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Luke Kawa

Google jumps, Nvidia and AMD fall on report that the search giant is in talks to sell “billions of dollars” of its custom AI chips to Meta

Google is climbing in premarket trading while Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have dropped on the heels of a report from The Information that has the search giant muscling in on the chip designers’ turf.

Per the report, Meta is in discussions with Google to spend “billions of dollars” to use its AI chips in the social media company’s data centers starting in 2027, and to begin renting access to Google chips from its cloud business next year.

Historically, Google has rented access to these chips through its cloud business rather than supplied them directly to third parties. The report suggests that insiders believe a more direct foray could allow the company to grab a market share in chips amounting to about 10% of Nvidia’s annual revenue.

Google’s AI chips — TPUs, or tensor processing units — are having a moment. These semiconductors were used to train its latest GenAI model, Gemini 3, which has received rave reviews, and are cheaper to use than Nvidia’s offerings. That’s sent the stock to record highs, surpassing Microsoft in market value along the way.

According to The Information, Meta is even mulling using TPUs for training, considered a much more demanding task, rather than just inference alone.

Shares of Nvidia have slumped more than 4% as of 8:30 a.m. ET. AMD, which sell GPUs for use in data centers, is down more than 5% by the same point. Google has moved 4% in the other direction, while Broadcom, the custom chip specialist that partnered with Google to design these TPUs, is also up about the same amount.

During Nvidia’s conference call last week, CEO Jensen Huang was asked about the competitive threat posed by custom chips. He responded by talking up the difficulty of inference (“How could thinking be easy?”). That’s a not-too-subtle nod to the idea that his company’s GPUs will be the more effective solution compared to more cost-effective options. He also touted the company’s CUDA software as a selling point because it’s more commonly used, therefore making it easier for buyers to go on and sell AI computing capacity.

Google has aimed to make its JAX software easier for developers over time by making its TPUs operable via open-source software tied to PyTorch (invented by Meta), overhauling how errors are reported and introducing an extension that makes it easier to write custom code, among others.

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Intel shares are officially a thing

April most definitely has not been the cruelest month for US chip giant Intel or its shareholders.

The stock is on a remarkable run that’s made it the best performer in the S&P 500 for the month, posting a gain of nearly 43% shortly after 11 a.m. ET Friday. That’s outdone AI darlings like Sandisk, Lumentum, Ciena Corp., Coherent, and Seagate Technology Holdings.

In fact, the monthly view actually underplays the extent of the stock’s performance. Over the eight sessions that ended yesterday — which includes March 31 — the stock was up just shy of 50%. That’s by far its best eight-day streak over the last 30 years.

Investors have eaten up Intel’s announcements this week of partnerships, first with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Terafab project, and separately, with Alphabet on developing custom chips for Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure needs.

More broadly, the seemingly relentless demand for computing capacity and chips related to AI seems to present, at least, the prospect of Intel actually solving the long-standing problems at its contract chipmaking business — known as a foundry — that have weighed on the business for years.

Oh, being partially nationalized by the US government amid an increasing global focus on ensuring secure supply chains for crucial technologies like semiconductors probably doesn’t hurt either.

(In case you're keeping track, the US bought a nearly 10% stake in Intel for about $8.9 billion in late August of last year. Today, that stake is worth about $27 billion.)

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Palantir’s slide continues, but President Trump tries to help

Investors were selling Palantir shares again on Friday, with the stock falling as much as 6% before stabilizing, thanks to an assist from the White House.

At its worst moments, the sell-off put the retail favorite on track for its worst weekly loss (more than 16%) since February 2021.

But Palantir has powerful friends: President Trump posted on Truth Social celebrating the company’s “great war fighting capabilities,” sending the stock higher, though it remained in the red.

Truth post on PLTR
(Truth Social)

The overall negative sentiment seems to stem from Anthropic’s powerful new AI models, at least judging from the latest epistle from Palantir bull Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities:

“Anthropic released a new product around multi-agent orchestration, which continues to add more headwinds to the software sector. While Anthropic is hitting a new scale with the company now at $30 billion [annual run rate], up from $9 billion at the start of the year, we believe this is not at the expense of PLTR’s business as the company continues to accelerate both its US commercial and government businesses.”

Of course, the specter of AI undermining of other software companies has been a well-established theme for months. And it’s clearly at play in the market on Friday, with Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Figma, and Atlassian continuing to get clocked on negative AI implications.

But the recent inclusion of Palantir among the pack of potentially replaceable software providers is newer, with the view popularized by well-followed market commentator Michael Burry’s pronouncement — since deleted — that Anthropic is “eating Palantir’s lunch,” which seemed to contribute to the downdraft for Palantir today.

The stock dove through its 50-day moving average in recent days, underscoring the sputtering momentum for what has been one of the market’s biggest winners over the last couple years. Long-term holders are still up massively, with the stock up about 1,400% over the last three years.

124% 🚗

China exported more than twice as many electric vehicles (and plug-in hybrids) in the first quarter of 2026 as it did in the same period last year, according to the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA).

New energy vehicle exports surged 124% year over year, as major players like BYD and Chery ramped up overseas efforts to combat lower domestic sales. Tesla’s China business also boosted exports, shipping 164% more EVs than the same period the year before.

Nio is ramping up export efforts as well, with a goal to deliver “several thousand” EVs overseas this year and have a presence in 40 countries. Still, the automaker exported 271 vehicles in Q1 — less than half of a percent of the company’s total deliveries.

According to the CPCA, April will see the country’s automotive industry continue its “slow recovery.”

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