Meta's Muse Launch Powers Arm and AMD as Agentic AI Demand Surges

GlobalFoundries reported stronger-than-expected second-quarter 2026 results, with gross profit rising 24% to $505 million and IFRS gross margin expanding to 28.3% from 24.2% a year earlier. Non-IFRS gross margin reached 29.9%, up 470 basis points year over year and 90 basis points sequentially, helped by favorable business mix, manufacturing productivity gains and higher utilization. Technology services, which includes IP, licensing, software, reticles and nonrecurring engineering activities, accounted for approximately 11% of second-quarter revenue and is expected to be a strong driver of gross margin in upcoming quarters. Revenue from communications infrastructure and data centers surged 62% year over year, the seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, while high-margin technologies such as silicon photonics and silicon germanium gain momentum. Among competitors, United Microelectronics' gross margin rose to 32.5% in the second quarter of 2026 from 29.2% in the first quarter and 28.7% a year earlier, while Taiwan Semiconductor's gross margin reached 67.7%, up 150 basis points sequentially and 910 basis points from the year-ago quarter. GlobalFoundries shares have gained 44.1% over the past year versus the industry's 34.6% and trade at 19.67 forward earnings against an industry average of 13.53, with its 2026 earnings estimate improving over the past 60 days.

Qualcomm shares rose 7% to $190.82 in Monday afternoon trading after Lumentum Holdings announced a joint demonstration with Qualcomm Technologies and Corning of a high-density die-to-die optical interconnect built for artificial intelligence scale-up architectures. The demo, to be shown at an optical communications industry conference in Málaga, Spain, pairs a die-to-die interface subsystem from Qualcomm Technologies with Lumentum's laser-based optical interconnect platform and Corning multimode fiber connectivity. Qualcomm's advance far outpaced the broader chip tape, with the iShares Semiconductor ETF up 4% to $555.42 and the Invesco QQQ Trust up 2.51% to $738.79. Skyworks Solutions and Qorvo, the two radio frequency front-end suppliers typically grouped with Qualcomm in the handset supply chain, each gained just 0.4%, to $89.11 and $117.60 respectively, confirming the rally is specific to Qualcomm's AI story rather than a handset-cycle move. The demonstration carries no product or customer order, leaving investors to weigh whether Qualcomm has found a genuine AI second act.