Nvidia briefly spikes after Jensen Huang sees at least $1 trillion in AI chip sales through 2027

• A Pakistani-owned tanker passed through the strait this weekend while broadcasting its signal, per Reuters, “indicating ‌that some countries are able to negotiate safe passage for their vessels despite the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.”

• US President Donald Trump said that some “fairly local” countries would soon be helping ships traverse the strait (while having added that other countries are “not enthusiastic” about the prospect of participating).

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF and Invesco QQQ Trust are both up over 1% amid oil’s retreat.

That being said, the news flow is far from universally positive.

Reuters reports that the UAE’s crude output has been cut in half since the Mideast conflict started; Bloomberg says Kuwait’s production has suffered a similar decline.

But Huang’s pronouncements have, at times, been pretty dang helpful for share prices of some companies in the orbit of the AI gods. Perhaps foremost among them are the memory stocks that have blasted toward the top of the S&P 500 in terms of price performance in recent years.

Case in point: the nearly 30% gain that Sandisk posted on January 6, the day after Huang’s keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in which he spotlighted memory as a key bottleneck constraining the AI build-out. (Fellow memory plays Western Digital, Seagate Technology Holdings, and Micron also posted double-digit gains that day.)

Memory stocks have been the highest-profile outlet for bullish AI industry impulses this year, and notable comments from Huang could put the wind back in their sails after they had slowed in recent weeks.

Of course, there are also other things happening in the sector, such as Micron’s announcement Sunday that it completed an acquisition of a new manufacturing site in Taiwan.

Either way, memory stocks are pushing higher after having exhaled a bit lately.

Shortly before 9 a.m. ET, bitcoin was trading around $74,000, near its highest levels since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28 that marked the start of open hostilities.

Bitcoin is up roughly 25% since it slipped below $60,000 in intraday trading on February 6. Crypto watchers are spotlighting the neighborhood of roughly $77,800 — near the 50-day moving average — as the next price point to watch to see whether the recovery could stick.