Oracle's stock exploded 40% after revealing a $455B AI contract backlog and projections for $144B cloud revenue by 2030. The surge made Larry Ellison briefly the world's richest person—but can the company turn massive bookings into sustainable margins?
Publishers like Reddit and Yahoo launched a new licensing standard to charge AI companies for training data. The Really Simple Licensing protocol lets sites demand payment per crawl or per AI response. No major AI company has agreed to comply yet.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Meta's $72 billion talent splurge hits turbulence. ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao nearly bailed
Wall Street's love affair with tech stocks turned sour this week. The market darlings known as the Magnificent Seven tumbled hard, with Tesla leading the descent at a 10% drop.
Nvidia, the AI chip champion, fell 7%, while Apple shed over $533 billion in market value - roughly equivalent to erasing a company the size of Tesla. The carnage spread beyond the tech titans.
Semiconductor stocks crumbled as investors digested Trump's harsh tariffs on chip-making hubs. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest chip maker, plunged 10%. Even crypto felt the pain, with Bitcoin dropping below $78,000 - a stark reversal for the "first Bitcoin president's" signature achievement.
Trump remained unmoved by the market chaos. "Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something," he told reporters, displaying the bedside manner of a medieval barber. Meanwhile, Wall Street veterans broke their silence. Bill Ackman warned of "economic nuclear winter," while JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon cautioned against America going it alone.
Corporate America scrambled to respond. Car companies halted shipments, trade groups warned of price hikes, and tech firms watched their AI dreams get more expensive by the day. The semiconductor industry, caught between U.S. demands and Asian manufacturing realities, faces particularly thorny decisions.
Global markets showed no signs of recovery Monday. European chip makers joined the slide, with ASML and STMicroelectronics dropping over 3%. In Asia, markets bled red as investors priced in a new era of trade barriers.
Trump's team keeps listening to concerns from financial executives, but the channels aren't as open as during his first term. Some analysts still hope for deals to reduce tariffs, while others argue this market correction was overdue.
Why this matters:
Marcus Schuler
Marcus Schuler
China's surveillance tech, originally built with IBM and other US companies in the 2000s, is now being sold as 'control-tech-as-a-service' globally. Geedge Networks ships turnkey censorship systems to Pakistan, Myanmar, and others—all while avoiding sanctions.
Nvidia brands Congressional chip hawks as "AI doomers" while supply constraints limit growth regardless of policy outcomes. Chinese firms still want chips despite Beijing pressure. Physical bottlenecks reshape the AI hardware landscape.
California's SB 53 advances with Anthropic's surprise endorsement, splitting the AI industry on transparency rules. The bill requires safety disclosures and incident reporting for frontier models, creating a state template as Congress remains stalled.
Trump's new chip diplomacy: annual permits replace permanent waivers for Samsung and SK Hynix in China. Washington gains oversight, Seoul gets continuity with red tape. But the real bottleneck isn't logic—it's memory production.
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