Archer outbids Joby and other rivals to acquire patents of bankrupt competitor Lilium for $21 million
Shares of air taxi maker Archer Aviation climbed after the company won a bidding war for the patents of German rival Lilium, which filed for insolvency earlier this year. Archer announced it paid about $21 million for the assets.
The stock was up 3.1% in recent premarket trading.
Archer beat out Joby Aviation, which also reportedly made an offer on the patent portfolio. Archer’s win nets it about 300 patents in advanced air mobility.
Over its decade of existence, Lilium invested $1.5 billion to develop or acquire the patents, which Archer said “could unlock future development.”
Lilium isn’t the only electric vertical takeoff and landing company to face headwinds: Hyundai’s Supernal reportedly paused work following the departure of its CEO and CTO last month.
Another day, another multibillion-dollar data center deal.
The announced $40 billion buyout — including debt — of Texas-based Aligned Data Centers on Wednesday was the first for a consortium established last year by a diverse base of investors including giant money management firm BlackRock, Abu Dhabi-based technology investment fund MGX, and Microsoft.
Some analysts suggest the variety of investors in such a deal — including tech giants, sovereign investment funds and the private pools of capital controlled by entities like BlackRock — will be an increasingly common site, as the enormously expensive buildout of AI infrastructure continues over the coming years.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley recently estimated that there will be some $2.9 trillion of spending on data centers globally by 2028. Some $1.4 trillion of that will be covered by the cash flows produced by giant hyper scalers like Microsoft, leaving a need for some $1.5 trillion from other sources. The analysts wrote that their “broad takeaway was bullishness on the availability of those sources of capital.”
Some analysts suggest the variety of investors in such a deal — including tech giants, sovereign investment funds and the private pools of capital controlled by entities like BlackRock — will be an increasingly common site, as the enormously expensive buildout of AI infrastructure continues over the coming years.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley recently estimated that there will be some $2.9 trillion of spending on data centers globally by 2028. Some $1.4 trillion of that will be covered by the cash flows produced by giant hyper scalers like Microsoft, leaving a need for some $1.5 trillion from other sources. The analysts wrote that their “broad takeaway was bullishness on the availability of those sources of capital.”
Rigetti Computing is getting taken to the woodshed on Wednesday amid souring retail trader sentiment and options bets on near-term downside.
In particular, one post on Reddit’s wallstreetbets forum from user bespoketrancheop, which shows the Google Street view (circa March 2025) of Rigetti’s listed headquarters, is generating a lot of attention. It’s the most popular Rigetti-centric post on the subreddit in the past seven months.
r/wallstreetbets via bespoketrancheop
Per our executive editor, it’s giving this:
Source: imgflip
But as one commenter notes, this isn’t exactly new news: “People been posting this since it was $11,” with another pointing out that “making an assessment on a google street view is lazy dd [editor’s note: due diligence].”
Of course, it’s impossible to single this out as <the> specific catalyst for the price action in Rigetti today. But since there’ve been dozens of days in the past couple months where quantum computing stocks went up on no news whatsoever, it stands to reason there are also going to be days when they go down for no (good) reason whatsoever.
More important, perhaps, is the flurry of major options bets positioning for downside in the quantum computing company this week. Put options with a strike price of $50 that expire this Friday are in demand. That contract had open interest of under 7,000 heading into today but has already seen volumes of more than 30,000, suggesting fresh wagers made on a pullback in the formerly high-flying stock.
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices are soaring after HSBC analyst Frank Lee strapped his price target for the chip designer to a rocket ship, hiking it to $310 from $185. The new price target ties that of Arete Research’s Brett Simpson for the highest on Wall Street, per data from Bloomberg.
But that’s just nowhere near enough compared to what the stock deserves, per Lee, who sees AMD’s MI450 series of AI chips as being sufficiently competitive to Nvidia’s offerings. Through 2030, he sees the revenue opportunity of the OpenAI deal to be $80 billion.
“We believe the Street has underestimated the AI GPU revenue with our estimates 50% and 45% above consensus for 2026e and 2027e, respectively,” he wrote. “We believe there could be further upside driven by pricing premium as well as additional AI GPU volume.”
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