News
Market news, earnings recaps, and daily moves in AI and semiconductor stocks.
The FTC and 22 states are suing Amazon (AMZN) for allegedly inventing a bidder to raise ad prices
The FTC and 22 states sued Amazon on Monday, alleging a hidden surcharge in its search ad auctions extracted tens of billions of dollars from more than a million advertisers over seven years. The complaint quotes Amazon's internal documents throughout.
Goldman Sachs raises its 2035 humanoid robot forecast nearly fivefold to 6.48 million units
Goldman now sees 6.48 million humanoid robots shipping in 2035, up from 1.38 million, a $138 billion market. The driver is a price curve crossing labor costs, and Amazon's $72 billion in modeled savings is the proof it already works.
Hyperliquid is in talks to enter the US through Kraken's parent, Bloomberg reports. HYPE rose past its August high.
Bloomberg reports Hyperliquid Labs is in advanced talks with Kraken parent Payward to offer some of its perpetual futures to US traders through Bitnomial, Payward's CFTC-licensed exchange. HYPE rose past $83, and Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR) gained on Nasdaq.
SpaceX (SPCX) put Grok on the Pentagon's AI platform. The prize is distribution, not the 42 cents.
The Department of War launched Grok for Government and OpenAI's ChatGPT Mil on GenAI.mil on Monday, a platform built for more than 3 million personnel. Each participating agency licenses xAI for Government for $0.42 under GSA's OneGov deal, so what SpaceX gets is distribution, not licensing revenue.
OpenAI's ChatGPT ads hit $1 billion annualized in 200 days. Google (GOOGL) books that much every 30 hours
OpenAI says its ad business passed a $1 billion annualized run rate about 200 days after launch, with ads in 40+ countries in front of 1 billion weekly users. Next to Google's $294.7 billion ad year it's tiny, and that's not the point.
Samsung and SK Hynix sold their memory years in advance. Buyers left out now pay up to 5 times the contract price.
A 36-gigabyte HBM3E chip sells for about $2,100 on the spot market, while long-term contract customers pay 500,000 to 700,000 won ($360 to $500 USD). Korea's HBM export price passed $70 for the first time in July.
Nvidia's (NVDA) $3.5 billion MediaTek deal turns the chips built to replace its GPUs into an ecosystem play
Nvidia is buying $3.5 billion of MediaTek convertible bonds as MediaTek joins NVLink Fusion to build custom XPUs. The bigger reveal is NVHBM, Nvidia's custom memory claiming 30% more bandwidth than HBM4E, with Amazon's Trainium4 first in line.
Meta's (META) $200-a-month AI agent could launch in September
Meta reportedly plans to launch Hatch, an AI agent that completes tasks inside Instagram and WhatsApp, as soon as early September, with a premium tier of up to $199.99 a month and a new model, Watermelon, due in October.
Korea's retail investors are deep in losses. The government's stock trading tax still rose 401%.
Korea collected 1.4 trillion won in securities transaction tax in July, up 401% from a year earlier. The tax is charged on trades, not profits, so a falling market that keeps trading still fills the treasury.
SemiAnalysis tested 25 AI clouds and got into other customers' data. It won't name the providers.
SemiAnalysis says it broke isolation between customers at AI cloud providers, reaching data belonging to banks, telecom companies and one national intelligence agency. It named none of the providers where it found the problems.
Marvell (MRVL) fell 10.3% on margins. Now Dell (DELL), Credo (CRDO) and Broadcom (AVGO) report into the same question
Marvell fell 10.3% Friday after guiding gross margin lower on a greater custom mix. Ten of the names we track report between September 1 and 3, and Broadcom, Credo and Ciena all sell into the same build.
China's Pony.ai (PONY) is bringing 200 driverless taxis to Seoul. Its Korean partner PonyLink rose 26% in a week.
China's Pony.ai and Korean operator FutureLink signed a deal on August 28 to put 200 Level 4 robotaxis on Korean roads by 2028. FutureLink's KOSDAQ-listed parent PonyLink rose 26% in a week.
