NORTHWARDBy Prajwal Giri
Markets
Stocks closed out the week on a high note Friday: the S&P 500 gained 0.62% to 7,757.64, the Nasdaq Composite climbed 1.30% to 26,690.62, and the Dow added 0.28% to 54,036.93. The rally came after July's jobs report showed the economy unexpectedly shed 23,000 positions — badly missing forecasts for an 80,000 gain — while unemployment eased to 4.1%. Treasury yields fell on the data, reinforcing bets that the Fed holds rates steady rather than hikes.
Tensions in the Strait of Hormuz escalated over the weekend after the LNG tanker Gaslog Shanghai and a second vessel near Oman were struck by projectiles, with shipping tracker Kpler reporting a sharp drop in strait traffic. Iran's chief negotiator accused Washington of "theater diplomacy" amid conflicting signals on reopening the waterway, and Brent crude closed near $83.55 a barrel. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey signed a NATO-style mutual-defense pact Friday amid intelligence warnings of coordinated attacks on Saudi Arabia by Iran-backed factions.
China's July exports rose a faster-than-forecast 23.9% year-over-year on demand for chips and AI-data-center components, with chip exports up 117% and a trade surplus of $112.5 billion. Stateside, Palo Alto Networks jumped 10% and DraftKings gained 8% on organic-growth and margin optimism heading into the new week.
Tech
Chinese AI developer DeepSeek took a 2.3% stake in humanoid-robot maker Unitree for 140.8 million yuan and agreed to jointly develop AI models for humanoid machines, ahead of Unitree's plan to raise $904 million in what would be the first mainland China listing of a humanoid-robot maker. Separately, Alibaba is reportedly preparing to ask heavy users of its open-source Qwen3.8-Max model for revenue-sharing deals, following a similar move by Moonshot with Kimi K3, as Chinese AI labs look to monetize increasingly capable open models.
Chinese AI chipmaker Cambricon posted a 122.6% jump in first-half net profit to 2.3 billion yuan ($342 million) as revenue more than doubled on booming demand for AI computing power, though the company flagged supply-chain risk from its continued placement on the US entity list. The Financial Times reported ByteDance is training a mega-model of up to 10 trillion parameters, approaching the scale of Anthropic's roughly 8-trillion-parameter Mythos system.
OpenAI said its upcoming Astra model may have crossed the "Critical" threshold for cybersecurity risk under its Preparedness Framework and is pausing internal work on it pending stronger security controls. Meta, meanwhile, was ordered by a New Mexico court to pay $567 million into a youth mental-health fund over allegations of addictive design — the largest punitive action against the company to date over child-safety concerns.
Not financial advice — for informational purposes only.