NextFin

BREAKING: $AMD AMD Acquires World Labs in $8.2 Billion Deal for AI Expertise. Stanford professor and World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li sits down with Jany Talk to break down what everyone gets wrong about AI - and why she still believes in people, not machines. Fei-Fei Li co-created ImageNet before most of the world understood why data would matter more than algorithms. She's spent a decade building computer vision and robotics from the ground up. Now, as the founder of World Labs, she's betting on spatial intelligence as the missing piece of AGI - and she's here to tell you why almost everyone is thinking about AI wrong. Fei-Fei Li: "AI Is a Tool, Not the World" - On Curiosity, AGI and Being Human. Full interview here:

US Stock Pre-Market Report - November 6, 2026 •U.S. equity futures were mixed ahead of the open, with Nasdaq 100 futures rebounding +1.54% while Dow futures fell -1.04%, reflecting fragile sentiment after Thursday's AI-led selloff. •Global markets extended losses, with the Nasdaq Composite dropping over 5% on Thursday and European benchmarks like the DAX down -2.41%, as investors reassessed AI data-center durability and regulatory risks. •Energy prices rebounded amid geopolitical tensions, with Brent crude near $99.99(+1.73%) and WTI around $91.64, while gold retreated -1.14% to $4,042.59 and the U.S. Dollar Index firmed near 101.90. •Corporate earnings drove individual stock moves, with Cloudflare surging ~19% pre-market on a Q3 beat and Airbnb up ~12% on a $12 billion buyback, while DraftKings plunged 25.2% on wider losses and lower guidance. nextfin.ai/news/us-stock-pre…

US Stock Pre-Market Report - November 5, 2026 •U.S. index futures were mixed before the open: Nasdaq 100 futures fell 0.51% to 28,422.00 on chip and AI pressure, while S&P 500 futures rose 0.17% to 7,734.00 and Dow futures gained 0.61% to 53,828.00. •Post-midterm rotation favored cyclicals as Democrats won both chambers; European equities advanced with FTSE 100 up 0.72%, CAC 40 up 0.80%, and DAX up 0.75%, while tech-heavy Nasdaq lagged. •Oil stabilized and gold rebounded: WTI crude held near $88.50 and Brent near $96.04 as election results compressed oil risk premium, while gold climbed above $4,100on softer yields and a weaker dollar. •Earnings drove individual stock moves: Qualcomm fell 9%-10% on weak smartphone sales, AppLovin surged over 16% on record Q3 results, and Expedia, Snap, Zillow and CAVA traded lower despite mixed quarterly outcomes. nextfin.ai/news/us-stock-pre…

The Midterms Didn’t Change Who Writes the Laws. They Changed the Pressure on Oil. Democrats are set to take control of both the House and the Senate in January, with flips in places few expected, including Texas. Politically, it’s a historic night. For investors, the question is simpler: what actually changes? What doesn’t change: the veto. The president remains in office and keeps his veto. Overriding one takes two-thirds of both chambers. So sweeping new legislation from either side is unlikely. What does change is that Republicans can no longer pass tax and spending packages through reconciliation without Democratic votes. The realistic outcome for the next two years is gridlock, and markets have historically handled gridlock well. In the six months after past midterms, the S&P 500 has averaged a 12.4% gain, positive in all 13 cases measured. History isn’t a forecast, but it’s a useful baseline against panic. What could change: the oil premium. Since the US and Israel struck Iran in February, oil has been the master variable for this market. It fed CPI, which fed rate-hike fears, which hit tech. It squeezed airline margins and drove the “Black Thursday” selloff. Post-election commentary from both sides points to the same issues. Vice President Vance cited the war in Iran and the cost of living. Democratic leaders called the result a mandate on affordability. A new Congress can’t end a war by itself. But it controls funding and oversight, and political pressure from both parties’ voters now points in the same direction. If that pressure speeds up de-escalation, the war premium in crude could start to come out of the price. That would be bearish for energy names like $XLE, and supportive for everything oil has been weighing on: lower inflation, lower yields, higher tech multiples. The timeline is uncertain, and the new Congress isn’t seated until January. But this is the most important second-order effect of the night. Sectors to watch. Healthcare. The most legislatively sensitive sector. Democrats want to reverse cuts to Medicaid and healthcare spending, but any reversal still needs the president’s signature. Managed-care names with heavy Medicaid exposure may trade on expectations before any law passes. Drug-pricing pressure on pharma could return to the agenda. Note that healthcare stocks were already rallying ahead of the vote as Democratic odds rose. Defense. Contracts already on the books aren’t affected by a change in Congress. The bigger swing factor is what happens with Iran, not who chairs the committees. AI and Big Tech. More congressional scrutiny of AI and large tech companies is likely. Oversight hearings don’t change earnings next quarter, but they can add headline risk to the most crowded trade in the market. Consumer. If affordability becomes the central policy fight, programs like SNAP and Medicaid directly affect lower-income spending and the retailers that depend on it. How surprising was this? Not entirely. Prediction markets had priced a Democratic House as close to certain and gave Democrats better-than-even odds in the Senate. The scale of the result is the new information, not the direction. Bottom line: for markets, this election is less about new laws and more about new pressure. Expect two years of gridlock on legislation, which markets usually tolerate well. The variable to watch is oil. If the political shift accelerates an end to the conflict, the biggest beneficiary may not be any sector on a policy list, but every asset the war premium has been holding down. Gridlock on laws. Pressure on oil. Watch the barrel.

