← The Rundown
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Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zaydad Mani and Today is Monday, July 27th. In today's episode, we'll tell you why stocks are bouncing back this morning and preview the biggest week of the summer. We'll also break down the latest AI funding deals from Nvidia and why they are pushing for open weight AI models. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how much money Waymo's Robo taxis have racked up in parking tickets. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. The markets had a down week last week. The S&P 500 dropped 0.6% while the Nasdaq fell by 2.1%. There's a lot happening right now under the surface that's driving up investor anxiety. I'm talking bond yields rising, tech and AI stocks are selling off, tariffs are back in the headlines, and oil prices briefly crossed $100 a barrel. So investors were pretty nervous at the end of last week. But the mood has flipped this morning. Over the weekend the US and Iran paused fighting in the Middle east and there are whispers that another round of peace talks is in the works. And nothing official has been announced yet, but that headline was enough for investors to celebrate this morning. Brent crude is down around 8% to roughly $89 a barrel and the S P and NASDAQ futures are up about 1% in pre market trading. And that brings me to there is a lot going on top of mind has to be the Fed meeting this week. On Wednesday the Fed will decide on what to do with interest rates and right now the market is still pricing in a 33 chance of a rate hike. Usually you don't see this level of uncertainty the week of the Fed meeting, so the markets will be watching this one closely. I personally don't think the Fed will hike rates at this meeting, but I'm really looking forward to seeing what Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has to say. Along with the Fed meeting, we're also getting earnings from Microsoft and Meta on Wednesday after the close following followed by Apple and Amazon on Thursday after the close. So this is going to be a pivotal week not just for the overall markets, but also the AI trade. The short term market sentiment could be decided based on how things go during a 26 hour period in the middle of the week. So we're going to be staying on top of all that along with all the macro stuff happening. So make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and Tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines starting with Nvidia. Nvidia is back to funding big time AI infrastructure deals with AI companies. Nvidia just announced an AI initiative with SK Group in South Korea, which is the parent company of the memory maker SK Hynix. This deal includes building 2 gigawatts of AI data centers on the Korean Peninsula and it could generate more than $500 billion in business between the two companies, including Nvidia buying SK Hynix memory and SK Hynix buying Nvidia Supercomputers. But that wasn't the only deal. Nvidia is also in talks to guarantee up to 250 billion billion in financing for OpenAI so they can lease a massive 10 gigawatt data center campus in Ohio. Now we briefly covered this story back in June. I compared it to a parent co signing an apartment lease. Except in this case it's not a few grand for grant, it's $250 million. Nvidia is also considering financing as much as $350 billion worth of their chips for this project. So this is raising fresh concerns about circular financing in the AI space. I feel like people were talking about this a lot more last year, but no one's really talking anymore. But I mean, if this deal with OpenAI goes through, Nvidia will be literally helping OpenAI borrow money so OpenAI can buy more of Nvidia's chips. The market is ignoring these risks for now, but it only takes one or two deals to go bad for it to lead to a chain reaction and panic. But that's not even the most interesting Nvidia story right now. The other Nvidia related news to drop recently was Jensen's open letter on Friday. In this letter, he urged US policymakers not to impose prosecution premature restrictions on open weight AI models. Now for some quick context here, open weight models means the models can be downloaded by anybody and modified to run on your own computer. That's different from the closed models like ChatGPT and Claude, where you have to access the model through OpenAI or anthropic. The debate around open models heated up recently after the Chinese startup Moonshot AI released Kimik 3, which is a cheap openweight model that performs extremely well and comparable to the leading American models. But there's concerns that these Chinese AI labs are distilling American models to train their own models. So now the Trump administration is considering potentially blocking American companies from accessing these Chinese AI models. We actually talked more about this in our deep dive this past weekend, so go check that out if you missed it. Now, what Jensen is pushing for is more open weight models, and he's not the only one. This letter was signed by 20 plus companies, including Microsoft, Meta, Palantir and Dell. And it's not that surprising why Nvidia and the rest of the tech industry is advocating for open weight models now. Right now the best models are coming from OpenAI and Anthropic, and these