Strategist Anshul Sagar is making an unusual public call: turn down a guaranteed yield above 5% and take the other side of the trade. “To me, it’s being long compute, being long NeoClouds, being long data centers,” Sagar said. The backdrop he is trading against is concrete. As of September 17, 2026, the 30-year US Treasury yield stood at 5.29% and the 10-year at 4.94%, after printing 5.01% the prior session and slipping back below the 5% line.
Why Sagar Is Passing on the Long Bond
Sagar acknowledges the pull of the risk-free bid, noting that clients are attracted to risk-free yields north of 5%. His pushback rests on math about where the long bond could rally to. Sagar expects nominal growth to stay north of 5%, with rates historically running about 50 to 100 points lower than that. His base case has the long end drifting only toward around 4.25%, and “We’re not expecting long-end rates to go down to 3%,” Sagar said. That framing caps the bond’s bull-case total return. “I’m not seeing the asymmetry there, according to The Markets. Personally, I think the asymmetric expression is being long compute,” Sagar said.
What Compute Looks Like in Public Equities
Sagar named categories rather than specific companies. The public tape offers a menu across two tiers. The GPU cloud and AI infrastructure names include CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV), Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS | NBIS Price Prediction) and Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD). The established data center REITs include Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX) and Digital Realty Trust (NYSE:DLR).
The neocloud tier is where the growth has landed. CoreWeave reported Q2 2026 revenue of $2.58B, up 112.3% YoY, with a revenue backlog of $104 billion and contracted power reaching 3.7 gigawatts, according to The Markets. Details are in the company’s Q2 2026 8-K. Nebius posted revenue of $582.3M, up 454% YoY, with remaining performance obligations of $37.5B. “$4 billion of ARR is now contracted for our 2026 capacity” was cited among neocloud operators, while Applied Digital reported total contracted long-term lease value of $36 billion across 1.41 gigawatts of critical IT load.
The REIT tier offers a more familiar income profile. Equinix raised 2026 guidance to revenue of $10.21B to $10.29B and adjusted EBITDA of $5.21B to $5.27B. Digital Realty pays an annualized forward dividend of $4.88 per share, with quarterly bookings anchored by a 200-megawatt AI inference lease, the largest hyperscale deal in company history. The power, cooling, and networking suppliers sitting behind all of this buildout are the subject of a separate free report we put together on seven AI infrastructure names that aren’t chipmakers.
Leverage Cuts Both Ways
Sagar concedes these are “more levered expressions” that “can go up multiplicatively”. Leverage is symmetrical. A position that can compound higher can compound the other way, and the 5.29% on offer in the long bond is contractual while the compute case is not. CoreWeave illustrates the point at ground level. Its interest expense jumped to $640M in Q2 vs $267M a year ago, with a debt-to-equity ratio of 8.94. The stock is down 33.61% over the past year.
Sagar flagged geopolitics as the top near-term risk, saying the Middle Eastern conflict combined with tariffs has left central banks unable to “underwrite the inflation that comes out of it.” That risk cuts against his own trade as much as anything. An inflation shock central banks cannot absorb is not obviously good for levered growth positions either.
Trade-Off on the Table
A contractual 5.29% in the 30-year against an uncapped but unguaranteed alternative in compute and data center equities is the oldest trade-off in investing. Sagar is taking one side of it in public. Readers can walk into the choice with eyes open on both what is being bought and what is being traded away.