Tuesday, October 20, 2026 · 1:11 AM ET
Big Tech
Morgan Stanley named Amazon its top pick with a $350 target (~40% upside) and raised AWS growth forecasts to 47% and 42% YoY for 2027 and 2028. Amazon also unveiled TorchNeuron, letting developers run existing PyTorch workloads on Trainium2/Trainium3 with minimal code changes, lowering a key barrier to adopting its custom silicon versus Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem.
Markets
ARK sees robotaxis as ~80% of Tesla's enterprise value by 2031 (8.1M autonomous vehicles, $753B annual ride-hailing revenue, costs ~40% below Waymo), plus ~1M Optimus robots sold externally and $212B revenue against a $26T robotics market. The thesis assumes ~$225B of cumulative AI-infrastructure investment through 2031.
AI Infrastructure
Per The Telegraph, Microsoft pulled out of a UK data-center agreement with British neocloud Nscale, a setback before Nscale's planned $3B IPO; the Loughton, Essex facility faced repeated delays with sufficient power not expected until the 2030s. Separately, Anthropic is reportedly in talks to buy $45B of AI computing capacity from Nvidia-backed Nscale (Bloomberg).
Macro
Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, citing sources familiar with mediation, reported negotiators are working to narrow differences and secure mutual concessions to prevent renewed military escalation between Washington and Tehran. No agreement has been officially confirmed and talks remain ongoing.
AI
Anthropic created the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund with an initial 5% of company equity for charitable work and AI's societal impacts, including employment; subject to approval, the board may add 2% of shares per 50% valuation increase above an undisclosed baseline. Elon Musk separately said that next year he will give every American child one $SPCX share, worth ~$10.5B at today's prices.
Markets
Unlike July, retail investors have shown little appetite to buy the dip, while short interest across Korean equities, US memory stocks, chip ETFs like $SMH and indexes like $SPY stays relatively low. JPM also flagged increased leveraged-ETF exposure and a combined $40B Samsung/SK Hynix buyback accelerated to finish in mid-October, removing a key source of buying support.
Macro
Per the Wall Street Journal, Putin raised the proposal on an October 9 call with Trump, with a potential meeting next month bringing together the leaders of Russia, the US and China. No meeting or peace agreement has been confirmed.
Markets
The GPU cloud-rental and AI-infrastructure software firm raised $151M at a $750M valuation but sank on debut amid a broader Korean selloff (KOSPI -4.2% below July lows, Samsung -3%, SK Hynix -6%). If the drop holds, it could be the worst IPO debut in South Korean market history, underscoring the gap between AI-offering demand and volatile public valuations.
Markets
Friday's S&P 500 put notional ran ~330% above the 2024 daily average (versus $100B-$500B typical pre-2020), while total CBOE put volume hit 9.6M contracts, the fourth-highest daily reading since 2015. Record put volume reflects heavy downside/hedging activity rather than necessarily outright bearishness.
Markets
Wilson urged investors to prepare to buy the dip rather than assume the bull market is ending. Since mid-August, high-quality stocks have gained ~6% while the equal-weight S&P 500 fell ~4% and cyclicals nearly 10%, a divergence he reads as a transition to a more selective, mid-cycle market.
Markets
Top 10 by contracts traded: NVDA 3.3M, TSLA 2.8M, AMZN 1.5M, AAPL 1.5M, MU 1.4M, SPCX 1.0M, INTC 816K, CRWV 778K, META 754K and AMD 743K.
AI Infrastructure
JPM now sees data-center spending growing 85% YoY in 2026 (up from 80%) and 70% in 2027 (up from 50%), with $270B+ incremental in 2026 and $400B+ in 2027, lifting total spend across major US hyperscalers toward ~$800B in 2026 and $1.5T in 2027. It flagged Credo $CRDO, Lumentum $LITE, Coherent $COHR, Amphenol $APH, Arista $ANET, Celestica $CLS, Ciena $CIEN, Corning $GLW and Fabrinet $FN as key beneficiaries.
