partners, secures senior debt and fundraises the missing 20-30 percent cash slice from investors to complete each deal. This lets neo-clouds deploy without equity dilution, while investors gain direct hardware yield from the contracts.

GPUs: The yield-generating asset class

A whitepaper co-published by the team at Compute Labs and The Family Office Association in December 2025 pitched GPUs as a new yield-generating asset class for family offices, like digital power plants producing steady cash from AI rentals for training and inference.

“When we work with these partners, one of the first things that they worry about is diluting their equity, and we know of an interesting business model that allows an investor just direct exposure to the most fundamental asset, which is the hardware,” explained Filichkin.

He noted the dual value points this structure serves: the neo-cloud avoids dilution, and the investor gains the raw hardware component without worrying about the volatility of the equity markets.

“More fundamentally,” added Hosseinion, “when we refer to a venture bet, we’re talking about VCs…betting on the founders to find product market fit, whereas (Compute Labs is) allowing investors direct access to the actual chips that power AI.”

These assets are secured by three- to five-year off-take contracts, a structure where end-users pre-commit to buying the compute power before it is even deployed. “The financial profile is a lot more similar to project finance… high upfront capex, the deployment phase, and then just a long tail of predictable yield.”

However, much AI infrastructure funding still relies on venture-style equity, despite the fact that typical VC rounds are often too small for major hardware buys.

‘Carfax for GPUs’

For GPUs to mature into a genuine asset class, the market requires a level of transparency that traditional tech lending has historically lacked. The current hesitation in private credit often stems from a “visibility gap” that prevents lenders from easily verifying the health, location or even the existence of the hardware they are financing.

Solving this requires what the Compute Labs team described as a “Carfax for GPUs” that employs a registry system that tracks the provenance, thermal history and real-time utilization of a chip, which would provide lenders the same level of auditability found in real estate or aviation.

While this strategy provides technical transparency, Compute Labs’ “revenue haircut” – where the 20 to 30 percent revenue share is the first to be sacrificed if performance targets are missed – provides financial safeguards that protect lenders from operational failures. This ensures that even if a neo-cloud struggles, the investors remain at the front of the repayment line.

Operational buffers are also becoming a benchmark for these deals; the team stressed that daily running costs, specifically electricity and maintenance, must typically remain under a quarter of the total income produced by the chips in order to maximize returns.

While concerns about technical obsolescence persist, the current supply-chain reality offers a natural hedge. Zhang noted that while new chips are announced frequently, it often takes up to 24 months for them to reach the market in significant volume at a reasonable price, providing a predictable “useful life” window for current-generation hardware.

Infrastructure before innovation

Ultimately, the shift toward asset-backed GPU financing is about unblocking what the team calls the “innovation funnel.” At the top of this funnel sit the thousands of AI applications and agents that promise to reshape the global economy. However, these innovations are entirely dependent on the physical infrastructure at the base.

By moving away from the slow, small financing models of the past and treating GPUs as a stable, bankable utility, the industry can finally provide the consistent power required to sustain the AI revolution.

However, if the bottom of the funnel remains choked by inefficient capital, the intelligence at the top will inevitably stall.

China’s role in copper markets

There are few parts of the economy that copper doesn’t touch. It’s used in construction, manufacturing, the transmission of electricity and in many high-tech products like mobile phones and electric vehicles.

Copper is a fundamental commodity for the global economy, and demand for it is only going to grow in the coming years on a variety of factors.

The red metal is essential for changing dynamics in the global south, where a greater share of the population is moving to urban centers and upward economic mobility is driving demand for household appliances like air conditioners, refrigerators and washing machines.

Adding to this demand are emerging sectors like the energy transition, where wind and solar require greater copper inputs, as well as AI and the data centers that support it.

Hamilton told the PDAC audience that China, the world’s largest consumer of the red metal, sits at a confluence of demand generation.

The country is often considered the world’s factory for its manufacturing glut, it has a growing middle class, and its tech sector is booming. These factors are also driving significant growth in its electricity grid.

“A decade ago, China was more or less in parallel with the rest of the world,” Hamilton said. “China has surged ahead in terms of that electricity share, and it’s going to continue in a world where artificial intelligence is arguably the next geopolitical battleground.”

He explained that because of its manufacturing base, China’s energy grid has benefited from significant investment, a trend that is set to continue.

