TSMC CEO on Tesla and Intel’s Terafab: “There are no shortcuts”
Hims jumps after RFK Jr. announces FDA may loosen regulations for 12 peptides
The most popular male and female names in the US, according to the latest Census
Last quarter, Anthropic attracted the lion’s share of trackable business spending on generative AI software, according to new data from Ramp, a fintech company that provides corporate cards and expense-management software for small firms and Fortune 500 companies alike.
The data showed that in Q1 Anthropic saw 37% of spending, its biggest share yet, versus 33% for OpenAI. Notably, the dataset doesn’t capture spending on Google or Microsoft.
OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, still leads in overall adoption at 81% of AI buyers, but Anthropic is catching up, at nearly 63% in March. Overall, more than half of Ramp’s customers currently pay for AI, up from just 18% two years ago.
Anthropic’s enterprise tools, including Claude Code and Cowork, have been making waves among the business class, sending its revenue soaring.
Anthropic’s revenue share is even higher among companies spending on AI for the first time.
“Anthropic has definitely been on a tear,” Ara Kharazian, Ramp’s economist, told Sherwood. “Its increase in adoption rates has been driven by its ability to sell to less technical users and smaller contracts than it typically has.”
It's notable that midway through the first quarter, Anthropic had a falling-out with one of its biggest customers, the US government, which near the end of February decided to shun Anthropic's products and lean into working with OpenAI.
Oracle is up nearly 27% for the week in midmorning trading Thursday, putting it on track for its best weekly gain since June of 1999.
And yes, that run-up — which has added $100 billion to Oracle’s market cap this week — beats the nuttiness of last September, when the stock exploded up 36% in a single day after Oracle disclosed its massive AI-related sales backlog. By the end of that week, the stock ended up a mere 25%.
This week, the company soared 13% on Monday after signing a power deal with fuel cell maker Bloom Energy, as the market continues to be super focused on how quickly hyperscalers can get their AI data centers built and powered up. (Finding off-grid connections to electricity is proving increasingly tricky.)
On Thursday, Oracle also announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services that would allow customers of both companies to easily move data back and forth and run programs using data center infrastructure from either company.
Oracle, along with other large-cap AI beneficiaries and the rest of the market, has also been getting a lift from a period of relative calm in the Iran war, with stocks hitting new record highs and US crude oil prices declining by more than 10% this month.
In 2018, Google employees protested against the company’s tech being used for the US military’s Project Maven — a drone targeting program — reminding the company of its “don’t be evil” motto.
After the controversy, the company declined to renew the contract with the Pentagon, drawing a bright line between Big Tech and the national security establishment.
What a difference a few years makes.
Google is now actively working to get its Gemini AI model to be used in classified national security settings, according to a new report from The Information. Seeking a similar deal to the one OpenAI hashed out with the Pentagon, Google reportedly wants a contract that allows use of Gemini in classified work, but with a prohibition on mass domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons.
But Google is playing catch-up in a major way. Amazon and Microsoft both have been widely used for classified defense work, and contractors are already experienced in working with their cloud systems, while Google’s services have never been used in classified work.
What a difference a few years makes.
Google is now actively working to get its Gemini AI model to be used in classified national security settings, according to a new report from The Information. Seeking a similar deal to the one OpenAI hashed out with the Pentagon, Google reportedly wants a contract that allows use of Gemini in classified work, but with a prohibition on mass domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons.
But Google is playing catch-up in a major way. Amazon and Microsoft both have been widely used for classified defense work, and contractors are already experienced in working with their cloud systems, while Google’s services have never been used in classified work.
Retail favorite Oklo, the “pre-revenue” designer of smaller experimental modular nuclear reactors with close ties to the Trump administration, is on track for its best week since January, even after slumping early Thursday.
Before Thursday’s slight decline, Oklo had posted big gains for four straight days, rising 33% in that time frame. Another stock in the category, Nuscale, rose 27% in the same span.
