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Luke Kawa

Vistra and Oklo soar on nuclear energy deals with Meta to support data center boom

AI utility darling Vistra and zero-revenues nuclear company Oklo are flying higher on Friday after both companies announced deals with Meta.

Shares of both companies are up double digits as of 7:30 a.m. ET.

The social media giant signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Vistra, which will see it buy the output of three nuclear plants “to support Meta’s operations in the region.” Per the press release, more than 15% of the contracted capacity from this deal will constitute a new addition to the PJM region, home to the nation’s largest power grid and ground zero for rising electricity costs. The pact is reminiscent of Meta’s deal with Constellation Energy in June, another 20-year PPA of what’s generated from a nuclear plant in Illinois.

Meta’s agreement with Oklo “provides a mechanism for Meta to prepay for power and provide funding to advance project certainty for Oklo’s Aurora powerhouse development,” with the nuke company aiming for the first phase to be active as soon as 2030, also “to support Meta’s data centers in the region.”

The Mark Zuckerberg-led firm also struck a deal with privately held firm TerraPower to develop up to eight reactors and storage system plants in the US, the first of which is hoped to be delivered as soon as 2032.

“We believe this news is incrementally positive for the entire nuclear energy industry, including OKLO, as it reaffirms the commitment from hyperscalers to start leveraging new energy sources to fuel the AI Revolution with power being the biggest headwind to the industry,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote.

The Trump administration has touted nuclear energy as a way to solve its competing priorities in the development of artificial intelligence. George Pollack, senior US policy analyst at Signum Global Advisors, has argued that US leadership can realize only two of these three objectives: preside over an AI boom, boost fossil fuel production at the expense of renewables, and avoid household angst over high energy prices. However, the long lead times involved with developing and deploying nuclear power, as two of agreements show, are seemingly incompatible with short-term fixes. On the other hand, the ambitious, multiyear data center build-out plans envisaged by hyperscalers help explain why they’re willing to wait and plan ahead to lock down energy supply.

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Luke Kawa

BlackBerry is on one of its hottest rallies of all time

History suggests that BlackBerry does extremely well when 1) it’s considered to be pioneering a transformative technology, or 2) there’s widespread retail enthusiasm for stocks.

If you squint (or dream), you could argue that both are going on right now.

Shares of the once-upon-a-time smartphone giant are up more than 160% over the past three months. The only times the shares have had a hotter run of form than this are at the tail end of the dot-com bubble, and in early 2021 when was it part of the meme stock craze headlined by GameStop.

Let’s start with the easy part first — here’s Scott Rubner, head of equity and equity derivatives strategy at Citadel, on retail’s significant footprint in the shares’ rally:

“Retail traders are the new price setters in the market. May volumes across our retail cash equities and options platforms are currently tracking at record levels. Daily volumes on our cash platform are setting new highs and are on pace to finish nearly ~10% above the previous record established during the January 2021 meme-stock era.”

And then there’s the harder part, part of the story that the traders bidding up BlackBerry now are dreaming about: the QNX division, which offers software that the company is positioning as an operating system for robots.

QNX’s software has early uptake in the field of autonomous driving, with BlackBerry eyeing a much more widespread role: in April, it announced a partnership to deploy this technology on Nvidia’s robotics platform. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, for his part, has long been calling for agentic AI adoption to be followed by physical AI (i.e., robots).

In a QNX press release unveiling a report this week, the company argued that software, not hardware, is the real problem in terms of making sure robotics works.

I supposed it would be poetic, in a way, if the company at the leading edge of the smartphone revolution also plays a big role in the proliferation of robotics.

markets
Luke Kawa

Micron and Sandisk rally on new Street-high price targets from Susquehanna

Micron and Sandisk both hit fresh all-time highs in early trading after Susquehanna bestowed new Wall Street-high price targets on the two memory stocks.

Analyst Mehdi Hosseini upped his view on the former to $1,750 from $600, and to $3,250 from $2,000 for the latter.

“Supply is now expected to remain tight through 2027, sustaining elevated margins and thus warranting valuation re-rating,” he wrote, per Bloomberg.

