Wednesday, September 23, 2026 · 1:18 AM ET
Macro
Trump said keeping Iran from a nuclear weapon remains the administration's only objective and that he faces a 'big decision' on the conflict, reiterating he expects a U.S.-Iran deal after the election as talks with Tehran continue.
AI
Meta added Instacart, PayPal, Expedia and Shopify partnerships to its Muse AI assistant, letting it handle grocery delivery, checkout, trip booking and shopping across millions of merchants as it pushes Muse into a full AI commerce and productivity platform.
Options
The most active options by contracts traded were NVDA (2.1M), TSLA (1.5M), AAPL (1.2M), MU (964K), META (936K), INTC (816K), AMZN (682K), GOOGL (662K), SPCX (644K) and AMD (622K).
Fintech
SoFi is moving its full debit and credit card program, over $25B in annualized volume, to blockchain settlement on Mastercard's network using SoFiUSD, a 1:1 dollar-redeemable stablecoin, with merchants needing no new infrastructure and cross-border payments eyed next.
Analyst Ratings
SanDisk rose 7% after Rosenblatt initiated Buy with a $2,400 target, arguing AI is turning NAND from a commodity into a system-critical part of AI infrastructure and noting SanDisk's recent addition to the S&P 100.
Markets
Burry said he is at full size across several positions, calling prices 'rather attractive.' He added shorts on MU, NBIS, SOXX and PLTR while increasing longs in QXO, BBW, SFM, BIRK and MELI.
Analyst Ratings
Citi kept AppLovin at Buy with a $600 target after data showed 13,105 global e-commerce clients as of Sept 18, up 5.1% week over week, the fastest growth in five months, with international merchant growth outpacing the U.S.
Big Tech
Apple launched an M6 Mac mini with up to 4x faster AI performance from $899 and a Mac Studio on M5 Max/Ultra with up to 512GB unified memory, Thunderbolt 5 with RDMA, and the ability to run large models on-device; Mac Studio starts at $2,499.
Quantum Computing
IonQ said it ran the industry's first end-to-end real-time quantum error-correction decoder on an off-the-shelf CPU, tested on circuits simulating up to 408 logical qubits and 31.5M operations with as little as 0.02% overhead, supporting its Walking Cat roadmap.
Commodities
China imported a record 1,141 tonnes of gold in the first eight months of 2026, already more than all of 2025 and on pace to top 1,700 tonnes for the year, as Chinese gold ETFs added 44 tonnes amid strong investment demand and a stronger yuan.
Crypto
Spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted $999M Monday, their biggest daily intake since October 2025, led by IBIT's $381M. September inflows now total $1.3B after $3.5B in August, underscoring continued institutional Bitcoin demand.
Markets
A filing disclosed 1,156 securities transactions made on Trump's behalf in July worth roughly $79M-$270M, including $5M-$25M sales of MSFT and AMZN and purchases across NVDA, INTU, MRVL, CRM and CHD; the White House said third parties manage the portfolio.
AI Chips
Alibaba rolled out its most powerful AI chip yet and outlined a roadmap for a larger model and expanded data centers, doubling down on controlling both the hardware and software behind its AI ambitions in a direct challenge to Nvidia.
AI
Amazon, Microsoft, Figma and Workday are dangling new discounts on AI products to clients and consulting partners worn out by shifting pricing, as customers grow choosier after ramping budgets for tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex.
Data Centers
Masayoshi Son-backed SoftBank is slowing the planned IPO of its roughly $50bn data centre group amid market fears over an AI slowdown and lackluster interest in a new debt sale.
AI
AI startup Heidi roughly doubled its valuation to $900 million in a new funding round, underscoring continued investor appetite for fast-growing artificial-intelligence companies.
Markets
Data-center infrastructure company Accelevation and a backer are seeking to raise up to $720 million in an initial public offering, testing investor demand tied to the AI build-out.
AI
Ande came out of stealth with $52 million from Lightspeed and Redpoint for AI agents that help businesses arrange corporate events, dining and sporting outings, handling everything from booking venues to processing expenses.
Big Tech
Microsoft is cutting jobs in its Xbox division and reorganizing several first-party game studios under its Activision Blizzard unit, the latest restructuring in the company's gaming business.
Crypto
Binance is investing $100 million in stablecoin issuer Circle and extending its USDC distribution agreement, deepening ties between the largest crypto exchange and the company behind the second-biggest stablecoin.
Markets
Technology stocks climbed with Meta out front as Brent crude sank on speculation of a potential US-Iran meeting, with falling energy prices helping lift equities and push the Nasdaq toward record territory.
AI
Anthropic unveiled a more cost-efficient Opus 5.5 model and OpenAI rolled out a cheaper GPT-6 family priced at roughly half its predecessors, escalating a price war among leading AI labs as they fight for enterprise share ahead of Anthropic's planned IPO.
Markets
Nvidia shares are showing a technical warning signal as the chipmaker's valuation compresses, raising questions about whether the AI-driven rally in the market's most influential stock can keep running.
Markets
Netflix received its second analyst downgrade in a week, with concerns mounting over slowing user engagement, pressuring the streaming giant's shares.
Markets
Meta's fast-growing Muse shopping app is weighing on shares of companies that rely on consumer inertia, as investors reprice retail and e-commerce names threatened by Meta's push into AI-driven commerce.
AI Chips
CME Group's plan to launch futures on Nvidia GPU rental prices — seen as key to making AI compute an investable asset class — is delayed, as the CFTC extends its review of how the contracts would work, pushing the hoped-for early-October launch out.
AI
AI legal-tech startup Legora is in talks to raise a new funding round valuing it at roughly $8.5 billion, underscoring continued investor demand for AI applications targeting professional-services workflows.
Data Centers
Anthropic is in early talks to lease up to 1 gigawatt of compute from Stream Data Centers, majority-owned by Apollo Global Management, filling the sites with Broadcom- and Google-designed TPUs as it works to cut reliance on cloud providers.
Markets
The Nasdaq 100 climbed to a fresh record as fear-of-missing-out buying in AI and megacap tech names powered equities higher, extending the tech-led rally into the close.
Data Centers
AI cloud provider CoreWeave closed a $4.2 billion convertible bond offering, with the notes carrying a higher coupon than a similar issuance in April as it funds its data-center buildout.
AI Infrastructure
SoftBank is seeking to raise more than $11 billion in dollar and euro junk bonds at record yields, one of the largest such deals, to help finance its escalating investment in OpenAI and the broader AI boom.
AI Infrastructure
Alibaba plans to expand its cloud data-center footprint into Europe and the Middle East as part of an aggressive AI infrastructure push, deepening its bid to compete globally in AI compute.
IPO
AI cloud provider Nscale, backed by Nvidia, played down that ByteDance was its largest customer last year as it pitches a roughly $35 billion IPO to stock-market investors.
AI Chips
China is surveying its reliance on Broadcom networking switches in data centres amid a drive to boost domestic players and cut dependence on foreign AI infrastructure, a potential risk to Broadcom's China revenue.
IPO
Indian data-center operator ESDS has become one of the country's best-performing new listings, as investor enthusiasm for AI-driven data-center demand lifts the stock sharply after its IPO.