Oklo shares may have benefited from a directive published Tuesday by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directing federal agencies to “establish cost-effective partnerships with private-sector innovators to meet near-term objectives that include safely deploying nuclear reactors in orbit as early as 2028 and on the Moon as early as 2030.”
Oklo’s close ties to the US government could put it in a position to benefit from such orders. US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright formerly served on Oklo’s board of directors.
Separately, Oklo announced new members of its board of directors Tuesday, adding David Christian, a former executive from Dominion Energy, and David Park, CEO of Standard Lithium, among others.
Whether these announcements ultimately translate into a financial gain for Oklo remains to be seen. But it likely won’t be seen for a while.
The company doesn’t expect to generate any meaningful revenue until it brings its Aurora line of modular reactors, none of which have been built yet, to market. (The company has announced approvals of some design plans related to a prototype it’s building at the Idaho National Laboratory.)
On the other hand, Oklo does have some money to burn, reporting cash and marketable securities worth some ~$1.4 billion at the end of 2025. And with the share price spiking this week, Oklo executives might also be tempted to offer more stock as a source of funding.
Oklo’s upswing comes amid a rebound in retail trading this week that’s sending stocks and crypto beloved by individual traders — such as IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, Hims & Hers, and SoundHound AI — sharply higher, as worries about Iran ease and traders rush to buy whatever remaining “dip” there is.
All of the technological breakthroughs, sales deals, and acquisitions haven’t mattered much for quantum computing companies in 2026.
The speculative fever had broken, with call volumes traded and most retail darling assets having peaked in October, and the subsequent risk-off move during the Mideast war accelerated the retreat from expensive, thematic plays.
Then along came Nvidia to the rescue — the company that kneecapped the industry in Q1 2025 when CEO Jensen Huang said it would likely be a couple decades before quantum computers were “very useful.”
On Tuesday, the chip designer released a family of open models (dubbed Ising) designed to leverage AI to improve calibration and error correction for quantum computers, “two of the most critical challenges in building hybrid-quantum classical systems,” per the press release.
D-Wave Quantum, IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and Quantum Computing have surged between 23% and 42% over the past three sessions, as of 9:50 a.m. ET.
These stocks are all poised for their best weeks since September, and the return of intense call buying definitely appears to be magnifying the buying pressure:
Infleqtion, the relative newcomer on the scene, is up about 16% since Monday’s close.
True to form, Huang threw a bit of a backhanded compliment to the industry along with this lifeline.
“AI is essential to making quantum computing practical,” he said.
We knew Tesla had been off-loading its struggling “apocalypse-proof” Cybertrucks onto CEO Elon Musk’s other companies, but now we know just how many.
The EV company sold about one in five Cybertrucks registered in the US in the fourth quarter to Musk’s other ventures, according to Bloomberg, citing data from S&P Global Mobility. The lion’s share went to SpaceX, which accounted for 1,279 of the 7,071 total registrations, while another 60 went to xAI (now part of SpaceX), Neuralink, and The Boring Company. All told, these inter-company sales represent roughly $100 million in value, and a vital lifeline for a vehicle that has failed to gain traction with the public, forcing Tesla to scale back production.
Musk’s companies have continued to scoop up the stainless steel behemoths this year, with another 158 Cybertruck purchases in January and 67 in February.
Shares of low-cost US airlines Frontier and JetBlue are up more than 3% in premarket trading following a Wednesday evening report that rival Spirit Airlines could liquidate as early as this week.
Spirit, which has made efforts to emerge from its bankruptcy filed in August, has reportedly been pummeled by elevated jet fuel prices.
JetBlue reached a deal to acquire Spirit in 2022, but it was blocked in 2024 on antitrust grounds. Bloomberg reported that Frontier had been in talks to merge with Spirit in December.
Jet fuel prices have squeezed the industry since the days leading up to the war in Iran. This month, most major US carriers hiked their bag fees in an attempt to offset some of the cost.
