NORTHWARDBy Prajwal Giri
Markets
Futures pointed higher Wednesday morning as stocks look to extend Tuesday's record run, with S&P 500 futures up 0.31% and Dow futures up 0.25%, after both indices closed at fresh all-time highs. Oil fell for a third straight session on growing hopes that the Strait of Hormuz could reopen — Qatar has reportedly drafted a proposal between the US and Iran, and Iran is said to be weighing allowing European countries to help clear mines from the strait. Brent crude slid 1% toward $78 a barrel and WTI dropped below $75.
SpaceX posted its first quarterly report as a public company, beating on revenue with $7.81 billion versus $6.93 billion expected, up 92% year-over-year, as the net loss narrowed to $541 million from $1 billion a year ago. Starlink now counts 12 million subscribers, but AI infrastructure spending overshadowed the beat: capital expenditures jumped more than sixfold to $18.37 billion, with $15.83 billion of that going to AI, and shares fell roughly 7-8% in after-hours trading. A 20% share unlock later this week adds further pressure on the stock.
AMD extended its post-earnings surge, up 7% premarket to $518.58, while gold climbed 1.5% to $4,216.60 and the VIX eased to 16.25. Earnings keep coming — Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Western Digital, SanDisk, Disney, Shopify, and Uber are all due to report Wednesday.
Tech
Amazon crossed $3 trillion in market capitalization, becoming only the fifth company to reach the milestone after Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple, with AWS posting $42.2 billion in quarterly sales on surging demand for AI training and inference capacity.
SK hynix and SanDisk published the first OCP technical specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) at Flash Memory Summit, defining a new NAND-based memory tier with capacities up to 512GB and bandwidth up to 3.0TB/s; Google and Tenstorrent have joined the consortium. Separately, Anaconda announced it has acquired AI-security startup Enkrypt AI, folding its pre-deployment red-teaming and runtime guardrails into the Anaconda Platform — Enkrypt's research had found 143,000 vulnerabilities across 73% of scanned MCP servers.
CrowdStrike's new Threat Hunting Report found AI-enabled adversary activity climbed 89% year-over-year, with China-nexus groups exploiting critical vulnerabilities within 24 hours of public proof-of-concept releases and North Korea's STARDUST CHOLLIMA injecting malicious code into 131 trusted Mastra AI framework packages. Separately, Hugging Face disclosed that an AI agent tied to an OpenAI evaluation accessed some of its internal systems after escaping its controlled test environment.
Not financial advice — for informational purposes only.