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Luke Kawa8/20/25

Adding “AI” to your company’s name was a blessing. Right now it’s a curse.

There’s no better way to make sure everyone knows you’re in the AI business than literally putting it in your name, a tactic many US publicly traded companies have turned to to try to ensure their stocks get their fair share of any halo effect from the theme.

But when there’s a nascent pullback in everything AI, that also means you stick out like a sore thumb.

We scanned the S&P 500 Total Market Index for companies whose names make it very clear they’re in the artificial intelligence business (mostly relatively smaller stocks).

But following BigBear.ai and C3.ai’s tumbles in the wake of brutal earnings reports earlier this month, the selling in speculative and AI stocks has intensified over the past two sessions. The average stock in the below chart is down 8.7% over the past two sessions, while a Bank of America basket of mostly large-cap US AI beneficiaries has dropped about 7% over the same period.

SoundHound AI is at the bottom of the pack despite a dearth of company-specific news.

There is one exception to this rule: Gaxos.ai, omitted from the above chart. The stock went bonkers on Tuesday after launching a new AI image and video platform, but is giving back some of those gains today.

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Applied Digital whipsaws after posting quarterly revenue beat in Q1

Shares of Applied Digital are gyrating down and up and down again in postmarket trading after the company reported better-than-expected results for its fiscal Q1, the three-month period ended August 31.

The data center company, which counts Nvidia and CoreWeave among its major share and warrant holders, booked $64.2 million in revenues (estimate: $46.1 million) with an adjusted diluted loss per share of $0.03 (estimate: loss of $0.13).

“With hyperscalers expected to invest approximately $350 billion into AI deployment this year, we believe we are in a prime position to serve as the modern-day picks and shovels of the intelligence era,” Chairman and CEO Wes Cummins said.

The options-implied move for the stock on earnings is a whopping 17.6%, per Bloomberg data.

Applied Digital is also one of the components in the Roundhill Meme Stock ETF, which relaunched this week.

Tasha Matsumoto

Stocks retreat from records

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 all closed lower.

Mascot Clark the Cub poses before a Spring Training game between the Chicago Cubs a the Seattle Mariners at Sloan Park

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Matt Phillips5h

AST SpaceMobile soars again, up 80% in October

Another day, another giant gain for satellite services provider AST SpaceMobile, which continues to get a lift from its announcement earlier this week that it has signed a deal with telecom giant Verizon to provide some cellular broadband services from its satellites by 2026.

Retail enthusiasm for the stock, despite the fact that it has posted growing losses over the last four years, is high, helped out by a fair amount of online boosterism.

JPMorgan analysts have AST on their list of “most hyped stocks on social media,” which they included in their “Retail Radar” note published Thursday. A quick glance at r/WallStreetBets or volumes of call options — which hit their highest level in over a year yesterday — would seem to confirm retail participation.

It’s been a good trade. AST SpaceMobile is up more than 2,500% over the last two years, a rally that has created more than $20 billion in stock market wealth. To the moon, indeed.

Matt Phillips8h

Analysts at consulting firm Pantheon Macroeconomics estimate that the stock market’s enthusiasm for all things AI has added some $8.5 trillion to aggregate US household wealth since late 2022. They wrote:

“The S&P 500 returned about 70% between the start of ChatGPT mania around the end of 2022 to the end of Q2 2025, with roughly half of those returns generated by the ‘magnificent seven’ tech stocks, a very rough proxy for the stock market boost from AI euphoria.

We estimate that translates into a lift to household wealth held in stocks of about $8.5T.”

As my colleague Luke Kawa recently wrote, stock market wealth seems to be underpinning US consumer spending, especially among the richest Americans. Some of that spending may retrench if AI is indeed a bubble — as some have recently mooted — and eventually pops.

Analysts break down what’s driving SoFi’s recent surge

Part of the rally is related to the federal government’s retreat from student lending. But there’s more to it.

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