Lower oil prices are also moderately boosting airline stocks on Thursday morning. West Texas Intermediate crude futures were down about 3% as of 8:30 a.m. ET.
JetBlue reached a deal to acquire Spirit in 2022, but it was blocked in 2024 on antitrust grounds. Bloomberg reported that Frontier had been in talks to merge with Spirit in December.
Jet fuel prices have squeezed the industry since the days leading up to the war in Iran. This month, most major US carriers hiked their bag fees in an attempt to offset some of the cost.
Lower oil prices are also moderately boosting airline stocks on Thursday morning. West Texas Intermediate crude futures were down about 3% as of 8:30 a.m. ET.
After a surprising announcement that the tech bro shoemaker would be pivoting to AI on Wednesday, shares of Allbirds were flying high — soaring nearly 600% by the end of the day in record trading volume.
This was, for many reasons, completely insane.
Before the latest pop, Allbirds had a miniscule market cap of some ~$22 million. Yesterday, some $3.8 billion changed hands in BIRD — with the company’s market cap ending the session at a still small $148 million.
That means that the company turned over more than 25x its market cap in trading volume. Indeed, there were no other stocks with a market cap less than $1 billion that traded more than $1 billion yesterday — something of an outlier, to say the least.
Two of the stocks that Allbirds out-traded were none other than the world’s largest bank (JPMorgan) and America’s largest oil company (Exxon Mobil), which only turned over $3 billion and $2.3 billion, respectively. And those weren’t even particularly low-volume days for those two corporate giants — Allbirds’ insane activity was way ahead of the average of the last 120 days for each.
Though this was perhaps more of a meme stock story than an AI story, those two worlds are starting to overlap, as retail traders have bought up anything adjacent to AI — particularly in the last couple of weeks, as risk-on assets have ripped higher since geopolitical risks have (seemingly) abated and indexes are back to all-time highs.
Of course, we’ve seen this movie before: remember Algorhythm Holdings, a former karaoke maker turned AI trucking logistics company, which obliterated the freight industry only a few months ago? Then there was the Long Island Iced Tea Corp., which, naturally, got into the blockchain.
Allbirds’ latest pivot, with a “long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider,” which will be funded with its new $50 million convertible financing facility, is unlikely to concern neocloud leaders like CoreWeave, which is planning to spend $30 billion in 2026.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has reportedly asked the chip industry suppliers for his Terafab chipmaking project to move at “light speed” in an effort to help Tesla and SpaceX manufacture the AI chips they need.
On the company’s last earnings call, Musk said chip supply would be the “limiting factor” for Tesla’s growth in about three or four years. During a presentation for the Terafab last month, Musk said, “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips.” More established chipmaker Intel has since joined the effort.
Still, the world’s largest chipmaker isn’t convinced that “light speed” is physically possible. Speaking on an earnings call this morning, TSMC Chairman and CEO CC Wei offered a blunt assessment of Terafab’s ambitious timeline: “There are no shortcuts.” According to Wei, the physics of a modern foundry, which he says takes roughly five years to build and ramp, remains the ultimate speed limit, regardless of the customer’s urgency. “That’s a fundamental of the foundry industry,” he said.
Wei noted that Tesla remains a TSMC customer.
Hims & Hers rose more than 13% on Wednesday and continued to rise in premarket trading on Thursday after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that the Food and Drug Administration may ease restrictions on 12 peptides.
The move would allow compounding pharmacies to dispense the list of peptides, which have grown in popularity but are currently available only through suppliers who sell them for research purposes.
Hims and other consumer health companies have positioned themselves to begin selling peptides after getting the FDA nod.
Today, we took long-overdue action to restore science, accountability, and the rule of law.
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) April 15, 2026
In September 2023, the Biden FDA pushed a number of peptides into Category 2 — “Bulk Drug Substances that Raise Significant Safety Risks” — driving a dangerous black market that puts…
Hims and other consumer health companies have positioned themselves to begin selling peptides after getting the FDA nod.
