Earnings season has been phenomenal, and it’s done nothing for the average stock

That giant sucking sound you hear is the AI boom continuing to pull in capital.

Per Bloomberg, Amazon is launching a six-part bond sale, its first new issue since November 2022.

The firm is aiming to raise $12 billion with a series of maturities ranging from three to 40 years.

Per Bloomberg sources familiar with the matter, the offering is for “general corporate purposes,” but in today’s day and age, that’s basically tantamount to financing ambitious AI investments.

The likes of Meta, Oracle, and Alphabet have recently tapped the market or announced plans to do so. Credit risk modestly starting to creep into the AI trade as issuance explodes has been a contributor to the sharp pullback in speculative stocks, many of which are highly levered to that theme.

“Even boasting some of the strongest balance sheets and highest ratings among corporate issuers, software and services providers’ increased spending and borrowing have widened their bond spreads, with some facing downgrades,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Robert Schiffman and Alex Reid wrote. “Though spreads are wider, the risk of significant widening, for most, appears contained.”

In their view, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta are best positioned, while the picture is less positive for Oracle.

Novo Nordisk slashed the cash-pay price for starting doses of its diabetes and weight-loss shots, Ozempic and Wegovy, in a bold move to boost sales after it’s lost ground in the GLP-1 market to Eli Lilly and compounders.

Starting Monday, the introductory doses for self-pay patients will be priced at $199 a month, the Danish pharmaceutical giant said. That's about the same price as the copycat versions sold by Hims & Hers and others.

After the first two months of treatment, a monthly dose of Novo’s shots goes up to $349 a month, compared to the $499 monthly price tag the shots previously had. Eli Lilly’s cash-pay price for a low dose of its weight-loss shot Zepbound is $349 a month, rising to $499 for higher doses.

The shots are available online via Novo’s direct-to-consumer pharmacy, NovoCare, as well as through its partners, which include Costco and telehealth companies like Ro and Weight Watchers. Novo and Lilly have embraced DTC sales channels in the past year as a way to cut out middlemen and reduce prices for patients not using insurance.

Novo, which was the first to bring GLP-1s to market, has been outpaced in sales by Lilly this year. It’s been competing with Lilly’s more effective drugs, as well as cheaper compounded versions made by companies like Hims.

Both Lilly and Novo reached a deal with the Trump administration to cut the price of their blockbuster drugs starting next year.

What do Peter Thiel and Masayoshi Son have in common?

Both are no longer owners of the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.

A 13F filing showed that the Silicon Valley luminary’s hedge fund had exited its holdings of Nvidia, which it had owned since Q4 2024, at the end of Q3. This was Thiel Macro’s second-largest equity position at the end of Q2 per filings, trailing only Tesla.

Last week, SoftBank revealed that it had divested its stake in Nvidia in October as it prepares to finance a larger equity position in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, a move that CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said had “nothing to do with Nvidia itself.”

Shares of the chip designer, which is scheduled to report earnings after the close on Wednesday, are down about 1.5% as of 8:15 a.m. ET.

Quantum Computing is leaping double digits in premarket trading on Monday after the integrated photonic quantum company jumped back into profitability in its third-quarter earnings, with the company’s strong balance sheet set to enable a ramp-up of production and R&D.

Revenue increased 280% year over year for the quarter to $384,000, largely thanks to a purchase order worth ~$332,000 from a top 5 US bank back in July for quantum cybersecurity solutions.

Perhaps most important, however, were comments from the company’s leadership about how it plans to deploy its swelling cash coffers.

After QUBT’s recent $750 million raise, its balance sheet is now in a strong position, with the company stating that it “ended the third quarter with $352 million in cash and $461 million in investments, and subsequent to the quarter raised an additional $750 million, giving us a substantial liquid position of over $1.5 billion today.”

That gives the company the largest cash pile among the four public pure-play quantum companies, a war chest that QCi looks to use “to implement our TFLN fabrication and quantum machine development initiatives,” alongside acquisition opportunities, according to CFO Chris Roberts on the earnings call.

Indeed, QUBT’s leadership remained bullish about creating a “robust quantum products platform leveraging TFLN integrated chip technology” from 2028 and beyond. The company’s CEO, Yuping Huang, said on the earnings call (emphasis ours):

“Our long-term goal is to move from prototype and small-batch manufacturing toward volume production, and we see that transition take shape by the end of this decade. To get there, our current three-year road map is focused on refining our processes, scaling small-batch production, and expanding our team and facility to position QSA for industrial-scale output.

In other words, the technology is there. Our quantum machines and photonic chips have been validated across multiple use cases. The next step is to scale the engineering and the manufacturing behind them, and we now have the team, resources, facility, and plan to make that happen.”

Amid a wider pullback in speculative stocks, QUBT has been deeply in the red in recent weeks, down 42% in the past month.

Go Deeper: Quantum computing companies are stacking up piles of cash, capitalizing on their booming stock prices