Billionaire Tesla bull tweets that he purchased 1 million shares of Nvidia

CoreWeave popped in premarket trading after announcing that it entered into a “multi-year strategic partnership” with Perplexity, which will see the AI answer engine company use the neocloud’s compute to support its inference workloads.

If sustained, the big bounce today would help repair some of the massive losses CoreWeave suffered last week after the company’s bottom-line results came in below expectations, while business investment and its capex budget for the full year were much higher than anticipated. The intense funding demands associated with aggressive expansions of capacity have sparked a renewed focus on credit risk in AI upstarts, as well as other emergent technologies.

Moderna is up 4.8% at 5 a.m. ET in premarket trading after the pharma giant said on Tuesday that it had reached a deal to resolve a patent dispute related to the technology behind its key Covid vaccine models.

Moderna will pay $950 million up front and a further $1.3 billion down the line, depending on the result of a separate appeal, to Arbutus Biopharma and Genevant Sciences to resolve all related disputes across its Spikevax^® and mRESVIA^® models. The settlement comes with no further royalties, which the company said in a press release would provide “certainty going forward for Moderna’s full infectious disease portfolio.” That said, if Moderna’s appeal, based on its government contractor immunity defense limits, ultimately prevails, the two biotech companies will refund the payment in full, including interest.

The $950 million charge is expected to be recorded in Q1 2026, per the company’s press release, leading Moderna to adjust its cash and cash equivalents expectations in the current calendar year to fall between $4.5 billion and $5 billion. Still, as analysts at William Blair observed late Tuesday, the total settlement amount is “better than feared” — a take investors seem to be getting onboard with.

Noting that Moderna is driving toward its goal to break even in 2028, CEO Stéphane Bancel commented, “Resolving this legacy matter from our pandemic response removes uncertainty and allows us to turn our full focus to Moderna’s exciting near-term future.”

West Texas Intermediate futures dipped to their lowest level of the day while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF continued to pare losses after US President Donald Trump ordered immediate action to improve the flow of oil to global markets, as the US-Iran conflict caused shipments through the Strait of Hormuz to slow to a crawl.

In a Truth Social post, the president said the US International Development Finance Corp. would provide “political risk insurance and guarantees for the Financial Security of ALL Maritime Trade, especially Energy, traveling through the Gulf,” adding that the US Navy would escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz as soon as possible, if necessary.

Bloomberg’s Javier Blas explained that having oil-producing countries in the region able to reload crude on tankers is critical to avoiding production shut-ins.

Of course, there is a risk of unintended consequences from a heightened US presence in the region’s most strategically important area, from the perspective of global markets, during a time of kinetic military action. US naval escorts through the strait could dramatically increase the risk of an incident that massively escalates the conflict.