US Stock Pre-Market Report - November 4, 2026 •U.S. index futures surged pre-market, with Nasdaq 100 up 0.83%, S&P 500 up 1.16%, and Dow Jones jumping 1.68%, while European benchmarks like the DAX and CAC 40 gained over 1.5%. •Global equities strengthened following U.S. election results, as Democrats secured majorities in both the House and Senate, boosting risk sentiment alongside a weaker dollar against the yen. •The AI trade stabilized after recent volatility, driven by strong earnings from AI infrastructure names including AMD, Arista Networks, and Super Micro Computer, which all reported positive outlooks. •Oil prices remained headline-driven by Middle East diplomacy, with Brent near $103.92 and WTI near $96.13, while U.S. crude inventories unexpectedly fell by 5.27 million barrels. nextfin.ai/news/us-stock-pre…

$SMCI Nearly Quadrupled Revenue. Read the Fine Print Before Celebrating. Revenue of $19.9B, up 298% from $5.0B a year ago, crushing the ~$16.3B estimate. Adjusted EPS of $1.81 vs about $1.62. Net income of $1.59B, from $168M a year ago. Full-year fiscal 2027 guidance raised to $72–82B, above the ~$69B consensus. The stock jumped more than 8% after hours. Supermicro builds and assembles the server racks hyperscalers fill with $NVDA and $AMD chips. Every capex number from last week’s earnings, from Microsoft to Meta to Amazon, ultimately flows to companies like this one. So the demand is real. But the quality of this quarter deserves a closer look. 1. Part of the beat is timing. Last quarter, revenue came in at $11.1B, near the low end of guidance. Management blamed customer delays: data centers whose power and cooling weren’t ready, with the revenue expected to land in later quarters. It landed. Revenue jumped about 80% in one quarter and beat Supermicro’s own $14.5–15.5B guide by roughly 28%. Some of this quarter’s strength is last quarter’s delayed shipments. 2. The margin fell back to normal. Gross margin came in at 12.7%, down from 17.5% last quarter. That 17.5% was the outlier. Management said most of it came from a favorable customer and product mix. Over the past twelve months, gross margin averaged about 10.8%, down from 18% three years ago. Supermicro is a high-volume, low-margin assembler. It wins on scale, not pricing power. 3. The full-year guide implies a slower second half. Q1 revenue of $19.95B plus the Q2 guide midpoint of $20.5B gives about $40.5B for the first half. The full-year midpoint of $77B leaves about $36.5B for the back half, roughly $18.3B a quarter, below the first-half run rate. That could be lumpy deliveries or conservative guidance. Either way, the full-year number doesn’t describe a straight line up. 4. Cash and concentration remain the core risks. Operations used $434M of cash this quarter. Two quarters ago, the company burned $6.6B as inventory swelled past $11B and net debt hit $7.5B. Building racks means buying billions of dollars of GPUs and components before getting paid. Customer concentration is also extreme: earlier this fiscal year, one data center customer made up about 63% of quarterly revenue. When a few buyers drive most of the business, timing swings like the last two quarters are almost guaranteed. Why the stock can still go up. Valuation. Even after its rally, Supermicro traded at roughly 11.5 times earnings in October, about half the S&P 500’s multiple. The market already prices in low margins, lumpy revenue, cash strain and past legal clouds. A quarter this big against expectations that low gives room for a pop. Bottom line: a blowout quarter that confirms AI infrastructure spending is flowing through to the hardware layer. But it’s a timing-boosted print in a low-margin, cash-intensive, highly concentrated business. The demand is real. The question is whether Supermicro can turn it into steady margins and cash instead of a few big quarters at a time. Huge revenue. Thin margins. Lumpy by design.

