The Wire
Nasdaq futures were up over 1% and things looked good. Then chips tanked and took the whole gain with them, led by ASML, Micron (MU) and Nvidia (NVDA) (July 27, 2026)
Futures pointed to a strong open on the Iran ceasefire and a 6.79% drop in oil. QQQ opened up 1.09% and was negative within the hour. Three chip headlines did it, and two of them came out of China: a domestic DUV lithography report that hit ASML, and CXMT's Shanghai debut that hit Micron.
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.
SoundHound (SOUN) is paying $42.8 million for LivePerson. LivePerson's own bankers valued its equity at almost nothing.
SoundHound AI (SOUN) cleared its last regulator on July 20 and LivePerson (LPSN) stockholders vote August 20. The proxy puts the price at $42,784,532.64, well under the figures circulating, and both of its valuation analyses value LivePerson's equity at de minimis.
If I had $1,000 for one AI chip stock, I'd buy SK Hynix (SKHY) over Nvidia (NVDA), Micron (MU) and AMD
Nvidia and SK Group signed a $500 billion AI infrastructure deal late Friday night, after both New York and Seoul had closed for the week. Given $1,000 for one of the four AI chip stocks, I'd put it in SK Hynix, which trades at 5.6 times forward earnings even after its 28% ADR premium against 6.4 for Micron.
Samsung just signed a $200 billion deal with Broadcom (AVGO), a 32-year TSMC (TSM) customer.
Samsung Electronics signed a memorandum with Broadcom on July 24 covering more than $200 billion of work over five years, through 2030. Broadcom has had TSMC make its chips since 1994, and about 95% of the wafers it outsourced last year came from there. Samsung's foundry holds 6.5% of the world market against TSMC's 72%, and Seoul had closed for the week before any of it was announced.
The busiest stock on Hyperliquid isn't Nvidia. It's SK Hynix (SKHY), and it out-traded Ethereum
Real world assets did $25.1 billion on Hyperliquid in the week of July 13 to 19, out-trading crypto on the venue for the first time. The busiest contract is not Nvidia or Tesla. It is SK Hynix, which passed Ethereum for second place on the whole exchange, and whose Nasdaq listing (SKHY) fell 8.8% on Friday.
Michael Burry sent readers to a BIS report on AI's poorly disclosed deals. Oracle (ORCL) reports $638 billion in one line.
Michael Burry spent July 23 pointing his readers at a Bank for International Settlements report on how AI deals get financed. The clearest illustration sits in an Oracle (ORCL) filing: a $638 billion backlog reported as one aggregate line, with the customer split left to S&P to estimate.
What is a pod shop? Millennium didn't buy your stock. One of its 340 teams did.
Citadel's last quarterly filing listed 15,589 positions. Millennium runs more than 340 separate investment teams and Point72 more than 200, which changes what a hedge fund stake in your stock actually means.
Korea's stock market has been forced to pause 41 times this year. All of 2008 had 26.
Kospi set off 41 sidecars between January 2 and July 24, more than the 26 it set off in all of 2008 and far more than the 3 it managed in all of last year. Circuit breakers have fired 7 times in 2026 against 13 in the market's entire history since 2000. Most Korean analysts blame the Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix leverage ETFs that listed in May, but one state research institute says that is the wrong target.
Nvidia (NVDA) and 34 other companies told Washington not to restrict open-weight AI. OpenAI signed a day late. Anthropic still hasn't.
The Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter asks Washington not to restrict AI models anyone can download. It went from 25 signatures to 35. OpenAI added its name after sitting out the launch, Google's CEO backed it without signing, and Anthropic declined to comment. Update, July 27: the list has since grown to 133 names, and both Google and Amazon signed.
I gave six AIs $10,000 for AI stocks. Five bought SoundHound (SOUN), one bought a construction company.
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI each got a paper $10,000 and five slots, capped at $10 billion. Five bought SoundHound. Claude bought a gas-plant builder. Two of them broke the rules on the first try.
SK Hynix (SKHY) sells the memory in Nvidia's (NVDA) Rubin racks. SK Group is committing $1.44T USD to the chips and data centers around them.
Nvidia and SK Hynix signed a multiyear memory partnership with no dollar figure attached. SK Group then committed 2,100 trillion won ($1.44T USD) to chip capacity and 15 gigawatts of AI data centers, built on Nvidia's Vera Rubin reference design. Nvidia put $1 billion into Naver on July 24. Here is what each side actually committed, and what is funded versus announced.
Solar stocks fell again Friday, July 24. T1 Energy (TE) is down 58% since June 2, Enphase (ENPH) 49% and First Solar (FSLR) 36%
The Invesco Solar ETF closed 31% below its May 29 record. Enphase and SolarEdge have lost close to half their value since June 2. The July 4 construction deadline, the expired 25D homeowner credit and a pending Section 232 polysilicon ruling are the drivers.
A record 944 billion won ($644M USD) divorce ruling lifted SK Telecom as SK Hynix fell 8.34% (July 24, 2026)
A Seoul court ordered SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won to pay Roh So-young 944 billion won ($644M USD), the largest property division in Korean history. SK Telecom closed up 0.50% on a day Kospi fell 5.72%, because a smaller award means he is less likely to sell SK Inc stock and more likely to lean on subsidiary dividends. SK Hynix, three steps down the same ownership chain, fell 8.34%.
Everyone's asking if AI is the next dot-com bubble. Nvidia and 25 companies just gave a clue.
Nvidia rallied 25 companies behind open AI models, and OpenAI and Anthropic sat it out. Here's why I think their coming IPOs, not this fight, mark the real top of the AI bubble.
Vietnam and China now pay the same US tariff rate. Nike (NKE) and Deckers (DECK) built years of sourcing strategy on the gap between them.
New Section 301 tariffs took effect Friday, putting Vietnam and China at the same 12.5% rate for the first time. Nike, Deckers, Columbia, Gap, Ralph Lauren and Under Armour all have heavy Vietnam manufacturing exposure.
Jensen Huang's first-ever post on X was an open-weights AI letter. Nvidia (NVDA) and Microsoft (MSFT) both signed it, along with 23 other companies.
Jensen Huang joined X in June and stayed silent for weeks. His first post was a joint industry letter on open AI models, signed by 25 companies including Microsoft. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Amazon did not sign.
Verizon (VZ) jumped 2.7% on record profit margins and a subscriber beat. A $1 billion Google deal got buried in the same call.
Verizon's Q2 2026 earnings brought record EBITDA margins, a subscriber beat and a $1 billion-plus dark fiber deal with Google buried in the same call. Shares climbed as much as 2.7% on the earnings, not the deal.
Elon Musk thanked Micron (MU) by name on Tesla's earnings call this week. That's what a real memory shortage looks like.
Musk thanked Micron on Tesla's earnings call, Intel's CEO called memory its biggest supply constraint the next day, SK Hynix's CEO sees a shortage into the next decade, and CXMT is about to IPO into all of it.