It’s the fifth time in the past year that the average price target on Micron has gone up by more than 10% in a week. UBS’s Tim Arcuri more than tripled his price target on Micron earlier this week, and has already lost the title of “most bullish.”

But even as analysts are tripping over themselves to raise their price targets on these stocks, the ferocity of the rally in Micron has outpaced their best efforts.

The high-bandwidth memory specialist traded at a record premium to the consensus Wall Street price target this week, based on data going back to 2008.

markets
Helena Cheng

Okta soars on Q1 earnings beat, raised outlook driven by AI security demand

Okta shares are surging in early trading Friday after the identity security provider posted Q1 fiscal 2027 financial results that exceeded Wall Street estimates. The strong results are fueled by accelerating corporate demand for cybersecurity software, as well as the deployment of autonomous AI systems.

Key numbers:

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $0.91 compared to analysts’ estimate of $0.85.

  • Revenue of $765 million compared to an estimate of $752.7 million.

The company generated subscription revenue of $750 million, up 11% year over year. Okta also has $271 million in free cash flow, up from $238 million in the prior year’s quarter.

While standard cybersecurity software protects human workers, the latest catalyst sparking Okta’s strong corporate performance is the rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents that can access sensitive corporate databases and interact with privileged executive accounts.

“AI agents are rapidly becoming a new workforce inside every organization, creating a wave of identities that must be secured and governed alongside human users,” said Todd McKinnon, CEO and cofounder of Okta. “We’re expanding our opportunity as the world’s leading independent and neutral identity provider and helping customers make identity the unified control plane for their secure agentic enterprise.”

Okta raised its fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to between $3.185 billion and $3.205 billion, roughly in line with estimates of $3.18 billion. The company formally dropped its long-term projected non-GAAP tax rate from 26% down to 21%. This adjustment is a direct byproduct of the federal corporate tax frameworks under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Shares of Okta have risen around 9% since the beginning of this year.

markets
Helena Cheng

HPE, SMCI surge after Dell’s Q1 beat on strong AI server demand

HP Enterprise and Super Micro Computer shares are surging in premarket trading, getting a big boost from rival Dell’s strong Q1 results.

Dell’s $16.1 billion in AI-optimized server sales for the quarter alone proved that enterprise data center demand is accelerating faster than Wall Street had anticipated. The company posted revenue of $43.8 billion, exceeding Street estimates of $35.5 billion. Management now sees full-year sales of about $167 billion, well above the $142 billion expected by analysts.

The read-through is particularly relevant for Super Micro, one of the largest suppliers of Nvidia-powered AI server systems, and HPE, which has been expanding its AI infrastructure and liquid-cooling offerings through its partnership with Nvidia.

The moves suggest investors view AI infrastructure as a broad spending cycle that benefits server makers across the entire ecosystem.

markets
Claire Yubin Oh

AST SpaceMobile plummets after Blue Origin rocket explosion

Shares of AST SpaceMobile plunged as much as 15% before the bell on Friday after a Blue Origin rocket exploded yesterday evening on the launchpad.

The New Glenn rocket blew up in what the Jeff Bezos-backed company described on X as “an anomaly” during a hotfire test at the launchpad, only days before it’s due to launch satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper next week. Bezos added via X that “it’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it.” Videos of the explosion circulating on social media show an enormous fireball.

Blue Origins' New Glenn rocket just exploded on the pad.
byu/Ph6222 inaviation

Though AST SpaceMobile’s satellites are not directly affected by the latest explosion, the company partnered with Blue Origin in November 2024 to use its New Glenn rocket to deliver AST’s next-generation Block 2 Bluebird satellites to low-Earth orbit. Citing multiple unidentified employees, the Financial Times reported that an initial assessment of the site showed severe damage to Blue Origin’s equipment, including its only launchpad.

The explosion is a stumbling block for AST’s goals to place at least 45 satellites in orbit by the end of the year. The journey to reach that goal already hit a pretty major speed bump in April, after Blue Origin reported that its New Glenn vehicle put AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite at an altitude too low to maintain operations.

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