$AMD’s MI450 Ramp Is Real. So Is the Price of Winning It. Revenue of $13.4B beat $13.1B. EPS of $2.09 beat $1.94. Data center revenue hit a record $8.55B, up 97% year over year and 27% in a single quarter, and now makes up 64% of AMD’s revenue. Three years ago it was about 28%. The stock jumped more than 6% after hours. But the quarter isn’t the headline. The guide is. Q4 guidance: about $17B. Against $13.4B this quarter, that’s roughly 27% sequential growth, and about 66% above last year’s Q4. It’s well ahead of the ~$16.2B estimate. This is the MI450 ramp Lisa Su has been promising: AMD’s new AI GPUs, shipping in Helios racks to Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle and Anthropic, plus a $12B HPE deal for Vultr. The question for a year was whether AMD could turn AI design wins into AI revenue at scale. A $17B guide is the answer. The margin held. MI450 carries lower gross margins than AMD’s average, so a big ramp could have dragged the company margin down. Instead, Q4 gross margin guidance is about 55%, close to Q3’s 56%. Growing revenue 27% in a quarter without sacrificing margin is the best version of this ramp. Now the cost: the warrants. To win its two biggest AI deals, AMD paid partly in its own stock. OpenAI and Meta each hold warrants to buy up to 160 million AMD shares at one cent per share, roughly 10% of the company each. They vest as each customer buys up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs and as AMD’s stock hits targets rising to $600. In effect, AMD is giving customers equity to secure purchase commitments. Two things follow: Dilution. If both warrants vest fully, existing shareholders could be diluted by around 20% combined. A charge that grows with success. AMD remeasures the warrants every quarter, and this quarter that cost $1.097B. That’s why GAAP net income was $2.43B while adjusted net income was $3.47B. The higher the stock goes, the bigger the charge. It’s the same accounting dynamic behind the giant non-cash losses in Anthropic’s IPO filing. Supporters call these deals smart customer lock-in. Skeptics call them circular financing. The truth is both: they guarantee demand, and shareholders fund part of it. The weak spot: PCs. Client and Gaming revenue fell 8% to $3.70B. Last quarter, client grew 23%. This is the same memory squeeze that crushed $INTC last week: memory prices are making PCs too expensive, and shipments are falling. The difference is AMD has a data center business big enough to absorb the hit. Intel doesn’t. Remember last quarter. In August, AMD also beat and guided above consensus, and the stock still fell about 9% after hours. Expectations are high, and the bar keeps rising. Bottom line: the MI450 ramp is real, the Q4 guide is a big step up, and margins are holding. That puts AMD firmly in the AI accelerator race, not just alongside $NVDA in slides. The price is equity: up to roughly a fifth of the company promised to two customers, and a GAAP charge that grows as the stock does. Data center is carrying the company while PCs shrink, and that’s now the whole investment case. The ramp is real. The warrants are the toll.

US Stock Pre-Market Report - November 3, 2026 •U.S. equity futures were mixed ahead of the open, with Nasdaq 100 futures at 28,129.3 (+0.01%), S&P 500 futures at 7,558.0 (-0.22%), and Dow Jones futures at 51,670 (-0.89%). •European equities weakened broadly, with FTSE 100 down 0.69%, CAC 40 down 0.31%, and Germany's DAX falling 0.74% amid softer global risk appetite. •Oil rebounded after Monday's selloff, with Brent crude near $105.78 (+0.96%) and WTI near $97.50 (+1.08%), while gold futures slipped 0.8% to about $3,936.30 an ounce. •Big Tech earnings pressured sentiment: Apple fell 4.5% pre-market on margin guidance of 45%-46%, Palantir slid despite strong results, and AMD, Shopify, Pfizer were due to report. nextfin.ai/news/us-stock-pre…

