Tuesday, September 22, 2026 · 1:17 AM ET
Markets
The Nasdaq jumped 2.26% to a record close of 27,122.09 and the S&P 500 gained 1.49% to 7,764.70, fueled by a semiconductor rebound. AMD topped a $1T market cap for the first time, Intel climbed ~12%, Arm surged ~17%, and Meta jumped ~11%.
Big Tech
Meta rose 11.4% to $741.25, adding roughly $200B in market value after Wells Fargo raised its price target to $796 and argued the company has a compelling AI monetization story, with Muse becoming the #1 free app on Apple's U.S. App Store ahead of Meta Connect.
Policy
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said U.S.-China talks went 'very well,' with the two countries formally establishing U.S.-China AI Dialogues and planning to meet again in two months. They are also creating an AI incidents hotline and discussing protocols on cybersecurity, AI agents, and broader AI safety.
Geopolitics
President Trump announced an agreement giving the U.S. permanent responsibility for Greenland's security at no cost to the U.S., barring adversaries from establishing bases there, and said the U.S. will build a significantly larger military presence on the island.
AI Infrastructure
Anthropic told investors it expects to scale available compute capacity to roughly 5 GW by year-end, up from about 1.5 GW last year. It has secured capacity across providers including a SpaceX deal near $1.25B/month through 2029 and up to 5 GW with Amazon, and is reportedly in talks with Meta on a potential $10B lease.
Markets
GameStop CEO and Chairman Ryan Cohen purchased another 1.15M shares for about $26.4M at an average of $22.94, lifting his direct ownership to 40.5M shares and, including warrants, roughly 8.7% of the company.
Policy
The Trump administration is reportedly proposing a $5B Middle East energy reconstruction fund, potentially expandable to $10B, seeking matching contributions from Gulf states to rebuild infrastructure damaged in the Iran war and reduce dependence on the Strait of Hormuz.
Options Activity
The 10 most active options by contracts traded were NVDA (3.8M), TSLA (2.8M), META (2.8M), INTC (2.2M), AAPL (1.4M), AMD (1.3M), MU (1.2M), AMZN (1.0M), SPCX (826K) and MSFT (753K).
AI
OpenAI projects $278B of cumulative negative free cash flow through 2030 on roughly $856B of compute and infrastructure spending. It expects revenue to grow from $36B this year to $350B in 2030, with investors reportedly weighing a new raise near a $1.2T valuation.
Big Tech
Meta's new Muse AI assistant is outpacing ChatGPT's early mobile launch across key adoption metrics, per Sensor Tower, reaching 2.8M downloads in its first 12 days and setting a new U.S. daily download record of 264K on September 19.
Markets
Last week marked hedge funds' largest weekly purchase of U.S. equities in five weeks, driven by short covering in macro products and new long buying, concentrated in Information Technology and Communication Services. Software allocations rose to roughly 5.0% of hedge fund market exposure.
Markets
U.S. household equity exposure climbed to a record 39.9% of household net worth, up 12.6 points since the 2022 bear market, while homeowners' equity in residential real estate fell to 19.3%, widening the gap to a record 20.6 percentage points.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity stocks CrowdStrike and Okta trade at rich valuation premiums as investors bet they'll benefit from AI-driven demand, though that payoff so far remains unproven.
AI Infrastructure
Neocloud Nscale's contracted backlog has ballooned roughly 1,000-fold in three years to about $103 billion, driven mainly by two AI-compute-hungry clients: Microsoft and Anthropic.
IPO
Health and fitness ring maker Oura and some of its backers are seeking to raise as much as $2.2 billion in a US initial public offering.
AI Chips
Chinese AI developer DeepSeek is leaning heavily on Huawei's homegrown AI accelerators to sidestep U.S. export controls that restrict its access to Nvidia hardware, a bet on domestic Chinese silicon for training and inference.
AI Infrastructure
Nvidia is partnering with Swedish autonomous-truck maker Einride to supply the underlying compute platform and AI tools for its driverless systems, as Einride targets 1,500-2,000 vehicles by 2028.
Cloud
Logistics giant Kuehne+Nagel announced a long-term partnership with Amazon to support supply-chain and data-center/cloud logistics; Kuehne+Nagel shares rose more than 3% on the news.
AI Chips
AMD and Intel shares surged, with AMD closing in on a $1 trillion market value, as the launch of Meta's Muse AI agent sparked a broad rally in chip stocks on hopes of fresh AI-hardware demand.
AI Infrastructure
Nvidia is purchasing an additional $1.5 billion of shares in SoftBank-backed SB Energy, deepening its bet on power supply for AI data centers ahead of the energy firm's planned IPO.
AI Funding
A former xAI staffer is seeking to raise about $50 million for a new startup focused on detecting and combating AI-generated deepfakes, tapping investor appetite for AI-safety tooling.
AI Infrastructure
SoftBank is seeking to raise more than $11 billion in dollar and euro high-yield bonds to help fund its escalating investment in OpenAI and the broader AI build-out, one of the largest junk bond deals on record.
Markets
The Nasdaq Composite closed at a record as Meta shares jumped roughly 11% on enthusiasm for its new Muse AI agent, while falling oil prices added to the risk-on mood across equities.
AI Chips
Alibaba rolled out what it calls China's most powerful AI accelerator, the Zhenwu V900 from its T-Head division, saying it triples its predecessor's performance and can be combined in clusters of up to 500,000 units to compete with Nvidia and underpin a 20 GW data-center expansion by 2032.
AI Infrastructure
Alphabet's Google agreed to finance capacity uprates at the Vogtle and Hatch nuclear plants operated by a Southern Co. subsidiary, adding about 96 megawatts of supply via a new tariff to meet data-center-driven electricity demand.
IPO
Shares of Qingdao-based Ligent Technologies, which makes optical transceivers and chips for data-center networks, rose as much as 19% in their Hong Kong debut after raising HK$5.7 billion ($727 million), valuing the company at about $4.6 billion amid the AI infrastructure buildout.
IPO
SoftBank-backed SB Energy, the developer behind a huge OpenAI data-center complex, is facing investor skepticism as it prepares to go public, a test of public-market appetite for AI-infrastructure power developers.