News
Market news, earnings recaps, and daily moves in AI and semiconductor stocks.
Anthropic is building AI chips and paying up to $850,000 to teach Claude how to design them.
Anthropic confirmed Wednesday it is building an in-house Custom Silicon team for Claude, the first time it has said so publicly. The job listings pay $320,000 to $485,000 for the chip designers and $500,000 to $850,000 for the researcher teaching Claude to do the design work.
Musk says memory demand grows 200% a year against 20% supply. The new Micron (MU) and SK Hynix (SKHY) plants open in 2027 and 2028
Elon Musk did the memory math out loud on SpaceX's call: supply up 20% a year, demand up 200%. Microsoft put $25 billion of its capex on memory and Amazon named it too. The plants that would fix it open in 2027 and 2028.
CoreWeave (CRWV) secured priority SSD supply from SK Hynix's Solidigm in a multi-year deal, but key terms weren't disclosed.
CoreWeave announced a multi-year agreement with Solidigm for priority access to enterprise SSD capacity. The release carried no dollar value, no term length and no capacity figure, which is not how CoreWeave's $21 billion Meta agreement read. Enterprise SSD contract prices rose about 80% in the first quarter.
Korean media says Apple (AAPL) asked CXMT for cheaper memory. CXMT quoted more than Samsung and SK Hynix (SKHY)
Digital Daily reported on August 5 that Apple asked China's CXMT to lower its price on LPDDR5X mobile memory and was refused. CXMT quoted the same as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, or higher, and the floor under ordinary memory prices held.
Leopold Aschenbrenner sold 11.5 million Core Scientific (CORZ) shares below the Aug. 3 low. The stock closed up 10%.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness sold 11,519,078 Core Scientific (CORZ) shares in two block trades on Aug. 3 at an average near $19.59, both priced under the session low. The stake fell to 4.4% from 8.1%, which ends the reporting obligation. He still holds 14,089,395 shares.
Texas froze new data center grid connections pending an audit of 474 gigawatts in requests. Bernstein says Cipher (CIFR) and CleanSpark (CLSK) are the most exposed.
Governor Greg Abbott ordered the PUCT and ERCOT to audit every data center seeking a grid connection, and new approvals are frozen until it is done. Bernstein says already-approved megawatts just got more valuable, and named Cipher (CIFR), CleanSpark (CLSK) and Core Scientific (CORZ) as the most exposed.
Aehr Test Systems (AEHR) director bought 20,000 shares at $15.50. He just filed to sell the same block near $109.
Fourteen insiders filed notices to sell stock on Tuesday. Thirteen were selling shares the company gave them. The fourteenth, a director at Aehr Test Systems, was selling 20,000 shares he bought himself at $15.50 two years ago.
Rigetti (RGTI) and D-Wave (QBTS) report earnings Thursday. Rigetti's last profit was a warrant revaluation.
D-Wave reports Thursday morning and Rigetti Thursday afternoon, with IonQ going first on Wednesday. The Street wants about $4 million of revenue from D-Wave and $5 million from Rigetti, against market caps of $8.1 billion and $5.8 billion.
Sivers Semiconductors (SIVEF) jumped on a US plan to block Chinese transceivers. Sivers supplies the lasers inside them.
SIVE closed up 18.86% in Stockholm and the US line finished at $3.90, up 17.1%. Sivers announced nothing Tuesday. The connection runs through Jabil, which said in April it plans to build a 1.6T transceiver module using Sivers' DFB lasers, with no customer or revenue date disclosed.
Constellation Energy (CEG) reports Thursday with the stock 35% below its 52-week high
Constellation Energy reports second quarter results Thursday morning, with full-year guidance of $11.00 to $12.00 a share affirmed in May. The stock trades about 35% below its October high, and the wider AI power group fell again Tuesday.
Anthropic is paying $10 billion over six years for compute at a Norway data center owned by bitcoin miner Bitdeer (BTDR). The startup reselling it was founded in January.
Anthropic will pay $10 billion over six years for capacity at a hydro-powered Norway campus, Bloomberg reported. Bitdeer signed a separate 16-year, $4.7 billion lease with the seven-month-old startup running the site.
Bloomberg said Korea's stock market is becoming uninvestable. The regulator fired back that night, over one number.
