Senators Ask FTC to Probe Walmart's Sparky AI Over Made-in-USA Claims

Meta Platforms launched Muse, an autonomous personal AI agent that shot to the top of the Apple App Store within a week, and the agentic AI shift is driving gains for Arm Holdings and Advanced Micro Devices. In March, Meta and Arm announced a large-scale partnership to co-develop Arm AGI CPU and multiple generations of specialized silicon for Meta's data centers, and Arm CEO Rene Haas said Arm already has $2 billion of customer demand for its new AGI CPU. SoftBank, which owns roughly 90% of Arm's shares outstanding, said it would raise Arm's loan facility to $25 billion from $20 billion, and Arm shares rose more than 10% in early trading. Meta partnered with AMD to optimize Muse Glimmer, an open-source model designed to run locally on computers, and demand for agentic AI has pushed prices for AMD server chips up about 40%. AMD CEO Lisa Su said the server CPU market could exceed $120 billion by the end of the decade, a 35% CAGR, and AMD shares broke out to all-time highs as the company crossed the $1 trillion market cap landmark for the first time.

Target Corporation is leaning further into artificial intelligence to personalize digital shopping and deepen engagement with its core customers, joining OpenAI, Google Gemini and other leading platforms in the early development of agentic commerce. Management said traffic from external AI platforms remains a small part of the business but is expanding at more than 3.5 times the industry pace compared with a year earlier. Within Target's own digital ecosystem, the company introduced AI-powered teacher and college wish lists during the back-to-school and back-to-college season, alongside more personalized content on the Target app's home screen. Total wish-list creations increased more than 50% year over year, the number of items added to those lists more than doubled, and conversion across key back-to-school pages rose nearly 20%. For comparison, Walmart said usage of its AI-powered Sparky assistant rose 70% year over year and that customers using Sparky spend 40% more per order, while BJ's Wholesale said its AI assistant Bev has handled more than 100,000 member conversations and that digitally enabled comparable sales rose 30% in the second quarter of fiscal 2026. Target shares have rallied 21.7% over the past three months against the industry's 7.3% decline, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for its earnings per share for the current and next fiscal year has increased by 91 cents and 19 cents to $10.43 and $9.38, respectively, over the past 30 days.