Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and US President Donald Trump speak about investing in America (Jim Watson/Getty Images)

Micron and Trump announce $200 billion investment touted by Huang, Nadella, and Cook… and the market doesn’t care

If you look a little more closely at the press release, you’ll notice why.

6/12/25 11:19AM

It’s a doozy of a press release.

Chipmaker Micron and the Trump administration announced this morning that Micron plans to invest a whopping $200 billion — a huge number, to be sure — into chip manufacturing and research and development. The press release ends with a murderer’s row of CEO quotes from tech behemoths: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Michael Dell, and other tech leaders cheer the investment on.

Despite all the biggest names in tech lauding “Micron’s investment in advanced memory manufacturing,” the market didn’t care. Shares of Micron were flat at last check. That’s because the market is (usually) smarter than even the best PR machine, and when you look past the big numbers, the glitz, and the Big Tech all-star team in the announcement, you’ll notice some key phrasing in there (emphasis ours):

“As part of today’s announcement, Micron plans to invest an additional $30 billion beyond prior plans which includes building a second leading-edge memory fab in Boise, Idaho; expanding and modernizing its existing manufacturing facility in Manassas, Virginia; and bringing advanced packaging capabilities to the U.S. to enable long-term growth in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which is essential to the AI market. Additionally, Micron is announcing a planned $50 billion domestic R&D investment, reaffirming its long-term position as the global memory technology leader. As previously announced, Micron’s investment includes its ongoing plans for a megafab in New York.”

If you take the press release at its word, seemingly only $30 billion of the investment is actually new. The business world, and especially politicians, love to repurpose existing plans to make them seem shiny and new, but digging in, it’s more of a $30 billion news item, not a $200 billion surprise.

And sometimes even the new things may not wind up happening.

Rani Molla

11h

Meta posts an earnings and revenue beat — and a huge capex bill

The social media giant reported earnings after the bell Wednesday.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg visits U.S. Capitol for Senate meetings

Rani Molla, Nate Becker

11h

Alphabet jumps as Q1 earnings and revenue blow past expectations

The search giant also boosted its capex forecast for the year and said it expects 2027 capex to be “significantly” higher than 2026.

Rani Molla15h

SpaceX filings reportedly show no one can fire Elon Musk except Elon Musk

The only thing stopping Elon Musk from being chairman and CEO of SpaceX is Elon Musk, according to Reuters, which viewed an excerpt of the company’s IPO filing.

The document outlines a dual-class share structure giving Musk control via super-voting stock. The filing says he “can only be removed from our board or these positions by the vote of Class B holders” — shares he’ll control after the listing. It adds that if he keeps those shares, he could “continue to control the election and removal of a majority of our board.”

At a typical public company — even founder-led ones with dual-class structures — a CEO can be fired by the board of directors, which represents shareholders and can vote to remove them over issues such as corporate performance, strategy, or misconduct.

The unusual SpaceX setup means Musk is unlikely to face the kind of CEO succession pressure he’s dealt with at Tesla. Musk, of course, is not a typical CEO, and the value of his companies has long been closely tied to his presence.

To be sure, SpaceX’s confidential IPO filing isn’t in its final form yet — while the filing is still in the confidential phase, the company will be going back and forth with the SEC, which will review it and suggest or require changes.

Exclusive: Only Elon Musk can fire Elon Musk from SpaceX, filing shows

Rani Molla4/28/26

OpenAI’s models are officially coming to Amazon

Amazon is finally getting in on the hottest ticket in tech.

After Microsoft announced yesterday that it has agreed to give up its exclusive rights to sell OpenAI’s models, Amazon, as expected, will start offering them to customers — something Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman says users have been asking for “for a really long time.” Some models are available now in preview, and the most powerful GPT versions will show up “in the coming weeks.”

This is a big shift in the AI cloud wars. Microsoft’s early bet on OpenAI gave Azure an edge by locking up the most in-demand models. Now that exclusivity is gone, Amazon and other competitors can finally offer them too, closing a key gap and competing more directly for AI customers.

Amazon Set to Sell OpenAI Tech After Microsoft Cedes Exclusivity

Claire Yubin Oh4/28/26

Ship-tracking app surges as Iran war continues

As Middle East peace talks stretch on, with Tehran reportedly offering to reopen the Strait of Hormuz if the US lifts its blockade and the war ends, the owner of shipping intelligence platform MarineTraffic revealed that the app has gained millions of new users since the conflict began.

MarineTraffic’s user count jumped to 8.5 million this April, up from 3.5 million a year ago, the cofounder of its parent company, Kpler, said in an interview with the Financial Times. Paid subscribers, often workers within companies and governments looking for more data on supply chains and commodities trading, rose 11,000 in the same period.

Kpler, which also owns shipping intelligence platform FleetMon, draws its data from a range of sources, including the Automatic Identification System, satellites, and more than 500 people on-site, like port terminal operators.

Per Appfigures data, MarineTraffic is estimated to have raked in almost $1 million across March and April in app revenue (through April 27), more than double the ~$346,500 from the same months last year. Across the full year, Kpler expects to earn between $300 million and $400 million in annual recurring revenues.