Markets
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Luke Kawa

Hon Hai’s profit miss is still good news for the AI boom

Major Nvidia and Apple supplier Hon Hai (better known as Foxconn) reported a set of mixed Q4 results.

The electronic components manufacturer posted revenues of TWD$2.61 trillion, ahead of estimates for TWD$2.45 trillion, but net income of TWD$45.21 billion came in below the anticipated TWD$59.86 billion.

While this is one way to interpret those results...

...the other would be to note that revenues beat expectations, that its AI-linked business’ sales beat those of its smartphone division in Q4 (the peak season for the latter), and that the company said “the AI server sector is expected to see strong growth in 2026.”

And then there’s this headline from Dow Jones, to underline the point:

Foxconn Expects 2026 AI Server Rack Shipments to Grow Exponentially

There’s... no bad news about AI demand here, and the market seems to agree, with Nvidia up 1.1% in premarket trading as of 7:17 a.m. ET on Monday.

Most likely, we’ll get some more reassuring commentary on the state of the ongoing spending tech campaign when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote address at the chip designer’s GTC in San Jose.

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Claire Yubin Oh & David Crowther

Nebius soars after signing AI infrastructure deal with Meta, worth up to $27 billion over 5 years

Nebius is skyrocketing in early trading on Monday, up nearly 14% as of 8 a.m. ET, after the Amsterdam-based company announced a new five-year deal, worth as much as $27 billion, with Meta.

The social media giant will initially buy dedicated AI computing capacity across multiple locations for $12 billion, which will be "one of the first large-scale deployments of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform," with delivery beginning from early 2027 according to the company's press release.

Meta will also buy an additional $15 billion worth of Nebius’ planned capacity if it’s not sold to other customers over the same five year period.

Nebius added in the press release that its guidance for 2026, in which the company is forecasting an annualized revenue run-rate of $7 billion to $9 billion per its Q4 earnings results, remains unchanged, signaling that the gains from the new deal will likely start rolling in after this fiscal year. This latest deal with Meta, which adds to their previous $3 billion deal announced in November, also notably relies on its partnership with another big tech company, Nvidia, which recently invested another $2 billion in Nebius.

This news of another major hyperscaler deal is sparking a bid for many of the other so-called “neocloud” companies like CoreWeave, IREN, Applied Digital, Cipher Mining, and Riot Platforms, which also sell hardware and cloud capacity to AI infrastructure-obsessed tech giants.

For Meta, the deal underscores the company's current financial focus: capital is to be used to expand in AI as quickly as possible, but spending in other areas is to be more cautious. Over the weekend, Reuters reported that the company was looking at layoffs which could affect more than 20% of its staff.

So far, dropping tens of billions of dollars on talent and compute capacity hasn't catapulted Meta to the top of the AI leaderboards — just last week, The New York Times reported that the company was delaying the release of its Avocado model because it simply wasn't good enough.

markets
Claire Yubin Oh

Micron rises after closing acquisition of PSMC’s Tongluo P5 site, plans to nearly double cleanroom manufacturing space

Micron rose 4% in premarket trading on Monday after the memory manufacturer announced that it had closed the acquisition of Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation’s (PSMC) P5 site in Tongluo, Taiwan, which had been announced in mid-January.

The rally comes amid big gains for the other big high-bandwidth memory chip companies. South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix rose 2.8% and 7%, respectively, on Monday.

In addition to the closing of the deal, Micron plans to begin "construction of a similar-sized second cleanroom at this site by the end of fiscal 2026." That will add approximately 270,000 square feet of space, in addition to a retrofitting of the existing cleanroom, roughly 300,000 square feet worth, to begin in March, per the company's press release.

The expansion plans will therefore almost double the site’s cleanroom space — rooms that are specifically engineered to minimize potential contaminants and regulate variables like temperature, moisture, and pressure which is essential to the production of microscopic chips.

Both cleanrooms in the new site will act as an extension of Micron’s vertically-integrated mega campus in Taichung, located some 15 miles away from the site, to expand its supply of DRAM products, including HBM, to support surging AI demand.

The Tongluo site, as a whole, is expected to meaningfully support Micron’s shipments starting fiscal 2028, as the company continues to scale up in Asia to meet its memory demand.

markets
Matt Phillips

Oil settles Friday at highest level since start of war

US oil prices moved higher in afternoon trading Friday, sapping strength from the stock market as they posted their highest close since the start of the Iran war.

After another day where the Strait of Hormuz was essentially closed to global tanker traffic, US futures for West Texas Intermediate settled up 3.1% at $98.71 a barrel for an 8.6% weekly gain, per Dow Jones data.

American officials have discussed using the US Navy to escort tankers through the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, but have said plans for such convoys are not ready yet. However, it is unclear if military convoys would bring an end to the war-related dislocations in the oil market.

“It could help,” Tom Liles, senior vice president of upstream research at energy consulting firm Rystad, told Sherwood News in a recent interview. “It could also go in a lot of different directions if a Navy ship is hit or if a tanker is hit.”

Oil Posts Weekly Gains As Middle East Conflict Drags On

Oil Posts Weekly Gains As Middle East Conflict Drags On

American officials have discussed using the US Navy to escort tankers through the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, but have said plans for such convoys are not ready yet. However, it is unclear if military convoys would bring an end to the war-related dislocations in the oil market.

“It could help,” Tom Liles, senior vice president of upstream research at energy consulting firm Rystad, told Sherwood News in a recent interview. “It could also go in a lot of different directions if a Navy ship is hit or if a tanker is hit.”

Tasha Matsumoto
3/13/26
Stocks post third straight week of losses as Brent crude surges above $100

Stocks wiped out early gains to close lower amid the ongoing war in Iran.

Roaring bear
markets
Matt Phillips

Memory stocks rebound off last weeks losses

Memory stocks Micron, Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings rose again Friday, putting these crucial providers of chips for AI inference work on track for big weekly gains after last week’s steep losses following the outbreak of war with Iran.

There’s no obvious trigger for the move higher for these shares this week, other than a bit of a recovery in the AI trade more broadly — AI beneficiaries like IT cable and connections maker Amphenol and custom chip and networking company Marvell Technology clawed back some gains this week — perhaps due Oracle’s earnings earlier, and some mean reversion to boot.

Micron is due to report earnings after the close of trading on Wednesday, with the company catching a couple price target hikes this week, including one from Wedbush on Friday.

Sandisk is something of a different story, as its enormous gains over the last 12 months — roughly 1,200% — have made it a momentum play beloved by the retail crowd.

It was up about 20% this week at around 11 a.m. ET. And its nearly 170% gain this year keeps the stock on top of the S&P 500, in terms of price performance.

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