Today, we took long-overdue action to restore science, accountability, and the rule of law.
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) April 15, 2026
In September 2023, the Biden FDA pushed a number of peptides into Category 2 — “Bulk Drug Substances that Raise Significant Safety Risks” — driving a dangerous black market that puts…
Alphabet’s 2015 investment in SpaceX is about to pay off handsomely with the company’s hotly anticipated IPO later this year, which is expected to be the largest in history.
Bloomberg reports that according to new financial filings, Alphabet’s investment could be worth up to $100 billion.
Google invested in SpaceX in 2015 when it, along with Fidelity, invested $1 billion in a round that valued SpaceX at $10 billion. At the end of 2025, Google owned just over 6% of SpaceX, per Bloomberg’s reporting on the more recent filings. That stake has likely been diluted due to SpaceX’s merger with xAI.
OP, the governance token for OP Mainnet, has increased as much as 5% since Tuesday night following news that Ether.fi, a decentralized finance protocol known for providing noncustodial crypto payment cards, completed its migration to the ethereum layer 2 blockchain network.
Ether.fi’s move resulted in around $220 million in total value locked coming to OP Mainnet, the largest single TVL event in the network’s history, as well as over 70,000 payment cards and more than 300,000 accounts, according to a blog post from Ether.fi.
Originally on alternative layer 2 network Scroll, Ether.fi made the switch to OP Mainnet due to lower median transaction fees of $0.00001 and sub-250-millisecond finality times.
“To ship what comes next, we needed infrastructure that could handle real-time payments at consumer volume,” Ether.fi CEO Mike Silagadze told Sherwood News. “OP Mainnet delivered on every dimension. Three days to migrate $220M with no downtime answered the question. Now we get to build.”
The migration comes about two months after Coinbase-incubated blockchain Base announced moving away from Optimism’s OP Stack.
Software shares are rising again early Wednesday, putting the widely watched iShares Expanded Tech Software ETF on track for its best three-day stretch in almost a year.
So far this week, Oracle is up more than 20%, Microsoft is up over 9%, and both ServiceNow and Datadog have gained more than 12%.
Intuit, CrowdStrike, Autodesk, and Atlassian were also among the software shares rising Wednesday after taking lumps on worries about AI disruption earlier this year.
Why the rebound? Mean reversion is a powerful force in markets, and some of these shares could simply be enjoying an overdue snapback.
Bloomberg suggests there’s some “bottom fishing” going on, with investors finally deciding that the price for these still highly profitable, cash flow-positive companies has fallen low enough to make them a compelling bargain.
Pat Tschosik, chief thematic strategist at research firm Ned Davis, told Sherwood News that the market may have been too panicky about software stocks as a whole, slamming the shares of software companies that could survive and thrive in the AI era along with those doomed to disruption.
Determining the difference between the winners and the losers will take a look at the fundamentals of individual companies.
“Somebody who does the homework is going to make a lot of money in these stocks,” he said.
So far this week, Oracle is up more than 20%, Microsoft is up over 9%, and both ServiceNow and Datadog have gained more than 12%.
Intuit, CrowdStrike, Autodesk, and Atlassian were also among the software shares rising Wednesday after taking lumps on worries about AI disruption earlier this year.
Why the rebound? Mean reversion is a powerful force in markets, and some of these shares could simply be enjoying an overdue snapback.
Bloomberg suggests there’s some “bottom fishing” going on, with investors finally deciding that the price for these still highly profitable, cash flow-positive companies has fallen low enough to make them a compelling bargain.
Pat Tschosik, chief thematic strategist at research firm Ned Davis, told Sherwood News that the market may have been too panicky about software stocks as a whole, slamming the shares of software companies that could survive and thrive in the AI era along with those doomed to disruption.
Determining the difference between the winners and the losers will take a look at the fundamentals of individual companies.
“Somebody who does the homework is going to make a lot of money in these stocks,” he said.