$AAPL Beat. The Memory Bill Is Why the Stock Isn’t Celebrating. Revenue of $114.5B beat $113.4B and topped the high end of Apple’s own guidance. EPS of $2.10 beat $1.99. iPhone hit a September-quarter record at $57.6B, up 17%. Mac crushed estimates at $10.8B. Fiscal 2026 was Apple’s best year ever: $479B in revenue, up 15%, with $86.4B spent on buybacks. And the stock is drifting lower. Three numbers explain it. 1. The margin is shrinking underneath. Gross margin came in at 47.9%, the top of guidance. But about 1 point of that came from one-time tariff refunds. Strip those out and underlying margin was roughly 46.9%. Last quarter, underlying margin was about 48.1%. That’s a 1.2-point drop in one quarter, and Apple has said memory costs explain all of the decline. IDC estimates memory costs are up around 350% from last year. Tim Cook called it a “100-year flood” on his final call. It hasn’t receded. This is the same story playing out across the sector: memory makers like $MU and Sandisk post record margins, while everyone who buys memory pays for it. It crushed $INTC’s PC business, pushed Amazon’s capex higher, and now it’s eating into Apple’s gross margin. 2. Services keeps slowing. Services grew 10% to $31.6B, down from 12% last quarter. Services is Apple’s highest-margin business, with gross margin around 75%, so it’s supposed to be the cushion that offsets hardware cost pressure. A cushion growing slower is a thinner cushion, right when hardware margins need it most. 3. China missed. Greater China revenue came in at $17.5B, against $18.6B expected. It’s still up 21% year over year, but missing by about $1B in the region with the most competition matters. The real test is the December quarter. This was John Ternus’s first quarter as CEO, and his first guide matters more than this print. The questions: Margins: Bernstein estimates December-quarter iPhone gross margin could fall to around 40%, as cheaper memory inventory runs out and new memory costs more. Volume: Loop Capital just downgraded Apple, modeling 79 million iPhones vs the Street’s 85 million. iPhone Duo: the new phone starting at $1,999 went on sale October 23. How many Apple can build, and how buyers respond to that price, lands entirely in the next quarter. Apple’s answer to memory costs has been raising prices. That works as long as demand holds. The December quarter is when that bet gets tested at the biggest scale. Bottom line: a record year and a clean beat, but the margin is quietly being squeezed by memory, and Services is slowing just when it’s needed most. The stock is reacting to where the margin is heading, not where it landed. The holiday-quarter margin guide on tonight’s call is the real report. Record revenue. Thinner margin. Memory sends the bill.

$PLTR Is Growing Faster Than Ever. Two Numbers Say Watch the Next Turn. Revenue of $2.31B, up 96%, beating $2.18B. EPS of $0.44 vs $0.41. US commercial revenue up 148% to $984M. Full-year guidance raised to about $8.53B, roughly 91% growth, up from 82% guided last quarter. Alex Karp opened the shareholder letter by saying few companies in postwar America have grown this fast. On the numbers, he has a point. Revenue growth has accelerated for eight straight quarters, from 36% in late 2024 to 96% now. At a $9B run rate, that’s almost unheard of. So the question isn’t whether this was a great quarter. It’s what comes next. Two numbers matter more than the headline. 1. The backlog grew much more slowly. US commercial remaining deal value is contracted revenue that hasn’t been recognized yet. It’s the best leading indicator of where commercial revenue is heading. Last quarter it grew 27% sequentially to $6.24B, up 124% year over year. This quarter it reached $6.5B: up just ~4% sequentially and 79% year over year. Revenue accelerated, but the pipeline feeding future revenue slowed sharply. One quarter isn’t a trend, since large deals land unevenly. But it’s the first real cooling in the metric bulls rely on. 2. The Q4 guide implies the streak ends. Q4 guidance of about $2.65B compares with roughly $1.41B a year ago, implying ~88% growth. That would be the first deceleration in two years. The caveat: Palantir guides conservatively. Q3 guidance was $2.16B and actual revenue came in about 7% higher. A similar beat in Q4 would put growth near 100%. Still, the company’s own math is the first sign the acceleration curve may be flattening. Why that matters at this price. After Q2, the stock jumped 29% in a day and traded at roughly 48 times 2026 revenue and 85 times adjusted free cash flow. Valuations like that price in years of extreme growth. At that level, it isn’t enough to be growing fast. The rate has to keep rising. That’s why Palantir has fallen after strong reports before, including a 6.9% drop after its Q1 beat. What’s not in question: business quality. Last quarter Palantir posted a 62% adjusted operating margin, a Rule of 40 score of 155%, net dollar retention of 157%, and $9.2B of cash with no debt. US commercial growing nearly 150% means AI deployments are moving from pilots into production. Palantir isn’t a story stock. It’s a highly profitable company growing at startup speed. Bottom line: an extraordinary quarter with no real flaws in the reported numbers. The risk is all in the forward indicators. If RDV re-accelerates and Q4 beats its guide like Q3 did, the eight-quarter streak continues and the multiple can hold. If the pipeline keeps slowing, the market will start pricing the turn before it shows up in revenue. The growth is real. The slope is the trade.

