← The Rundown
The Rundown
Nvidia's Shocking $20B Deal with Chip Startup Groq, Silver & Gold Surge to New Records
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Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaidad Mani and Today is Friday, December 26th. In today's episode, we'll take a look at the Santa Claus rally and why the S and p could start 2026 with a major milestone. We'll also dig into Nvidia's $20 billion deal with a potential competitor, then stick around to the end of the show to find out the origin story of the modern day Santa Claus. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. The stock market's winning streak continued on Wednesday even with a half day of trading in pretty light volumes thanks to the holidays. The S P500 added 0.3%, locking in another record close, while the Nasdaq was up 0.2%. Both these indices have now gone up for five days in a row. Wednesday also marked the official start of the Santa Claus rally. Remember, the Santa Claus rally covers the last five trading days of the year in the first two trading days of January and historically stocks tend to move higher during that stretch. The S P has gone up 1.3% on average, going all the way back to 1950. Now if Santa Claus does bless the stock market this year, then the S P could start 2026 at 7, 000 points. The S P is about 1% away from that milestone right now, so I'll be keeping my eye out for that. Overall though, it's been another fantastic year for the S P 500, which has rallied 18 in 2025, the Nasdaq jumping 22%. If you want a more in depth recap of 2025 and a sneak peek at 2026, keep an eye on your podcast feed. For my upcoming interview with Jason Ware, the Chief Investment Officer at Albion Financial, we recorded an awesome conversation earlier in the week. I really like Jason's commentary. He's a regular on cnbc, so it was great to talk to him. We talked about AI stocks, the Fed, the impact of tariffs, and where consensus might be wrong heading into next year. Jason had a few takes that really stood out to me and I think you guys are going to really like that conversation. That interview drops on Sunday morning, so make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines starting with Nvidia. Nvidia just did a $20 billion deal with Grok. And no, I'm not talking about Elon's AI Chatbot. I'm talking about a different Grock. This Grok that Nvidia just did a deal with is an AI chip startup that a lot of people viewed as a potential Nvidia competitor. Now I have to get a little technically here, but see these Nvidia chips are best when it comes to training AI models. Training AI models is an expensive, power hungry process and Nvidia's chips are the best at it. But what Grok does is they specialize in chips designed for AI inference. That's when an AI model responds to you. So when you ask Chad GPT or Gemini something and it generates a response, it's using inference. And inference is expected to be a bigger market long term than AI training. As AI gets embedded into everything, the amount of real time AI responses is going to explod. And companies don't want to run all of that on massive expensive GPUs that Nvidia sells if they don't have to. So GROK is becoming an option for these companies. See, Grox chips are more specialized in Nvidia GPUs. They're designed to be faster and cheaper for inference. So Grok could have been a threat to Nvidia long term. But now, with this $20 billion licensing deal, Nvidia will now get access to Grox chip technology. So now Nvidia can use Grox's specialized proprietary technology to create their own chips that are better, faster and cheaper to run inference to than Nvidia's current lineup. To me it sounds like Nvidia is buying Grok for $20 billion without actually buying them and triggering a regulatory backlash. They're essentially using a licensing loophole which other tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have done as well recently. It does seem like a smart deal. I know it's a way for Nvidia to neutralize a potential competitor before they get too big and solidify their dominance. But I do wonder if these licensing loophole deals will get the attention of regulators pretty soon. Let's shift gears and talk about gold and silver. Gold and silver are having a historic year and the rally is not slowing down. Both metals are surging into year end due to a mix of geopolitical tensions and a weaker US dollar. Gold is currently sitting at 4,500 dollars an ounce, which is a record high. It's up 70% in 2025, which is the best year it's had since 1979. The recent bump in the price is because of geopolitical flare ups. The US military has been blockading oil tankers in Venezuel also confirmed a Christmas Day military strike in Nigeria against terrorist targets. But geopolitics isn't the only catalyst for gold. You know, we've talked about this in the past. There's also been strong ETF inflows and heavy buying from central banks all over the world. It also helps that the Fed is cutting interest rates. See, when