Block’s guidance hike sends shares higher

We’ve been covering the sudden sexiness of data storage as a market theme a lot recently, with Western Digital and Seagate Technology Holdings turning into top trades of 2025.

The makers of relatively affordable data storage devices known as hard disk drives were leading the S&P 500 until recently, when they were supplanted by an index newbie.

But Western Digital, which has been trading at a discount to Seagate due to its spottier earnings record over the last couple years, seems to have suddenly found fans among the unwashed stock-trading masses, with JPMorgan’s always informative Retail Radar note spotlighting “strong buying in WDC rally” Wednesday as they climbed aboard a rally that has carried the shares up more than 60% over the last month.

Quantum stocks are going gangbusters in early trading on Thursday, with Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum, IonQ, and Quantum Computing all up at least 5.5% as of 10:10 a.m. ET.

Surprisingly, most of these gains are taking place on relatively light volume (and a dearth of news) so far, though Rigetti and Quantum Computing are both enjoying elevated call demand, having already outstripped Wednesday’s call volumes traded a little over half an hour into the session.

The quantum space has benefited from a number of fresh deals with governments and affiliated agencies over the past month, with hopes of more to come, as the Trump administration recently highlighted quantum technology as an R&D budgetary priority for fiscal 2027.

Shares of EV maker Rivian dipped more than 3% in premarket trading on Thursday after the company reported its third-quarter production and delivery totals.

Rivian said it delivered 13,201 vehicles in the period ended September 30, beating analyst estimates of about 12,000. The figure represents a 32% jump from the same period last year, with the expiring EV tax credit boosting purchasing activity.

The company also narrowed its full-year delivery total to between 41,500 and 43,500 vehicles. That’s on the lower end of its prior range of 40,000 to 46,000 vehicles, likely fueling the investor pullback. That delivery outlook has been trending the wrong way: in April, the automaker was guiding for between 46,000 and 51,000 vehicles.

Tesla, the leader in the US EV market, sold a record 497,000 cars in Q3.

Nebius is jumping in premarket trading after a Bloomberg report shed more light on its near $20 billion deal to supply computing power to Microsoft.

Citing people familiar with the matter, the report says that Nebius will utilize more than 100,000 of Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell chips in order to “provide computing power to internal teams creating large language models and a consumer AI assistant” for Microsoft.

The so-called “neocloud” cohort, of which Nebius and CoreWeave are the most prominent in the publicly traded space, effectively serves as overflow capacity for the AI boom. The pair have been on fire amid an all-out frenzy from hyperscalers to accumulate more computing power.

Nebius’ arrangement with Microsoft will allow the tech giant to use its own compute to focus on fulfilling demand from customers.

Remember that the stock market’s intermediate peak in February was accelerated by a breakdown in AI-geared momentum stocks on concerns that Microsoft might have already had too much data center capacity, which came on the heels of the DeepSeek-induced freak-out for the industry. Such worries have since been washed away by a steady wave of spending commitments from leading private and public tech giants that total in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Stellantis is up more than 3% in early trading after the Jeep maker posted upbeat Q3 US sales, ending a string of quarterly declines in the region.

Total US deliveries came in at 324,825 vehicles, up 6.4% from the year prior, driven by strong performances from Fiat (+2%), Jeep (+11%), and Chrysler (+45%).

Jeep, which makes up nearly half of Stellantis’ US volume, saw sharp gains across some key models, including Wrangler (+18%), Gladiator (+43%), and Wagoneer (+122%), with the latter hitting record monthly sales in August and September. The company also said Jeep held two of the five bestselling plug-in hybrids in the US in the first seven months of the year.

The results come on the heels of Monday’s unexpected resignation of CFO Doug Ostermann after just a year, with tariffs and dented demand hurting the company. Shares are down about 21% in 2025, despite today’s early jump.