News
Market news, earnings recaps, and daily moves in AI and semiconductor stocks.
The Fed held rates 9 to 3. Warsh says the AI capex boom is driving up chip prices.
The Fed held the federal funds target range at 3.5% to 3.75% on July 29 in a 9 to 3 vote, with Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan dissenting in favor of a quarter-point increase. Chairman Kevin Warsh listed the AI capex boom as one of four questions the committee debated and said it is driving up prices of memory and logic chips. The June minutes show many participants expect AI infrastructure demand to keep pressuring technology and electricity prices.
SoFi (SOFI) beat and raised guidance. The stock still hit a 52-week low.
SoFi beat on revenue, earnings and EBITDA, raised its full-year revenue outlook, and then fell 7.2% to a 52-week low. Credit actually improved this quarter. The issue is where the growth came from: lending revenue grew 63% while the asset-light Financial Services and Technology Platform segments grew 17% between them.
Nokia (NOK) has halved since June. Five insiders bought $2.2 million of it in the past week.
Three Nokia insiders bought on July 24, including board chair Timo Ihamuotila. Two more bought on July 29, another 7 percent lower. The stock is down about 50 percent from its June peak even as second quarter profit grew.
Micron (MU) CEO sold $37.3 million in stock, the same 40,000 shares he has sold every 28 days since May
The Form 4 landed July 28 showing $37.3 million sold. It is the same 40,000-share block Micron's chief executive has sold every 28 days since May, on a plan signed back in January.
Seoul halted its stock market two days in a row. The rules written to stop it start Friday (July 29, 2026)
The Kospi closed Wednesday at 5,663.24, down 5.98%, after trading 12.63% lower at its worst point, and both Korean markets halted for a second straight day, which has never happened before. Deputy Prime Minister Koo Yun-chul apologized for the single stock leveraged ETFs blamed for the size of the move, then called the four financial chiefs in at 6 p.m. The cash deposit rule meant to cool those funds does not take effect until Friday.
SK Hynix (SKHY) reported a record quarter and still missed. One analyst broke from the pack and called it within a quarter of a percent
SK Hynix reported 60.5426 trillion won ($41.6 billion USD) of operating profit against a 64.09 trillion won consensus, 5.5% short, on revenue 5.6% short. Both figures are records. The operating margin came in at 76%, right where the street had it, so the entire miss was revenue rather than profitability. Korea Investment & Securities was the only firm below the pack and landed within a quarter of a percent.
Hedge fund Durable Capital now owns 10.6% of Goosehead (GSHD). Its last public filing showed 6.6%.
Durable Capital's last public filing showed 1,562,969 Goosehead shares on March 31. Tuesday's Form 3 showed 2,380,281, and everything bought in between required no disclosure at all.
The FCC moved to ban Chinese robots. Agility Robotics (CCXI) rose 12% in half an hour while the humanoid ETF (KOID) fell.
The FCC moved July 28 to bar new Chinese humanoid and quadruped robots, plus connected power inverters, from the US market. Four small robotics names did all the moving: RoboStrategy (BOT) closed up 17.6% and Churchill Capital XI (CCXI) rose 12.3% in the half hour after the headline. Teradyne then jumped after hours on earnings. The robotics ETFs closed lower.
Kioxia hit limit-down again and is down 60% from its June peak. Sandisk (SNDK) co-owns its factories (July 28, 2026)
Kioxia closed at its limit-down price of 44,550 yen ($272 USD), down 18.33%, after finishing at the bottom of its daily band on July 17 as well. It is 60.5% below the 112,700 yen peak it set on June 22. It shares the Yokkaichi and Kitakami NAND plants with Sandisk (SNDK), which is why the two keep falling together.
Korea's Kospi fell 10.84% and halted trading. Nvidia (NVDA) is flat and Micron (MU) is down 10% (July 28, 2026)
Korea's Kospi closed at 6,023.66 on Tuesday, down 10.84%, its fourth largest one-day fall on record, after Korea Exchange stopped all trading for 20 minutes. Samsung and SK Hynix each lost more than 13%. The US carryover went into memory and storage, with Sandisk (SNDK) down 14.52% and Micron (MU) down 9.54%, while Nvidia (NVDA) held flat and the Dow rose.
T1 Energy raised its Austin solar fab budget 20% and blamed the Texas data center boom (TE)
The Austin solar cell fab's phase one estimate went from $425 million to $510 million and first production slipped a quarter. T1 named the Texas data center construction market as the reason. A second filing the same morning disclosed a $135 million purchase of the TOPCon patents Trina Solar owned until December.
Anthropic says it never asked to ban open-weight AI. Dario Amodei does want China cut off from Nvidia (NVDA) chips.
