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Workday Headquarters Building
Workday’s headquarters building in Pleasanton, California

Workday rallies on positive comments from new investor Elliott, buyback boost, and analyst upgrade

The HR tech giant is winning Wall Street’s support as the company refreshes its growth playbook.

Nia Warfield

Workday shares jumped 8% Wednesday morning, leading S&P 500 gainers, as a slew of positive news pumped up the stock.

Activist investor Elliott Management revealed a $2 billion stake in the HR software giant, making it one of Workday’s largest shareholders. The firm praised the company’s leadership and strategy as signs of “substantial long-term value creation” for investors.

Adding to the momentum, Workday’s board authorized another $4 billion in share repurchases, bringing its total buyback plan to $5 billion through fiscal 2027. The company still has about $1.2 billion left from previous authorizations. Meanwhile, Piper Sandler bumped Workday up to “neutral” from “underweight” and lifted its price target to $235 from $220.

The firm cited the recent Workday Rising conference, saying the company has been leaning hard into AI by snapping up three startups in just the past month (Sana, Paradox, and Flowise). Workday also rolled out a new data cloud that plugs directly into Databricks, Snowflake, and Salesforce, giving it more reach in enterprise data.

Despite todays lift, Workday shares are still down about 6% year to date.

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Trump’s “impossible trinity” on AI and energy

Everyone loves a good trilemma.

In economics, the most famous of the genre was developed by Fleming and Mundell, which posits that you can only successfully achieve two of the following three objectives: the free flow of capital, a fixed exchange rate, and independent sovereign monetary policy.

George Pollack, senior US policy analyst at Signum Global Advisors, proposed a trilemma of his own to describe the Trump administration’s competing policy aims as a red-hot AI boom devours power and leaves households miffed by rising electricity bills.

He wrote:

“This note flags what we believe to be a simple reality whose salience will continue growing in US politics in coming months: the Trump administration, in its remaining three years will face a trilemma as the nation waits for its energy bet to play out — proving able to achieve two, but not all three, of the following objectives:

-Fulfill AI’s energy-appetite.
-Keep repressing renewable sources of energy.
-Appease American electricity consumers.”

Trump AI trilemma

As for evidence that the Trump administration is taking a fossil fuels-first approach while stunting renewables, Pollack pointed to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which shrinks access to tax credits for green energy, as well as the end to the federal pause on liquefied natural gas export permits. However, it would be “inaccurate and unfair” to blame President Trump’s policies for surging electricity prices in recent months, he added.

While the government has pursued the expansion of nuclear power as a way to solve this trilemma, the long lead times involved are incongruent with a short-term fix.

Palantir reports Q3 earnings results

Palantir climbs toward a fresh record high ahead of earnings report

Traders and Wall Street are waiting to see whether Palantir’s latest numbers after market close today will continue to beat expectations.

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