🔮 Huang predicts next trillion-dollar company

Marvell Technology surged a breathtaking 32% yesterday after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the chipmaker, which his company has a stake in, ⁠the next “trillion-dollar company.”

• Huang made the comments at the Computex ​expo in Taipei on ‌Tuesday. It’s not the first vote of confidence for Marvell from the world’s most valuable company: Nvidia announced a strategic partnership with Marvell in March, saying that it has invested $2 billion in the company.

• Marvell’s market capitalization as of Monday’s close was around $192 billion, meaning that Huang’s prediction hinged on a more than 420% rally. It made good headway on that on Tuesday, finishing with a roughly $254 billion market cap. 

• Huang said computing is becoming increasingly disaggregated and distributed, creating a need for advanced connectivity, which is what Marvell specializes in.

• “That’s the reason why Marvell is so essential,” he said, standing onstage next to Marvell CEO Matt Murphy. “That’s why you’re going to be the next trillion-dollar company.”

The stock is up more than 244% since the start of the year.

The Takeaway

Huang also projected that demand for optics will continue to grow over the next 5 to 10 years. Optics companies such as Lumentum, Coherent, and Applied Optoelectronic rose Tuesday. These companies make optical components that use light, rather than traditional copper interconnects, to move data within and between servers in data centers, a technology increasingly seen as critical for scaling artificial intelligence capacity. 

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Not so long back, Uber was the go-to example of a capital-hungry business, raising about $8 billion and change when it went public in 2019. By comparison, Alphabet, already flush with cash, is raising 10x that amount in an equity round announced Monday evening.

• While Alphabet stock is down, as investors anticipate some dilution, many of those with starring roles in the AI trade ripped Tuesday on the news.

• Suppliers with close ties to Alphabet, most notably Broadcom, were particularly bid up, with the chip giant up nearly 5% on Tuesday, as investors presumably see upside to the pair’s long-term deal that runs through 2031 and sees Broadcom supply chips to Alphabet.

• To raise this funding, Alphabet has had to exercise a corporate muscle that it hasn’t used in a long time — the last time the company raised substantial primary equity was back in 2005.

• Eschewing the debt markets is an interesting decision. Alphabet has already tapped the credit markets a bunch of times in the last year, and the company’s long-term debt has spiked to a little over $90 billion. 

But before you envisage Alphabet drowning in borrowings, that’s not even enough to put the company into a net debt position overall, owing to its enormous cash balance.

So we have a company in a net cash position deciding to dilute shareholders rather than raise debt. Why is that? 

The Takeaway

A couple possible reasons come to mind. Perhaps Google execs think the stock has run a little far and want to cash in on that high share price. Or maybe behind the curtain, preliminary conversations about raising more debt suggested that the interest rates for something this big might have been suboptimal from a pure corporate finance cost-of-capital perspective, or potentially spooky for investors (see: Oracle), or damaging to its credit rating.

Still, Occam’s razor might just suggest that Google execs want to suck up some of the equity funding available. There are a few major IPOs coming down the pike in the AI space, most notably OpenAI and Anthropic, and hoovering up some of the equity funding in the room just before those go live feels like a pretty solid strategy.

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June isn’t busting out, but going bust for bitcoin, it seems. The largest cryptocurrency by market cap nearly dropped below $67,000 on Tuesday, a level it hasn’t seen since the first days of April. Is everyone freaking out because the biggest corporate bitcoin bull, Strategy, sold off a small slice of its stash, or is that “immaterial”?

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• 🏀 NBA: Tonight is the first game of the NBA Finals, and markets* think the New York Knicks have just a 37% chance of pulling off a win on the road. As a New York City-based newsletter with a deeply held and sincere belief in the power of markets to accurately price future performance, we’re pretty torn up about the whole thing.

• 🏛️ Administration: Bill Pulte has been named acting director of national intelligence after serving in the Trump administration as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chair of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. While he’ll continue to run FHFA for the time being, skepticism from the Senate means that markets appear to think the more high-profile role might not work out. The probability Pulte leaves the Trump administration in 2026 spiked from 20% to 50% on the announcement. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

• Premarket earnings: Macy’s 

• Postmarket earnings: Broadcom, CrowdStrike, Five Below, and ChargePoint Holdings