Dario Amodei answered the Nvidia-hosted open-weights letter on July 27, three days after Anthropic became the only major AI lab to skip it. He says a ban was never the ask. What he does want is China cut off from US chips, a crackdown on industrial-scale distillation, and mandatory safety testing for every capable model, open or closed.
Micron (MU) accounting chief sold 879 shares for $879,000, at exactly $1,000 each, two days before the 10% drop
Scott Allen sold 879 Micron shares for $879,000 at exactly $1,000 each on July 23, the only unscheduled large insider sale our tracker caught last week. His other 34,958 shares stayed put.
We gave six AIs $10,000 each to pick small-cap AI stocks. Five bought the same one.
Six AI chatbots each got $10,000 for small-cap AI stocks. Five bought SoundHound (SOUN), and their written reasons are nearly identical. DeepSeek leads week one.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz bought SpaceX on its first day of trading. The disclosure landed 44 days later, with the stock down 29%.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz disclosed a $1,001 to $15,000 purchase of SpaceX (SPCX) dated June 12, 2026, the stock's first day of trading. It has fallen about 29 percent since, and the one stock he sold that week is the best performer in the filing.
Nvidia (NVDA) will own more of Korean internet company Naver than its founder does
Naver, the Korean company that runs the country's main search engine and its biggest shopping platform, told the Korea Exchange on Monday it will sell 1.4809 trillion won of new shares to Nvidia, near $1.01 billion. That makes Nvidia the third largest shareholder at about 4.5%, ahead of founder Lee Hae-jin at 3.8%.
About $25 billion of Microsoft's (MSFT) AI budget is memory getting more expensive. Wednesday says whether that grew.
Microsoft told investors in April it would spend about $190 billion on capital projects this year. Around $25 billion of that increase bought nothing new, it was the same buildout at a higher price after memory costs rose. Microsoft reports Wednesday after the close, two hours after the Fed decision.
Amazon (AMZN) wants 5,105 satellites talking to your phone, on Globalstar (GSAT) spectrum it doesn't own yet
The application covers 5,105 satellites connecting straight to phones, starting in 2028, running on airwaves that still belong to Globalstar. Amazon agreed in April to buy the company for about $11.6 billion, and that deal is not expected to close until 2027. Globalstar trades $11 under the headline price, and the reason is in the exchange ratio rather than in doubts about the deal.
ChangXin Memory (CXMT) closed up 466% on day one and is worth as much as Intel. Its factories are sold out through 2027.
ChangXin Memory (CXMT) closed its Shanghai debut up 465.82%, passing ICBC as China's most valuable listed company and drawing level with Intel. Only 6.73% of its stock was tradable. The order book behind it is the part that matters for Micron (MU) and SK Hynix (SKHY).
Korea signed $950 billion in AI deals, then foreign investors sold 2.9 trillion won of SK Hynix and Samsung (July 27, 2026)
Monday was the first Seoul session after Korean companies signed about $950 billion of AI agreements in San Francisco. Kospi opened 1.7% higher, then fell almost 2% when China's CXMT closed its Shanghai debut up 465.82%. Foreign investors sold a net 2.9039 trillion won of Kospi stocks, and the two they sold most were SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.
Nvidia (NVDA) is in talks to guarantee $250 billion of OpenAI's data center financing. The chips are another $350 billion.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday evening that Nvidia is in talks to guarantee about $250 billion of OpenAI's financing for a 10 gigawatt campus in southern Ohio. The guarantee would cover lease and construction costs, not chips, which are a separate arrangement worth about $350 billion. Nvidia's earlier plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI was never completed.
Fed rate hike odds went from 10.7% to 38% in nine days. AI stocks are the most exposed.
Odds of an increase at Wednesday's meeting stood at 38% on July 24, against 10.7% on July 15. Nine of 18 FOMC participants projected a hike this year back in June, and Chair Kevin Warsh says policymakers have no tolerance for elevated inflation. June CPI came in cooler than forecast, but oil has since gone back over $100, and the AI trade is the part of the market most exposed to what happens next.
SK Hynix (SKHY) reports earnings Wednesday. Even the lowest forecast beats what it earned in all of 2025.
Everyone who follows SK Hynix agrees the April to June quarter was the best in company history. They disagree by about 16% on how good. The lowest forecast on the board still has the company making more money in three months than it made in all of 2025.
US strikes on Iran paused. Oil fell more than 3%, and Micron (MU) and Nebius (NBIS) rose over the weekend
US Central Command has gone two straight nights without striking Iran, and a Defense Department source told CNN operations are on a hold. Polymarket puts an effective ceasefire at 75% by August 31. US markets were shut all weekend, but the tokenized stock market never closed, and it spent Sunday buying the AI trade and selling oil.