A Bloomberg Opinion column counted 33 days this year when the Kospi moved 5% or more, against four for the Nikkei and none for the Hang Seng. Korea's Financial Services Commission called its forced-selling figure unsourced.
Zebra Technologies (ZBRA) rose 18% on record results. A $73 million tariff refund did most of the margin work.
Zebra beat by $1.99 a share and raised full year guidance. The quarter also carried $73 million of IEEPA tariff recoveries booked into gross profit, and the company guided next quarter's margin nearly 6 points lower.
T1 Energy (TE) jumped 19% on a 641 MW Clearway order. First Solar (FSLR) rose 10% the same day.
T1 Energy closed up 18.7% Monday after signing Clearway for 641 MW of solar modules. Solar stocks rallied across the board behind First Solar's earnings beat.
The Nasdaq just erased six red days in three. It's only done that once before.
The Nasdaq closed at 25,913.90 on Monday, up 2.13% and green for a third day running. Those three days added 6.02% and wiped out the 5.4% lost during the six red days that ended July 29. Since 1971 the Nasdaq has gone six down then three up 35 times, and day four came back green in only 11 of the 34 finished cases.
Palantir (PLTR) grew revenue 93%, raised its full-year forecast by $500 million, and is still a third below its high.
Palantir reported second quarter revenue of $1.935 billion, up 93% from a year earlier, and adjusted earnings of $0.41 a share. It raised full year revenue guidance by about $500 million. Shares were up more than 8% in early after-hours trading.
CrowdStrike insiders filed to sell $196 million of CRWD since June. The CEO's sales were preplanned. The CFO's weren't.
Nine Form 144 notices since June 5 cover $195.7 million of CrowdStrike stock, and $145.3 million of it is the chief executive. His Forms 4 check the 10b5-1 box. The finance chief filed again Monday, and his do not.
A drone motor costs $12 from China and $100 from America. The Pentagon just committed $820 million to close the gap.
The Pentagon committed $1.3 billion to drones last week and none of it reached the stocks that rallied. The $820 million loan went to privately held Performance Drone Works, and it was for motors, batteries and control electronics rather than aircraft. The majority of drones on the Pentagon's own approved list still run Chinese motors, because a Chinese one costs $12 and an American one costs $100.
SK Hynix couldn't discuss a buyback for 25 days because of a US rule. That ends Tuesday in Seoul.
A US prospectus rule has barred SK Hynix from announcing a buyback or special dividend since its Nasdaq listing on July 10. The 25 days end on the night of August 4 in Korea, with 87.96 trillion won of cash on the balance sheet and the company saying no plan has been finalized.
The AI trade rallied Monday. Memory fell as much as 8% at the open even as chip prices kept rising.
Micron (MU) has lost a third of its value since June 25 and SanDisk nearly half. CoreWeave and Vertiv fell about half as far, and Nvidia rose. Memory contract prices never fell. What changed is the rate of increase, which went from 93-98% a quarter to a forecast 13-18%.
EchoStar (ECHO) just reported $24.12 in earnings per share. Almost all of it came from bankruptcy.
EchoStar reported net income of $8.46 billion for the second quarter. About $9.73 billion of it was a non-cash gain booked when DISH DBS filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 on the final day of the quarter.
Radware (RDWR) CFO bought after a 17% drop. Two colleagues sold at higher prices this year.
Guy Avidan bought $50,420 of Radware stock two days after the shares fell 17 percent. It is the only open-market purchase in the company's Form 4 record, and that record begins on April 2, 2026.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are close to half the Kospi. They fell almost 9% on Monday and took the index down 5.12%, while Korea's smaller companies rose.
The Kospi closed down 5.12% on August 3, giving back a third of the record rise it had on July 31. Foreign and institutional investors net sold 4.3814 trillion won ($3.06 billion USD) of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix on the day, and almost nothing else. The Kosdaq rose 2.44% in the same session.
SoundHound (SOUN) reports Wednesday. Five of our six AI stock pickers own it despite the stock trading near a 52-week low.
SoundHound reports second quarter results Wednesday after the close. Guidance leaves a large second half to cover, gross margin fell to 31% last quarter, and five of the six AI models in our stock contest own the shares.