Weekly Signal Playbook · Jul 10, 2026

The Model Race Keeps AI Capex Climbing

Garrett’s Signal · Weekly Signal Playbook · July 10, 2026

The big story this week is the model race. Grok 4.5 just landed, and it’s good enough to change the math on cost. On the tape, last week’s calls held up: memory rolled over, Apple pushed back toward its highs, and money kept moving into the AI hyperscalers. Two side stories worth flagging. Meta is buying its way into the agent race with a cheap model and a huge user base. And China pulled off its first rocket recovery. Rotation isn’t over. The AI bullrun is still here.

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1. What Changed This Week

1. The model race just got hotter, and that keeps capex going

Grok 4.5 shipped on July 8. SpaceXAI trained it alongside Cursor, and Elon’s own read is that it’s roughly on par with Opus 4.7, just much faster and a lot cheaper. Pricing: $2 in and $6 out per million tokens, well under OpenAI and Anthropic (Opus 4.8 runs $5 / $25).

The interesting part is why it got good so fast. SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion back in June, so now one side brings the compute and the other brings the data and the real coding workflows. Put those together and you get a top-tier model. GPT-5.5 and China’s GLM are right there too.

So the race is far from settled. If anything it’s getting more crowded, which means capex keeps climbing, not falling. We stay long AI compute and infrastructure. And the core call doesn’t change: memory has peaked for now, and the money is rotating into the hyperscalers and Apple. Micron is down about 22% in two weeks, from its $1,213 record close to around $949. Apple is sitting just under its 52-week high of $317.40, closing at $314.70 on the 9th.

2. Meta: a cheap model plus a huge user base is a real ticket into agents

Meta put out a very cheap model and pointed it at the 3.5 billion-plus people who use its apps every day. The model doesn’t have to be the smartest. If it’s good enough for simpler agent tasks, Meta’s sheer reach can still push it into the main AI conversation. It wins on distribution, not on being the smartest in the room. It also tells you Meta’s AI spending isn’t slowing down. Tencent is the same story in China, a huge ecosystem plus agents, so we’re adding it to the watchlist too.

3. China landed a rocket recovery, and that opens a new space story

On the morning of July 10, the Long March 10A flew for the first time from the Hainan commercial spaceport and reached orbit, and the first stage was caught at sea with a net system. This is China’s first controlled recovery of a launch vehicle, and the first net-capture recovery anywhere. China is now the second country with large reusable-rocket capability.

Our read: on the surface this looks like a threat to SpaceX, but we think it’s a net positive for the whole space and satellite theme. Once both the US and China are committed here, neither one backs off, so spending only goes up. Cheaper launches also change the economics of satellite constellations, turning a money pit into something that can actually scale. That pulls in the whole chain: launch, satellites, ground gear, and comms. We’re going to dig into satellite comms more. For now it stays on the watchlist, not the scorecard.