Rogue AI agents attacked Hugging Face. Its defenders turned to a Chinese open-weight model.
About 700 OpenAI test agents took part in an attack on Hugging Face in July, and the reports published Aug. 26 read like the case against open-weight AI. Except the frontier models Hugging Face reached for refused to help analyze the attack, and its responders ran a Chinese open-weight model instead. Washington has already picked a side.
Elon Musk says SpaceX will cast its own turbine blades. Howmet (HWM) has over 50% of that market.
Elon Musk says casting blades and vanes is the limiting factor for gas turbine production, and that SpaceX doing it in-house could speed new turbines by up to 18 months. Howmet (HWM), the one public pure play, says gas turbine demand is already extraordinary.
Broadcom (AVGO) told Wall Street to expect $16 billion in AI chip revenue. On September 2, it has to deliver.
Broadcom reports fiscal Q3 on September 2 with AI revenue guided to $16 billion, more than triple a year ago. The stock sits 25% below its June high, and options price a move of just over 8%.
OpenAI will cut SpaceX's (SPCX) Cursor off from its models on November 12. Musk: "I couldn't care less... utterly untrustworthy assholes"
OpenAI told SpaceX on Friday it will wind down Cursor's access to its models by November 12, citing Elon Musk's companies breaking contracts. Cursor's CEO says OpenAI serves about 5% of traffic, and Anthropic's compute chief says Claude capacity for Cursor will keep growing.
Sony and Warner publishers sue Anthropic over alleged use of pirated lyrics weeks before a possible $2 trillion IPO.
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and 33 affiliated publishers sued Anthropic and its two founders personally in San Jose federal court on August 28, seeking up to $150,000 per song. The complaint itself cites a report that Anthropic is eyeing a $2 trillion IPO as soon as October.
IBM's software chief sold a third of his IBM stock. It was his own call, not a trading plan.
Rob Thomas sold 25,000 IBM shares for $5.76 million on August 26, six weeks after IBM's worst day in its history. The Form 4's trading-plan checkbox is unchecked.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund owns 21.1% of SharonAI (SHAZ). It's currently sitting $101 million below cost.
Situational Awareness filed a Schedule 13D reporting 8,070,950 SharonAI (SHAZ) shares at a cost of $523.9 million. The same position was in its filings before the fund's July losses, and it's still there.
Korean investors put $798 million into a 3x leveraged semiconductor fund (SOXL) in one week. It fell 9.5% the next session.
Korean investors made a 3x semiconductor fund their number one overseas purchase in the week of Nvidia's earnings, with $798.04 million going in. That's about 58 times what they put into Nvidia itself.
A thermal drone found 45 gas generators running at the Nebius (NBIS) data center in New Jersey. The state says it issued no permits.
Floodlight's thermal drone footage shows at least 45 of 62 gas generators operating at DataOne in Vineland, the site supplying Microsoft under Nebius' $17 billion deal. NJDEP says it has issued no permits and none are under review.
Meta (META) is testing robots to swap cables and reset servers. One could take 80% of some workloads, a worker says.
Wired reported Meta is testing robots from Kinova, ABB, and Watney Robotics to swap cables, power cycle servers, and reseat parts at its Iowa and Ohio data centers. One worker estimates a cable bot could replace up to 80% of some workloads. Meta says it needs more workers, not fewer.
IREN signed a frontier AI lab and is paying 9% to finance the GPUs. Microsoft deployment debt costs 6%.
IREN (IREN) reported fiscal 2026 results and a new multi-year contract with an unnamed leading frontier AI lab. The same release prices its GPU debt by customer: 9.0% on $2.4 billion for non investment grade deployments, 6.0% on the $3.6 billion behind Microsoft.
Meta (META) is asking TikTok and YouTube to copy its teen limits. Saying yes costs Meta another $5.3 billion.
Meta ran full-page ads in three national papers urging TikTok and YouTube to adopt the teen limits from its settlement. If the rivals comply, Meta pays the states another $5.3 billion, and New York's payout nearly doubles.