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Luke Kawa

Morgan Stanley counts Amazon’s data center square footage to explain why its cloud business will boom

The second-quarter reporting period showed that competitors have been making up ground on Amazon in a key AI battleground among tech giants: their cloud businesses.

Amazon Web Services’ revenues rose 17.5% year on year in Q2, trailing growth of 31% for Alphabet’s Google Cloud and 39% from Microsoft’s Azure. Granted, AWS is still the leader in the cloud, but its slow growth versus rivals was a sore spot for investors after earnings — especially after CEO Andy Jassy fumbled his way through an answer on the subject.

Amazon Web Services had a $195 billion backlog as of June 30, and turning those would-be orders into actual cash requires time and/or increased capacity. Morgan Stanley analysts led by Brian Nowak have a framework for assessing how Amazon aims to maintain its dominant footprint in the cloud business: by literally counting up expected data center square footage.

“Our analysis of AWS expected forward square footage (analyzing S&P 451 Research DataCenter KnowledgeBase and company filings) speaks to how AWS potentially has ~8.5 million/~10 million of data center square feet coming online in ’25/’26. This would be similar to annual square footage added in ’24 and ahead (in some cases significantly ahead) of prior periods,” they wrote. “This expected square footage growth combined with AWS’s ~$3.5 billion historical median incremental revenue per prior year incremental square foot leads to our sensitivity below showing how upcoming data center capacity growth could translate into 20%+ AWS revenue growth in ’26.”

Morgan Stanley AWS revenue growth estimates

However, this analysis also comes with a large caveat attached:

“We acknowledge there are sources of volatility and (ongoing) constraints around incremental revenue per incremental square feet analyses — component supply constraints like chips, racks, cables, boards, power, and demand differences like client readiness and products to drive adoption, product pricing, and yield per foot, etc. — but we think this framework is helpful in showcasing how AWS is investing to match demand and drive accelerating growth in the early innings of the GenAI era.”

Nowak has an “overweight” rating and $300 price target on Amazon.

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Tasha Matsumoto
19h
Stocks rise on low volume day, erasing November losses

All sectors posted gains today except for healthcare.

Michael Jordan #23, Shooting Guard and Small Forward for the Chicago Bulls wearing a warm up jacket looks on during player introductions before the NBA Midwest Division basketball game against the Denver Nuggets
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Luke Kawa

GameStop rallies as Michael Burry takes a trip down memory lane

Shares of GameStop are up more than 3% in premarket trading on Friday.

Thanksgiving is a time for catching up with family and reminiscing about the good times. To that end, early Thursday morning (just after midnight), hedge fund manager turned Substacker Michael Burry published tweets that purportedly offer a look into the lore of his time spent betting on the success of the video game and collectibles retailer ahead of its ascendance to meme stock status.

In one, he shared screenshots of Scion Asset Management’s letter to GameStop’s board of directors, as well as emails appearing to be from Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, the retail trader whose GameStop thesis inspired legions to jump onboard, and Ryan Cohen, who would go on to become GameStop’s chairman, president, and CEO.

Shares have bounced back in earnest since the stock regained support of the $20 level at the start of this week.

Burry’s Scion announced a bullish GameStop position in GameStop in 2019, and held this through at least the third quarter of 2020.

At the peak of its meme stock frenzy in January 2021, however, he called the price action “unnatural, insane, and dangerous” in a since-deleted tweet, and said that he was no longer long or short the company.

Do I think this is the reason why shares of GameStop are flying on Friday morning?

Eh, in most circumstances I’d say this is pretty thin gruel. But this is a stock that has, in the past, traded off of nostalgia, its exposure to things that are cool or entertaining, and leaders with Big Main Character Energy.

Your mileage may vary, but to me Burry’s trip down memory lane hits a few of these notes. The company is inside the top 20 most mentioned tickers on SwaggyStocks over the past 12 hours as of 8:20 a.m. ET, has seen the greatest pickup in mentions on Stocktwits compared to the prior session (per a Bloomberg Automation report), and Burry’s post is being very positively received on the r/Superstonk subreddit dedicated to discussions of GameStop.

That being said, all this is not something that can reasonably been said to have changed the outlook of GameStop’s estimated future discounted cash flows.

Of course, it’s also Black Friday, and we’ve seen promotional events be a boon for the video game and collectibles retailer this year:

markets
Claire Yubin Oh

Outages hit CME’s exchange, affecting FX markets and futures on stocks and Treasurys

After yesterday’s holiday, Black Friday was off to an unusual start after an outage at CME, the world’s biggest exchange operator, hit a number of major markets, halting trading in FX markets as well as affecting futures contracts on stocks, Treasurys, and commodities.

CME Group cited a “cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers” in a short statement on its website, which Reuters reported was posted at 2:40 a.m. GMT, and that it was working to “resolve issues in the near term.”

In an update to the banner on its site, CME says that its BrokerTec US Actives and BrokerTec EU are now open, but that its other markets are currently halted.

While CyrusOne has yet to make a statement about the glitch, CME’s electronic trading platform has been run through CyrusOne’s data center in Aurora, Illinois, after the derivatives exchange sold the campus to the operator in 2016. CyrusOne and the city of Aurora recently reached an agreement to address noise complaints over its chillers, per the Chicago Tribune.

A record daily average of 26.3 million contracts traded through CME in October, with CME one of the biggest sources of liquidity for contracts on a number of core markets, including 10Y Treasurys as well as futures on major US indexes such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100.

Tasha Matsumoto
11/26/25
Stocks rise for the fourth consecutive session as tech rally leads gains

While tech was the best-performing sector ETF, the rally was broad-based, with all sector ETFs rising higher except for healthcare.

This picture shows a turkey standing next to cows in a field in Douville-en-Auge, northwestern France, on December 29, 2018.
markets
Luke Kawa

Beyond Meat jumps amid spike in call activity

Shares of Beyond Meat are soaring on Wednesday amid heavy call activity and little news.

Over 200,000 call options have changed hands as of 11 a.m. ET, already above the 20-day average of 194,098 for a full session. Its put/call ratio of close to 0.1 is the lowest in months.

The three most traded options contracts are calls that expire this Friday with strike prices of $1 and $1.50, as well as calls that expire next Friday with a strike price of $1.

Those remain out-of-the-money call options: after its meme moment drove shares to $7.69 on October 22, the stock has given all that back and then some as the air came out of many speculative pockets of the market.

Because of how much call demand spiked during the boom times, today’s pickup registers as more of a blip on the chart:

Beyond Meat’s recent refinancing efforts, which were cited as a supposed fundamental catalyst for the explosion of retail interest, started when the stock was trading at $2.85.

Based on today’s activity, the dust hasn’t fully settled on this story, but so far: management has eliminated about $800 million in debt and all it got in exchange so far is a near 70% decline in its stock price and a longer runway to make processed peas into faux meat.

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