Dell Shares Rise 4% as Morgan Stanley Lifts Odds on $756 Bull Case

Advanced Micro Devices crossed the $1 trillion market capitalization mark for the first time on Monday, with shares surging 9.9% amid a broader tech-stock rally. The milestone caps a September in which CEO Lisa Su sat at President Trump's table during the state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping, two seats from Trump and next to Elon Musk, and rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange with first lady Melania Trump. AMD stock is up 193% year to date, far outpacing Nvidia's 22% gain. The chipmaker beat Wall Street expectations across the board for the second quarter, posting record non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.66 against consensus estimates of $1.61, with total revenue up 50% year over year to a record $11.5 billion and data center revenue more than doubling to $6.7 billion. AMD projected second-half 2026 server CPU revenue to grow 80% year over year and 70% in 2027, and expects data center revenues to more than double in 2027 with AI GPUs growing well over 100%. The company also unveiled its next-generation Instinct MI450 Series GPUs and 6th Gen EPYC Venice CPUs for its Helios rack-scale AI systems, alongside deals for Microsoft to deploy Helios across Azure AI services beginning in the second half of 2026 and for Anthropic to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 GPUs beginning in the first half of 2027, a deal that could be worth tens of billions of dollars over time, with AMD committing to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic.

Akamai Technologies signed an $11.6 billion, seven-year contract to supply Anthropic with computing power, sending its shares up 21.83% in premarket trading. The deal is the largest in Akamai's history and builds on a $1.8 billion agreement the two companies struck earlier this year, giving the Claude developer access to central processing units. Akamai expects capital spending tied to the contract to total about $5.5 billion, more than six times its entire 2025 capex, with most of it going on servers, chips and networking gear next year. CEO Tom Leighton said revenue from the Anthropic business should reach $150 million to $300 million next year and an annual run rate of about $1.7 billion by 2028. Akamai also issued Anthropic a warrant to buy Series B shares at $111.33 each, convertible into 7.7 million common shares, with a portion equal to about 2% of Akamai's common stock vesting when the computing agreement starts in the second half of next year and the rest vesting over the contract's term. Leighton called the warrant, Akamai's first in a cloud deal, a serious step, and it lands as some investors question circular AI deals in which suppliers and customers invest in each other.

Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang said the artificial intelligence infrastructure boom will eventually produce more computing capacity than the market needs, but he does not expect that turning point for another two to three years. Speaking on The Ezra Klein Show, Huang said demand and supply will eventually invert and markets will slow into a "period of digestion" that could last six months, nine months or a year, though he added it will not happen next year or in the next couple of years. He also argued that AI labs should not release systems they cannot control. Nvidia reported second-quarter revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% from a year earlier, while Data Center revenue surged 117% to $89 billion. TrendForce estimates the world's nine largest cloud providers will spend more than $886.7 billion this year, up about 90%, before capital expenditures climb to roughly $1.3 trillion in 2027, and it raised its 2026 AI server shipment growth forecast to nearly 31%. Former Fidelity fund manager George Noble compared the boom to "dot-com and subprime all merged in one," and Reuters reported investors are demanding higher yields on AI-linked debt as hyperscalers prepare for another surge in borrowing. A Polymarket market puts the probability of an AI-industry downturn by Dec. 31 at 10%, resolving "Yes" only if at least three specified stress events occur within 90 days, including Nvidia falling 50% from its all-time high, the SOXX semiconductor ETF falling 40%, or the bankruptcy of OpenAI or Anthropic. Nvidia shares closed Wednesday down 1.5% at $225.51 and were about 1% lower in Thursday premarket trading.