tech companies don't want the next era of technology to be dominated by just these two companies. Nvidia especially wants AI models to become a commodity because the more models there are and the cheaper that AI becomes, the more people will use it. And the more that people use it, the more Nvidia chips will be required. AI models becoming a commodity would push the economic value away from the model makers themselves and towards the infrastructure companies powering it, which which Nvidia conveniently dominates right now. So this is going to be a key story to watch in the AI space over the next year or so and it could have an impact on the economics of AI. If AI models do become a commodity, it could reduce OpenAI and Anthropic's pricing power moving forward. Let me know in the comments on what you guys think. Do you think that AI models will become a commodity in the near future and how are you adjusting your investment strategy if that becomes a reality? Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of D Wave Quantum are surging this morning after for the Quantum Company announced an expanded partnership with AT&T.D Wave is one of the big names in quantum computing. They specialize in what's called annealing quantum systems, which are basically quantum computers built for solving optimization problems. AT&T has already been testing this technology on a limited basis and the early results were pretty impressive. In one example, D Wave systems helped cut the processing time for a workload from one hour to less than 15 seconds. So AT&T saw that and they want to expand the use of this technology including detecting outages and managing Internet traffic. Now this isn't some multi million dollar system sale or anything, but having a household name like @&t actually using quantum computing in the real world is a big signal for the whole industry. And that's why D Wave stock is up around 7% this morning at the time of this recording. And the news is lifting the entire quantum sector including Ionic and Rigetti, which are also up around 3 to 4%. I got to say this is the first time the quantum computing sector has gotten some buzz in the last few months. Moving on, let's talk about a loser here. Warner Brothers Discovery shares are moving lower after news that Paramount is delaying their $110 billion acquisition of the company. Now remember, Paramount agreed to buy Warner Brothers back in February for $31 a share in cash. But that deal is now facing an antitrust lawsuit from 12 states, along with a legal challenge from the Writers Guild of America. So because of all these lawsuits, Paramount has agreed to paus acquisition until all these legal challenges are resolved or Until June of 2027, whichever date comes first. So that's a long time for Warner investors to sit around and wait, and it creates a real risk that this deal could eventually fall apart. Warner stock is down about 2% this morning at the time of this recording, and the Stock is trading around 21 below Paramount's 31 takeover price. So the market is signaling that this deal could fall through. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Waymo's robo taxis have racked up more than $9,000 in parking tickets in Austin, Texas. According to the Wall Street Journal, since Waymos came out in Austin back in 2024. Their driverless cars have been fined $9,325 across 83 citations. The violations include 64 tickets for parking in a toaway zone, 13 for not paying the parking meter, nine for double parking, and one Waymo even partially blocked an railroad track and had to be towed away. And here's the funny part. Since there's no drivers behind the wheel, the city just writes the ticket to the car and the fine is being paid by the company. Now some of you guys might be wondering, why is a robo taxi parking at all? Why not just keep driving? Well, between rides, Waymos typically pull into public parking spots on purpose so they're not clogging up the roads while waiting for the next passenger. It's a good idea in theory not to make traffic worse on the roads, but these way MO's are just not great at picking legal parking spots. Now to be fair, there are over, what, 300 Waymo Robo Taxis operating in Austin right now. So 83 citations over what, two years really isn't that bad. But it is funny that even robots can't seem to figure out parking sometimes. You know, when you think about it, there's actually some interesting second order effects that could happen with the rise of robo taxis as more and more cars become robo taxis and self driving cars that could impact the budgets of local cities because in theory, these robo taxis don't speed. They don't run red lights. So as they take over, traffic ticket revenues for local governments could dry up. So it's possible that cities will make their parking rules even more complicated to confuse these robo taxis and milk them with fines. Well, all right guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did and you have like five extra seconds, consider giving us a five star rating on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcast. All that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching and commenting. Shout out to Mike for all the work behind the scenes and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.
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