Markets
Nia Warfield, Luke Kawa

Stocks slip ahead of Fed decision and megacap tech earnings

Stocks opened at their highs of the day and spent the rest of the session in a slow grind lower, finishing near their lows. Markets briefly perked up when China said it had come to an agreement with the US to continue their trade truce, before the gentle slide lower resumed.

The S&P 500 ended down 0.3%, the Nasdaq 100 gave back 0.2%, and the Russell 2000 underperformed with a 0.6% decline.

Performance among S&P 500 sector ETFs was mixed, with defensive groups like real estate and utilities leading the way higher while industrials fared the worst.

Gains were led by Corning, which jumped 12% after the glassmaker for smartphones and fiber-optic cables for AI data centers posted record second-quarter sales. Declines were led in part by Carrier and UPS, which fell 10%, with the shipping giant posting mixed Q2 results and warning of ongoing pressure in the US. Meanwhile…

Sarepta Therapeutics rose 14% after the Food and Drug Administration said it was clearing the way for the drugmaker to resume shipments of its gene therapy drug Elevidys to some patients.

SoFi Technologies shares jumped more than 6% after the personal finance company soared past Q2 expectations and hiked full-year guidance for 2025 revenue and earnings.

JetBlue shares jumped 7% after the airline posted a narrower-than-expected loss for Q2 and received approval for its “Blue Sky” alliance with United.

Stellantis shares dipped 1% after the Jeep maker said it would face a full-year tariff hit of about $1.7 billion.

UnitedHealth slumped 7% after it reported second-quarter earnings that missed expectations along with disappointing full-year guidance.

Uber shares dropped nearly 4% after Alphabet’s Waymo announced on Monday evening that it will launch its robotaxi service in Dallas in a partnership with rental car giant Avis. 

Spotify shares tumbled 11.5% after the audio streamer swung to a loss for the second quarter and gave a lighter-than-expected Q3 outlook.

Shares of PayPal fell almost 9% even after the payments company reported better-than-expected Q2 results and hiked its outlook for the year.

Tilray sank 17% after the cannabis company reported mixed Q2 earnings, including fewer sales than expected of alcoholic beverages like its Montauk beers.

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Toby Bochan, Luke Kawa
12/12/25
Markets end the week in the red as Broadcom and Oracle concerns drag the entire AI trade down

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 were all negative on Friday.

The lunchbox
markets
Matt Phillips

Data center trade deep in the red

The data center trade is seeing its steepest sell-off since the market rout that was ignited by President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden tariff announcement back in April.

Goldman Sachs’ themed basket of AI data center shares was down more than 6% at around 12 p.m. ET, putting it on track for its worst day since the tariff announcement.

Losses hammered seemingly every form of input needed for the sprawling concrete server warehouses at the heart of the investment boom.

Hardware makers including data storage companies like Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings, as well as DRAM maker Micron — some of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year — were taking a licking, as were networking stocks Cisco and Arista Networks and data center builders such as Vertiv Holdings and electrical and mechanical contractor Emcor.

Optimism for all things AI has seemed to evaporate throughout the week, as the stock market greeted lackluster quarterly numbers from Oracle and Broadcom with jittery sell-offs and concern about growing debts that could crater cash flows.

Those worries seem to be spreading to ancillary beneficiaries of the AI boom on Friday, gouging a chunk out of charts that retail dip buyers have not — at least so far — stepped in to buy as we head into the weekend.

markets
Luke Kawa

Oracle denies Bloomberg report that it’s delaying some data centers for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027

Getting a multi-hundred-billion-dollar backlog for cloud computing revenues from data center projects is easy. Building them is hard.

Oracle extended declines to as much as -6.5% on the day on the heels of a Bloomberg report that the cloud giant has pushed back the completion dates for some of the data centers it’s building for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027, citing people familiar with the work. Oracle denied this report, telling Reuters that there have been no delays to any sites required to meet its contractual commitments and that all milestones remain on track.

Shares had fully pared their report-induced drop ahead of Oracle’s reply, but remain in the red for the day.

Bloomberg said the reported postponement was attributed to labor and material shortages.

Oracle has been spending more on capex than Wall Street had anticipated, leading to higher-than-expected cash burn. Management boosted its full-year capital spending plans by $15 billion after reporting Q2 results earlier this week.

Oracle’s cloud infrastructure sales came in short of estimates in its fiscal 2026 Q2, a signal that markets already had reason to doubt its ability to quickly turn its humungous RPO (that is, remaining purchase obligations) into revenues.

Traders also seem to be of the mind that potential delays to data center completions are going to limit sales for what goes into them.

Some of the bigger losers since the Bloomberg headline hit the wires include:

markets
Luke Kawa

Broadcom’s post-earnings tumble is weighing on Google’s entire AI ecosystem

Broadcom’s post-earnings plunge is prompting a sharp pullback in Google-linked AI stocks, which had been on fire thanks to the warm reception to Gemini 3.

The stocks getting hit hard:

A basket of these Google-linked AI stocks compiled by Morgan Stanley is suffering one of its worst losses of the year. This brisk retreat also follows the release of GPT-5.2 by OpenAI.

markets
Matt Phillips

Citi initiates coverage of Planet Labs with “buy” rating

Planet Labs was up after aerospace and defense analysts at Citi initiated coverage with a “buy/high risk” rating and $19 price target.

The stock is up more than 40% this week, after a strong earnings result that spotlighted the company’s growing opportunity in linking its core business of capturing daily images of the planet with AI technologies.

Citi analysts noted the potential for a positive flywheel effect for Planet Labs as it deepens its focus on integrating AI into its offerings:

“AI is accelerating the conversion of pixels to decisions, where Planet’s daily scan and deep archive offer a uniquely large training corpus and broad-area foundation for automation. AI-enabled solutions (MDA/GMS/AMS) are gaining traction with customers such as NATO and the U.S. DoW, validating the approach of integrating AI into broad-area monitoring products... These AI moves create a compounding advantage: more coverage generates more training data, which improves models, which in turn increases product utility and addressable demand.”

The stock has also caught the attention of some of the retail trading crowd, with call options activity spiking on Thursday as traders rode the market reaction to the results.

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