interest rates fall, assets like gold tend to rally since the opportunity cost of holding gold goes down. Since gold doesn't pay any interest. Now, despite a big year from gold, silver is actually having an even better year. An ounce of silver just hit 6, $75 an ounce. For the first time ever, the price of silver is up more than 150% in 2025. Now, this rally in silver is being driven by a combo of tight physical supply, speculative demand, and a growing role as a critical industrial metal, especially for electronics and energy infrastructure. Silver is about to wrap up its eighth winning month in a row. So we'll see if this momentum carries over into next year. By the way, silver just passed Apple to become the third most valuable asset on the planet. The market cap of around 4.2 trillion dol dollars. Gold is by far the highest at 31.6 trillion, followed by Nvidia at 4.6 trillion. And for my crypto people out there, Bitcoin is sitting at 1.7 trillion right now. We haven't talked about crypto in a while. It's been trading sideways for weeks now. It's pretty boring over there in crypto land these days. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Memory and storage stocks like Micron and SanDisk are up this morning after reports that Samsung and SK Hynix plan to raise prices on their 5th generation high bandwidth memory 3e chips by nearly 20% next year. The memory chips and storage are facing a supply crunch right now because of AI. Memory chips like DRAM and NAND are critical for speeding up AI workloads and improving performance. And more storage is needed to store all that AI data. So that's going to be a big boost for companies like Micron and Sandis. Both of their stocks are up around 3% this morning. By the way, Sandis stock is up 600% this year. It was actually added to the S&P 500 back in November and it's the best performing stock in the S P this year. And Micron is the third best performing stock. It's up nearly 250% this year. So it's a great time to be an investor in these storage and memory companies right now, but it's not a great time for anyone trying to build a gaming PC because RAM and SSD prices have just gotten so expensive. Now, moving on to a stock not doing so great today. Biohaven shares are dropping this morning after the biotech company reported disappointing results from a clinical trial for its depression treatment aimed at major depressive disorder, or mdd. This drug failed to show meaningful improvements in reducing depression symptoms compared to a placebo group. And shares of Biohaven are down more than 15% this morning on this news. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact the modern image of Santa Claus was created by the Coca Cola Company. See, back in 1931, Coke launched a marketing campaign to sell sodas during the winter because before that, Coca Cola was mostly seen as a summer drink. Well, as part of this campaign, they needed a Santa. So the commissioned artist had, in sunbloom, gave Santa the iconic red outfit that we know today because of the Coke branding. He also made Santa as big as possible to get in as much Coca Cola red as he could, and that became the Santa that we know today. See, prior to this campaign, there was no standardized image of Santa. Sometimes he wore blue or green, and often he was shown to be small and elfish. But hadn't sun bloom changed all that? Bonus fun fact. He also went on to create the image of the Quaker Oats man, which is now owned by Pepsi, by the way, and also Aunt Jemima. So if there's a hall of fame for marketing, this guy definitely needs to be in it. What is kind of sad, though, is that Coca Cola went from making these iconic ads to now using AI to create terrible TV commercials. I was watching a ton of basketball yesterday, shout out to my rockets for getting the win. But I saw that holiday Coca Cola commercial multiple times where they used AI to make it. And I'm sorry, it's just so bad. Like, the images aren't consistent. It just has that AI feel to it. I guess it doesn't matter because I still consumed a couple of cans of Coke Zero yesterday. This probably means in like two years, every commercial and ad is going to be AI generated. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. Hope everyone's been having a fantastic holiday week. We're now entering that weird period between Christmas and New Year's where no one really knows what day it is. Not much work is getting done. The markets will still be open, though, so we're going to be posting throughout the week. By the way, if you guys have been enjoying our show so far, consider giving us a five star rating if you haven't already on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you are listening on Spotify, don't forget to vote in today's Spotify poll. Leave us a comment on Spotify. All that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys again for listening, watching and commenting. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.
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