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Luke Kawa

Intel spikes on Nvidia’s plan to invest $5 billion as part of a partnership to develop data center and PC products

Shares of Intel are mooning as the chipmaker has successfully hitched its wagon to the biggest star in the semiconductor space: Nvidia.

In a joint press release, the two companies announced “a collaboration to jointly develop multiple generations of custom data center and PC products that accelerate applications and workloads across hyperscale, enterprise and consumer markets” that will also see Nvidia purchase $5 billion in Intel stock at a price of $23.28.

“We appreciate the confidence Jensen and the NVIDIA team have placed in us with their investment and look forward to the work ahead as we innovate for customers and grow our business,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said.

Shares of Intel were up as much as 34% in premarket trading, which, if sustained, would be the biggest one-day gain for the stock ever, surpassing the 26.4% gain on October 29, 1987.

“The chip landscape remains NVDA’s world with everybody else paying rent as more sovereigns and enterprises wait in line for the most advanced chips in the world,” said Dan Ives, senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities. “Today’s announcement further strengthens the US lead in the AI Arms Race against China as Intel now goes from a laggard to a catalyst.”

This deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, would make the chip designer one of Intel’s largest shareholders, behind only index fund providers BlackRock and Vanguard, and also the US government.

Intel and Nvidia plan to codesign two products:

  • Custom-made CPUs for data centers that Nvidia would integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms, and

  • System-on-chips for PCs that integrate Nvidia’s RTX GPUs for better performance.

“This historic collaboration tightly couples NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem — a fusion of two world-class platforms,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. “Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.”

Advanced Micro Devices sank on this news, as the hits seemingly come on both sides: the PC-chip partnership threatens to see Intel reclaim market share from AMD in that space, while the deepening of Nvidia’s data center offerings may also further entrench its dominance in that market to AMD’s detriment.

“For Intel, the deal provides a lifeline for its struggling AI GPU efforts and a potential lift in AI PC share,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Kunjan Sobhani and Oscar Hernandez Tejada wrote. “For Nvidia, it secures a path to remain central in AI compute regardless of whether x86, Arm or custom CPUs dominate, by embedding NVLink and CUDA deeper into the ecosystem.”

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Max Knoblauch

Airline stocks climb as oil prices retreat on easing US-Iran tensions

West Texas Intermediate crude futures fell more than 5% on Monday, following President Trump’s comments over the weekend that Iran was “seriously talking” with the US — a sign that tensions between the countries could be easing.

That drop-off boosted major US airlines, which stand to benefit from lower fuel costs. Shares of carriers including Frontier, United Airlines, JetBlue, and Delta Air Lines were all up in the mid- to high single digits.

markets
Max Knoblauch

Gaming stocks rebound from sell-off as analysts dismiss Google’s new AI project as merely “a one-minute-long walking simulator generator”

Investor fears about the impact of Google’s Project Genie on the broader gaming market may have been an overreaction, analysts at mBank said in a note on Monday.

According to analyst Piotr Poniatowski, Friday’s sell-off was “unjustified.”

Unity Software shed 24%, Roblox lost 13%, and Take-Two closed down 8% heading into the weekend. All three are up at least 3% on Monday.

Project Genie, Google’s new generative-AI prototype, can create interactive worlds from a text or image prompt, and users are already testing its ability to recreate copyrighted worlds. But, as Poniatowski noted, interactivity within those generated worlds is very limited:

“Control is limited to movement and jumping. Users cannot perform complicated actions such as crouching, climbing, dodging, evading, shooting, etc. It is simply moving and jumping around the generated world. There are no NPCs, no interactions and no depth. As of writing, Project Genie is essentially just a one-minute-long walking simulator generator.”

The note mirrors a post on X by Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg on Friday, in which the exec said models like Google’s are “unsuitable on their own for games that require consistent, repeatable player experiences.”

Gaming stocks plunge following release of Google’s AI tool that can create playable, copyrighted worlds

Gaming stocks plunge following release of Google’s AI tool that can create playable, copyrighted worlds

Unity Software shed 24%, Roblox lost 13%, and Take-Two closed down 8% heading into the weekend. All three are up at least 3% on Monday.