“China is planning to increase grid investment by 40 percent over the next five years. This is huge spending that is continuing to come through, and that will be copper-intensive spend,” Hamilton said.

China isn’t the only country that needs to expand its electrical grid. Hamilton also noted that Europe has an energy problem that it is solving, in the short term, by buying Chinese-produced solar technology, adding further copper demand to already constrained Chinese supply.

Smelting supply shortfalls

The biggest issue impacting copper markets and causing increased prices is a lack of supply.

This has led to a shortfall of copper concentrate supply for smelters to refine.

“To keep it in simple terms, we see a situation where smelting demand over 2025 is going to be 600,000 to 650,000 metric tons more than the available concentrate in the custom market,” Hamilton said. “That’s really what sets that raw material constraint. There’s just not enough copper supply to go around.”

The lack of supply in concentrates has pushed treatment and refining charges, which are typically paid by mining companies to smelters, down to zero. Hamilton said these historically low charges outline how acutely tight the market really is. He explained that it’s a trend that won’t moderate in the short term, as supply growth is failing to keep pace with refining capacity.

Hamilton noted that 10 years ago the expectation was that copper supply would be in the 20 million to 30 million metric ton per year range by 2026. In reality, supply is expected to be 23 million metric tons this year, closer to the lower end of the range.

“Not to say projects haven’t come online, but we have seen depletion of existing assets,” he said.

China’s copper supply strategy

In addition to being the leading consumer of copper, China is also leading in adding new supply to the market.

“Who has been successful at growing copper supply is China, not necessarily in the country, but a lot through investments, particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Hamilton said.

Those investments have contributed to the DRC adding 2.5 million metric tons of annual supply over the last decade, as well as increases in Peruvian production from the Las Bambas and Toromocho operations, owned by China-based MMG and Chinalco, respectively.

This dominance by China has led the rest of the world to play catch-up. Hamilton pointed to Chile, the world’s top copper producer, noting that Chilean production has been flat for 20 years. While there is growth planned, he said it’s going to take some time and a change in mindset within the industry.

In the long term, Hamilton suggests China will take what is available from the concentrate market; however, he pointed out that fallout from the copper tariffs last year led US traders to buy up significant quantities of copper cathode.

“Now that material is not available for price formation yet,” he said. “It is locked in economically to the US. It will come back to the market at some point. So we have to be aware that is a little bit of an inventory overhang, but I do believe trading houses will slowly bleed this out into the market in a managed form.”

What comes next?

The market needs to adapt to changing times, Hamilton emphasized, in much the way copper smelters have in the face of difficult copper market conditions.

“Smelters have really pulled the levers they can pull as the whole economics of the value chain changes to maintain profitability. That’s good, that’s what we like to see, that healthy change in business model to changing market conditions,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton suggested that there needs to be some evolving perspectives within the industry, in which every part of the value chain works together, and they should be able to make money.

China, he points out, has focused on a commodity-first business model, in which it imports raw materials from wherever they are available and uses its domestic processing capacity to upgrade them.

Although growth in its domestic processing capacity has stalled, he suggested that its funding of processors outside the country is likely to increase.

“China started to dominate the copper exports of (semirefined products) and cable into the world. I do think that’s a trend that will continue, though it does mean there will probably be some trade barriers,” Hamilton said, noting the trend could also extend to finished products.

He went on to say that copper has delivered consistent premiums, spending nearly 50 percent of the time since 2000 in the 90th percentile of the cost curve.

“The industry has just been using the money, the free cash flow, to do dividends and buybacks and servicing debt, but we haven’t actually seen that capital allocation back towards growth,” Hamilton said.

While keeping shareholders happy is important, so too is growth of the business.

“Capital intensity is hugely important. Where companies have got mining projects wrong, in many cases, over the past decade has been blowing out in terms of capital intensity, so you have to look for smart solutions,” he said.

Hamilton noted that the easiest copper resources have already been developed, and the next ones will become increasingly more challenging. With prices reaching record highs, it should unlock some projects.

“At these copper price levels, if you’ve got a shovel-ready project, you can bring it to market pretty quickly. Those big greenfield projects are much harder,” he said.

Using capital efficiently will be critical as companies look to open these new assets. However, Hamilton believes that copper’s solid fundamentals, and new energy sectors, will drive industry growth.