AI
Tenstorrent, which designs chips it says run certain AI workloads more efficiently, raised $1.5 billion in a Series E led by Trace Capital alongside Innovation X, lifting its valuation to $6.2 billion after drawing takeover interest earlier this year.
Markets
Semiconductor and AI-adjacent stocks rebounded Monday after the Nasdaq 100's worst week since April 2025, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index up about 2.9% and on track to snap an eight-day losing streak, its longest in 18 years. CoreWeave and data-center names led the recovery.
AI
AI start-up Anthropic said it will commit 5% of its shares to a new 'public benefit' fund as it faces growing backlash over AI safety and economic concerns, a move tied to its corporate structure ahead of a potential IPO.
AI
Microsoft abandoned an agreement to lease AI data-center capacity at neocloud provider Nscale's U.K. site, citing power-supply problems — a setback for one of the larger planned 'neocloud' buildouts and a sign of how power constraints are reshaping data-center economics.
AI
doubleAI, a startup backed by Nvidia and co-founded by Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua, launched a new model it says slashed one early customer's compute costs by 67%, targeting the soaring cost of running AI workloads.
AI
The FT reports that America's roughly $10 trillion bet on AI infrastructure is beginning to strain against the unforgiving economics of the physical world — power, land, financing and build timelines — raising fresh questions about the pace and returns of the boom.
Markets
An upcoming South Korean data-center IPO is shaping up as an early test of AI investors' appetite following the recent semiconductor-stock rout, gauging whether demand for AI-infrastructure listings holds up after the selloff.
Markets
The slide in Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix shares during the chip selloff dealt an estimated $137 billion hit to South Korea's National Pension Service, underscoring how concentrated the AI and semiconductor trade has become for the fund.
AI · Bloomberg
Anthropic is in talks to buy about $45 billion of AI computing power from Nvidia-backed cloud developer Nscale, seeking a second facility at Nscale's Monarch data-center campus in West Virginia. Anthropic already has infrastructure agreements with Nscale worth as much as roughly $44.6 billion, according to a filing for Nscale's planned IPO.
Markets · Bloomberg
Goldman Sachs upgraded CoreWeave to buy from neutral, a vote of confidence after the AI cloud provider's stock plunged about 25% last week — its worst week since November — on debt-distress fears that pushed its credit-default-swap pricing to record highs. Shares swung sharply again Monday, rising as much as 7.4% before briefly turning negative.
Markets · Bloomberg
Hedge funds cut their tech-stock exposure in the five sessions through Oct. 15 at the fastest pace in Goldman Sachs prime-desk data going back to 2016, the bank said. Gross trading activity also fell at its quickest rate in nearly three months, underscoring how sharply investors pulled back as the AI trade wobbled.
AI · WSJ
Chinese memory-chip maker CXMT guided for a more than eightfold jump in nine-month revenue, to between 265 billion and 270 billion yuan (about $39.6-40.4 billion) from 32.08 billion yuan a year earlier, as it cashes in on the AI-fueled memory crunch. The DRAM maker, briefly China's most valuable listed company after its July debut, has lost more than 10% of its market value since listing.
AI · The Information
DeepSeek is working closely with Huawei to shape the design of future AI chips, with Huawei engineers incorporating DeepSeek's requests into design decisions — a collaboration that could help China build frontier AI models without Nvidia's technology. The tie-up goes well beyond the usual road-map conversations chip buyers have with suppliers, people familiar with the matter said.
Markets · Bloomberg
SoftBank Group's five-year credit-default swaps rose to 432 basis points, the highest since early November 2022, widening more than 30 bps in a week as concern grows over AI-related funding commitments and a potential large acquisition.
Startups · Bloomberg
Neolix Technologies, a Chinese maker of driverless delivery vehicles, raised $400 million in a Series E led by Boyu Capital to fund global expansion. New investors included Alibaba's AEF NextGen Fund, Monolith Management, Granite Asia and Temasek-backed Vertex, alongside existing shareholders.