Shares of Surf Air Mobility, a small-cap provider of regional on-demand charter flight services, soared for the second straight day, with trading briefly paused in early trading due to volatility.
The stock jumped 88% during Tuesday’s session, after it was disclosed that retail trader favorite Palantir had acquired a 20% stake in the company.
Instacart dropped more than 7% in pre-market trading on Thursday following an exclusive Reuters report that the FTC has launched a probe into the grocery-delivery company's AI-driven pricing tool. News of the probe follows a study published last week finding that Instacart’s prices for identical grocery lists at the same stores varied across users, with some grocery prices differing by as much as 23% per item from one customer to the next.
Per Reuters, the FTC has sent Instacart a civil investigative demand, seeking information about Eversight, a pricing tool which Instacart acquired in 2022 for $59 million. The platform allows retailers to test different price levels and promotions across products and categories, which Instacart says could drive 1-3% revenue growth and an incremental margin lift of 2-5%, according to its website.
In response to last week's report, Instacart said its pricing practices has been "mischaracterized," telling TechCrunch that retailers control prices on its platform and that the tests are "completely randomized," not dynamic or based on individual user data.
In a statement reported by Reuters, the FTC said it "has a longstanding policy of not commenting on any potential or ongoing investigations," but added that it is "disturbed by what we have read in the press about Instacart’s alleged pricing practices."
The probe comes as Instacart doubles down on AI to boost its profitability in the low-margin online grocery space, as growth slows and competition from Amazon intensifies.
Go deeper: The economics of Instacart’s grocery delivery are pretty tight — AI might help, or hurt
Per Reuters, the FTC has sent Instacart a civil investigative demand, seeking information about Eversight, a pricing tool which Instacart acquired in 2022 for $59 million. The platform allows retailers to test different price levels and promotions across products and categories, which Instacart says could drive 1-3% revenue growth and an incremental margin lift of 2-5%, according to its website.
In response to last week's report, Instacart said its pricing practices has been "mischaracterized," telling TechCrunch that retailers control prices on its platform and that the tests are "completely randomized," not dynamic or based on individual user data.
In a statement reported by Reuters, the FTC said it "has a longstanding policy of not commenting on any potential or ongoing investigations," but added that it is "disturbed by what we have read in the press about Instacart’s alleged pricing practices."
The probe comes as Instacart doubles down on AI to boost its profitability in the low-margin online grocery space, as growth slows and competition from Amazon intensifies.
Go deeper: The economics of Instacart’s grocery delivery are pretty tight — AI might help, or hurt
Micron has completely erased Wednesday’s big losses, rising 9.5% in premarket trading as of 4:20 a.m. ET, after the memory chip specialist yesterday posted stellar results for its fiscal Q1 2026 and a much better outlook for the current quarter than Wall Street anticipated.
For Q1, the company reported:
Revenues: $13.64 billion (estimate: $12.95 billion)
Adjusted earnings per share: $4.78 (estimate: $3.95)
And the Street’s consensus was well ahead of even the upper ranges of the guidance provided by management for the quarter for sales of $12.5 billion (plus or minus $300 million) and $3.75 (plus or minus $0.15).
For Q2, management provided an outlook for adjusted revenues of $18.3 billion to $19.1 billion, and adjusted EPS of $8.22 to $8.62. Wall Street had penciled in revenues of $14.38 billion with adjusted EPS of $4.71.
Even the bottom end of the ranges management provided is well above the top analyst’s estimate for the quarter.
These results may help spark a revival in semi stocks, which have gotten trounced in recent sessions. Hard disk drive sellers Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital are also rising in after-hours trading, as is flash memory seller Sandisk.
Micron has been one of the worst performers in the S&P 500 since last Thursday’s record close, down double digits from then until Wednesday close as investors broadly dumped AI names. Prior to that, shares had been on fire amid a bevy of Wall Street price target hikes and surging memory chip prices as demand runs ahead of supply. The AI boom has fueled a spike of immense appetite not only for GPUs and custom chips but also memory chips as well, as data centers also need a boatload of these to store information and feed it to those processors. Micron and its major competitors, SK Hynix and Samsung, have already sold out production for their most advanced high-bandwidth memory offerings for calendar year 2026.
Micron recently announced that it would be exiting its consumer chip business to focus on serving its AI customers.
The subsidies are still likely to end before the deadline.