Project Genie, Google’s new generative-AI prototype, can create interactive worlds from a text or image prompt, and users are already testing its ability to recreate copyrighted worlds. But, as Poniatowski noted, interactivity within those generated worlds is very limited:

“Control is limited to movement and jumping. Users cannot perform complicated actions such as crouching, climbing, dodging, evading, shooting, etc. It is simply moving and jumping around the generated world. There are no NPCs, no interactions and no depth. As of writing, Project Genie is essentially just a one-minute-long walking simulator generator.”

The note mirrors a post on X by Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg on Friday, in which the exec said models like Google’s are “unsuitable on their own for games that require consistent, repeatable player experiences.”

markets
Luke Kawa

An options trade to benefit from a potential turnaround in beaten-down Palantir after earnings

Palantir Technologies, the richly valued AI darling, hasn’t been immune from the persistent waves of selling that have drowned software stocks.

Last week, the stock broke below its 200-day moving average for the first time since August 5, 2024, and ended January with its lowest close since July. Needless to say, the defense data and AI software company has rarely traded worse heading into an earnings report, with its Q4 results due out after the close on Monday.

“It appears that expectations coming into this earnings print are lower than they have been in the last year or so,” Dean Curnutt, CEO of Macro Risk Advisors, wrote. “And this potentially sets the shares up for post-earnings volatility and directional follow-through to the upside.”

His recommendation:

  • Buy call options with a strike price of $162.50 that expire on Friday;

  • Sell the same amount of calls with a strike price of $182.50 that expire on Friday.

As of the time of recommendation, the potential payout on this trade was roughly 10.5 to 1.

Curnutt noted that when Palantir has been this beaten-down ahead of earnings, shares have usually performed very well thereafter.

Palantir Pre/Post Earnings
Source: Macro Risk Advisors

“As of right now, PLTR T-3 move is -11%,” he concluded. “If you look at the last 8 quarters in the attached table, the only 2 times where the T-3 was negative (8/6/24 and 11/5/24), the T+5 moves were +22% and +45% respectively.”

Claire Yubin Oh
Elon 🤝 Elon 
6h
SpaceX’s planned $1.5 trillion IPO is on track to be gargantuan enough

But a potential merger with xAI or Tesla would create a Musk-centric megaplanet.

US-SPACE-AEROSPACE-SPACEX-STARSHIP
markets
Luke Kawa

Rare earth stocks surge on report the US will launch a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile

Rare earth and critical minerals stocks are soaring as Bloomberg reports that President Donald Trump will soon launch a $12 billion initiative to stockpile critical minerals.

Think the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but for the likes of gallium, cobalt, and lanthanum.

MP Materials, USA Rare Earth, Critical Metals, NioCorp, and United States Antimony Corp. are all soaring in premarket trading on this report.

The purpose of this project, reportedly dubbed “Project Vault,” is to secure a sufficient domestic supply of these strategically important materials for the private sector. Three commodities trading houses and more than a dozen companies (including Google, General Motors, and GE Vernova) are said to be participating in this venture.

Here’s how the mechanics would reportedly work:

“Under the arrangement, companies that make an initial commitment to purchase materials at a specified inventory price later — and pay some up-front fees — will be able to present Project Vault with a shopping list of preferred materials they need.

The project, in turn, will seek to procure and store the materials, with the manufacturers charged a carrying cost for the expenses associated with interest on the loan and holding the elements.

Manufacturers will be allowed to draw down their material stash as long as the firms replenish them. In the case of a major supply disruption, they will be able to access all of it, the officials said.”

The Trump administration has invested in many critical minerals stocks, most recently USA Rare Earth, in a bid to bolster North American output. China currently dominates the production and processing of many strategically important minerals, which are used in everything from fluorescent lights and EV batteries to semiconductors. Access to rare earths was a particularly contentious issue as the US and China ironed out a trade agreement late last year.

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