Stocks climb to new records amid peace prospects; chip stocks rally

Oklo shares jumped following the announcement that the company has been selected by the US Department of Energy for advanced negotiations under the Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program. Under this federal program, Oklo will help to turn excess legacy Cold War nuclear material into commercial fuel for its advanced power plants.

Read more: Inside Oklo’s audacious plan to turn leftover weapons-grade plutonium into a nuclear bridge fuel

Oklo will partner with European nuclear developer Newcleo, validating their October 2025 partnership including a Newcleo-affiliated investment of up to $2 billion, to convert material that already exists into fuel for advanced reactors, using it to generate electricity and consume it through fission.

“Fuel supply constraints are a key throttle to advanced reactor development,” said cofounder and CEO Jacob DeWitte. “This program creates a pathway to use existing surplus material as bridge fuel for advanced reactors to bring more reactors online sooner.”

Advanced nuclear companies are facing roadblocks trying to find fuel. This deal gives Oklo a chance to reduce its dependence on foreign supply chains. Wall Street is closely watching what this means for Oklo’s business model. Wedbush maintained its “outperform” rating and a $110 price target on the stock, emphasizing that this is a helpful “addition” to Oklo’s multipronged fuel strategy, rather than a stand-alone fix.

Just last month, Oklo announced a collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Nvidia “to support critical infrastructure development and accelerate the deployment of nuclear energy.”

Qualcomm is spiking after a Bloomberg report that the chip company is poised to sell “millions” of AI chips to TikTok owner ByteDance.

The report, citing people familiar with the matter, said these custom processors would be used to “support the social media company’s AI agent software.”

Qualcomm had come under pressure earlier this year because of softness in its China handset business in light of difficulty accessing memory chips, which are in a severe supply crunch. At one time, the company had seemingly been counting on supporting AI-enabled devices to earn its role in the boom — and still might be doing that, with analysts speculating over a potential partnership with OpenAI for an AI smartphone chip.

But it’s also been telegraphing a shift toward playing a bigger role upstream in providing hardware for data centers.

In the press release that accompanied Qualcomm’s recent earnings report, President and CEO Cristiano Amon touted the company’s entry into the data center business, with initial shipments to a “leading hyperscaler” on track for later this year, and said that investors could expect to hear more on Qualcomm’s growth plans in data center and physical AI at its Investor Day on June 24.

Seems like they’re on track.

Traders are happy about potential peace. But they’re even more happy that Micron exists.

That’s the best way to describe the price action on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump’s comments this weekend that a deal with Iran has been “largely negotiated,” along with reports that the US Navy has restarted shepherding vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, have contributed to a worldwide rally in stocks and sell-off in crude oil.

Some normal things you’d expect to see are happening:

• Within US markets, the SPDR S&P Retail ETF is up; the Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR Fund is selling off. A world in which high gasoline prices are placing less pressure on household budgets is positive for more discretionary spending versus necessities. Checks out.

• Europe is typically much more adversely impacted by energy price shocks than the US. Accordingly, the iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF is outperforming the SPDR S&P 500 ETF. Checks out.

  • Zooming out, the iShares MSCI ACWI ex-US ETF is crushing SPY by over 1%. Checks out — that’s what was happening before the war was on anyone’s radar.

But... there’s also some weird stuff beneath the hood.

When global stocks outperform the US by a ton, it’s generally because tech is out of favor. After all, the US market is heavily weighted toward megacap tech giants. However, a big reason why ACWX is trouncing the US is because of how insanely well the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF and iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF are doing! Those countries, of course, are even more heavily levered to AI hardware than the US market. The new Street-high view on Micron in particular is fueling gains for Korean stocks, where fellow memory chip giants SK Hynix and Samsung are the biggest components.

The tech-heavy Invesco QQQ Trust is putting in a bigger gain than European stocks, as of 11 a.m. ET.

It’s extremely rare for Europe, a major portion of global equities, to be lagging US tech when ACWX is leaving SPY in the dust.

The combination of global equities outperforming by at least 1% while the Nasdaq 100 bests EZU hasn’t happened since December 16, 2022. If that holds, it would be only the sixth time this has happened in the past 15 years.

(My kingdom for an MSCI ACWI ex-US ex-Korea ETF... bonus points if you can throw in an ex-Taiwan, too!)

The lesson seems to be: peace is great; the small pieces that help the brains of the AI boom access information are even better.

TeraWulf shares are rising after the company announced it has acquired a 1-gigawatt hyperscale data center site in eastern Kentucky.

The project, known as the Muskie Data Campus, marks an expansion of the company’s digital infrastructure capabilities and accelerates TeraWulf’s transition from a bitcoin miner into an HPC and AI infrastructure provider. The newly acquired site spans 285 acres and is engineered to support more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity over time, with the first 500 megawatts scheduled to ramp up in the second half of 2028.

The Muskie Data Campus represents TeraWulf’s second major digital infrastructure campus in Kentucky, alongside the company’s 480-megawatt Justified Data campus in Hancock County.

“This acquisition further reinforces the strategy we discussed on our first quarter earnings call: securing and developing large-scale, power-advantaged sites capable of supporting the next generation of HPC workloads,” Paul Prager, chairman and CEO of TeraWulf, said. “As we said then, the defining constraint in this market is no longer computing hardware — it is power, transmission infrastructure, and execution certainty.”

TeraWulf reported strong Q1 earnings results in early May. While heavy capital expenditure resulted in a GAAP loss, the company generated $34 million in revenue. The stock is up more than 120% year to date.

Shares of Wolfspeed and Navitas Semiconductor are rising after power chip company Vicor boosted its Q2 guidance and a potential technological breakthrough by China’s Huawei is helping to boost US chip stocks with a big Asia footprint.

Vicor attributed the strong guidance in part to “royalties from an additional licensee to its patented power system technology.” Wolfspeed is a little more upstream from Vicor in the power chip industry as a silicon carbide producer.

Huawei, one of China’s national tech champions, said it’s developed a “LogicFolding” technology that will allow it to start producing 1.4-nanometer chips by 2031.

This announcement helped lift sentiment across Chinese semiconductor names. Semtech, another stock with historically elevated sales exposure to Asia, was up big in early trading but pared most of its gains. ASML is modestly lower, perhaps a nod to the idea that Huawei’s ability to manufacture chips this tiny without its top-notch EUV lithography machines (in light of export restrictions to China) undercuts its critical role in advanced semiconductor manufacturing.

(The irony of any US stocks going up on a Chinese tech self-sufficiency push is not lost on us, especially given competition from Chinese silicon carbide suppliers helped push Wolfspeed into Chapter 11 bankruptcy!)

TSMC, for its part, plans on having chips that small in mass production by 2028.