Markets
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Luke Kawa

OpenAI’s cash burn suggests selling Nvidia because of reported Broadcom chip orders may not make much sense

When Broadcom announced that it booked $10 billion in new orders from a customer reported to be OpenAI, shares of its major AI chip rivals tanked.

The judgment of the invisible hand was that this was nearly a zero-sum outcome: $130 billion of market cap erased from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, and a $135 billion increase in Broadcom’s market value.

But looking at this from the perspective of near-term cash flows, the market’s view seems off.

The Information is reporting that OpenAI now expects to burn through $115 billion by the end of 2029 (or more than 11 seasons’ worth of NFL broadcasting rights).

Let’s zoom in on this tidbit from The Information:

“But the biggest change emerging from OpenAI’s latest projections was to its cash flows. The company projected it will burn more than $8 billion this year, or roughly $1.5 billion higher than its prior projection from earlier this year. Cash burn will more than double to more than $17 billion next year — $10 billion higher than what the company earlier projected.”

That $10 billion fits all too neatly with the $10 billion in orders from a major new customer that Broadcom CEO Hock Tan referenced in the chip designer’s earnings call.

(Cheers to @lokoyacap for flagging this on X.)

Assuming the reporting around OpenAI and Broadcom is accurate, these orders for ASICs don’t look to be displacing what the ChatGPT creator was going to spend on Nvidia’s GPUs, but are just in addition to it! The money’s not coming out of Jensen Huang’s pockets; it’s coming out of OpenAI’s coffers. Its spending budget is just getting bigger.

Perhaps if you squint, there’s a world where OpenAI may prefer to have an additional $10 billion in Nvidia GPUs rather than ASICs, and I am still of the belief that hyperscalers diversifying their chip sources due to constrained top-end supplies isn’t a good sign for the company selling the most in-demand product.

But it’s quite intriguing, and says something about the depth of the pockets that fuel the AI boom, that OpenAI’s reported new relationship with Broadcom has seemingly no direct negative financial impact on Nvidia in the near term.

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Tasha Matsumoto
4h
Tech drags down stocks; gold and silver plummet

Gold and silver sank amid Trump’s plans to nominate reputed inflation hawk Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair.

Public sculptures along the Clear Creek Trail in downtown Golden, Colorado.
Ben Walsh, Luke Kawa

Gold and silver plunge, suffering their worst losses since the 1980s

Gold and silver suffered their worst losses in decades on Friday, with the iShares Silver Trust falling more than 30% at one point during afternoon trading before recovering slightly.

After recently crossing $5,000 per ounce for the first time, gold’s dip was relatively muted compared to silver’s rout, but nevertheless eye-watering for a traditional safe haven asset. At one point, gold’s intraday dip exceeded 10%, its worst intraday drop since the 1980s and surpassing its declines seen during the 2008 financial crisis, per Bloomberg.

Silver’s drop was its worst in percentage terms since 1980.

Gold, and particularly silver, have been pushed higher recently by a storm of retail trader enthusiasm for the metals, as well as more traditional drivers of precious metals such as geopolitical risks and concerns over a fall in the dollar’s value due to trade wars and possibly waning central bank independence.

Leveraged ETFs that hold gold and silver futures have become increasingly popular trading vehicles amid the parabolic moves in precious metals prices, and likely contributed to the magnitude of the unwind today.

Case in point: look at silver futures for delivery in March. That’s the dominant contract held by the ProShares Ultra Silver ETF, which offers exposure to 2x the daily move in the shiny metal. Volumes exploded (and the contract rebounded modestly) right around 1:25 p.m. ET, which is when silver futures settled and around the time the ETF performed its daily rebalancing (which in this case, involved massive selling).

Max Knoblauch

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

Shares of major gaming companies are plunging on Friday as investors get a deeper look at the capabilities of Google’s new generative-AI prototype, Project Genie.

The tool allows users to “create and explore infinitely diverse worlds” with a text or image prompt. Users have already exposed its ability to realistically recreate knockoffs of copyrighted games from Nintendo and other gaming companies.

As users experiment with recreations of game worlds like Take-Two’s “Grand Theft Auto 6,” shares of major gaming companies are sinking. Unity Software, the maker of the popular Unity game engine, is down over 25%, while gaming platform Roblox is down about 9%.

Collision 2019 - Day One

D-Wave Quantum CEO on what’s next after the most eventful month in the company’s history

“If 2025 was the international year of quantum, 2026 is the international year of D-Wave Quantum,” said CEO Dr. Alan Baratz.

Luke Kawa10h
markets
Matt Phillips

SoFi bests Wall Street’s Q4 expectations, shares rise

SoFi Technologies reported better-than-expected Q4 sales and earnings-per-share numbers Friday before market open, sending the shares higher in the premarket. 

The online lender reported: 

  • Adjusted Q4 earnings per share of $0.13 vs. the $0.12 consensus estimate collected by FactSet.

  • Adjusted revenue of $1.01 billion in Q4 vs. the Wall Street forecast for $977.4 million.

  • Q1 2026 adjusted net revenue guidance of approximately $1.04 billion vs. the $1.04 billion consensus expectation, according to FactSet.

SoFi shares rallied roughly 70% last year, as the company’s growing menu of financial products — including trading, wealth management, mortgages, credit cards, and cryptocurrency trading — showed signs of gaining traction beyond its traditional base of student borrowers. But the stock has stumbled in early 2026, falling nearly 7% in January through Thursday’s close, though most of that slump seems to have been reversed this morning.

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