US Stock Pre-Market Report - November 2, 2026 •U.S. equity futures rebounded before the open, with Nasdaq 100 futures up 0.74% to 28,744.5, S&P 500 futures gaining 0.46% to 7,648.8, and Dow futures advancing 0.49% to 52,172 after Friday's selloff. •Oil prices retreated over 3% on renewed Iran-related diplomacy, with Brent crude falling to $109.70 and WTI dropping to $100.58, while gold advanced 0.9% to about $3,911 an ounce. •AI capital-spending scrutiny remains a key theme as investors reassess infrastructure spending returns following chip-led declines, with Intel's steep drop drawing attention to upcoming semiconductor earnings. •Major earnings in focus include Apple (EPS est. $1.98-$2.00), Palantir (EPS est. $0.33), and Inovio surging over 200% after FDA accelerated approval for Voceryq. nextfin.ai/news/us-stock-pre…

Intel Plunges 29% in Worst Day Since 1974 as Amazon Results Deepen Tech Rout, Sending Nasdaq to Its Worst Day Since June | US Market Close (Oct. 30) · U.S. stocks sold off sharply on Friday as disappointing earnings from Intel and Amazon deepened the technology rout, with the S&P 500 falling 2.0% and the Nasdaq Composite declining 2.8%. · Intel sank about 29%, its worst day since 1974, after issuing a fourth-quarter profit forecast below analysts' expectations despite reporting stronger quarterly profit. · Amazon fell about 2% after weaker third-quarter profit and higher capital spending, with heavy AI build-out pushing free cash burn to a record despite AWS growing 39%. · AI-spending anxiety spread across the market, moving the AI trade from the hopes phase into the 'show me' phase, while defensive and value areas held up much better. nextfin.ai/en/articles/intel…

US Stock Pre-Market Report - October 30, 2026 •U.S. equity-index futures signal a risk-off open, with Nasdaq 100 futures down 2.59% to 28,797.00 and S&P 500 futures falling 1.13% to 7,667.00, while Dow Jones futures remain flat at 52,512.00. •Oil prices surge on Hormuz supply-risk premium, with Brent crude up 2.4% to $117.62 a barrel and WTI up 2.1% to $104.18, tracking roughly 14% and 15% monthly gains respectively. •Tech earnings drive pre-market selloff as Amazon falls 7% on $220 billion 2026 capex guidance and Intel plunges 25% on softer Q4 outlook despite Q3 revenue up 21% to $16.5 billion. •Gold breaks below $4,000, with spot gold down 1.0% to $3,980.40 an ounce and U.S. gold futures down 1.0% to $3,991.10, pressured by higher oil prices and persistent inflation concerns. nextfin.ai/news/us-stock-pre…

Why $SNDK Fell After a Double Beat: The Market Trades the Slope, Not the Level Revenue of $11.03B beat $10.64B. Adjusted EPS of $49.51 beat $46.22. Gross margin hit a record 85.1%. Revenue is up 378% from a year ago, net income went from $112 million to $8.1 billion, and Q2 guidance is above consensus too. Plus an 8-for-1 stock split. And the stock is red. The same thing happened in August. Here’s why. Growth is still huge, but the slope is flattening. Look at sequential revenue growth: Fiscal Q4 2026: +51% ($5.95B → $8.97B) Fiscal Q1 2027: +23% ($8.97B → $11.03B) Fiscal Q2 2027 guide: ~+12% (midpoint $12.4B) Growth is roughly halving every quarter. In a cyclical industry like memory, stocks don’t peak when earnings peak. They peak when the rate of improvement peaks. A decelerating slope is exactly what investors who lived through past memory cycles are trained to sell. Margins have hit a ceiling. Gross margin went from 78.4% to 84.6% to 85.1%, and guidance is 84.5–85.5%. There’s not much room above 85%. When margins stop expanding, earnings growth has to come entirely from volume and price, and price is what’s slowing. NAND price hikes are cooling. TrendForce estimated NAND contract prices rose 70–75% in the spring quarter, then projected 10–15% for the quarter after. Goldman’s view is that hikes continue through Q4 2026, then prices start falling in 2027 as new supply comes online. That’s the bear case in one sentence: the best pricing may be right now. The bull case is contracts. Unlike past memory cycles, this one is built on long-term agreements. Last quarter Sandisk reported $59.8B of remaining performance obligations, or $91.1B including deals signed after quarter end, with about half of fiscal 2027 bit shipments and two-thirds of fiscal 2028 already committed. Data center revenue jumped 61% sequentially to $4.80B, and that’s where the contracts sit. Contracted volume at locked-in terms is the reason this cycle shouldn’t collapse the way 2019 or 2023 did. The warning light in the report: consumer. Consumer revenue fell 39% year over year to $397M. High memory prices are crushing demand for consumer storage, the same dynamic that drove PC shipments down 20% and sank $INTC yesterday. At these prices, memory makers are winning data centers and losing everyone else. About the split. An 8-for-1 split changes nothing about the value of the company. It makes shares cheaper per unit and easier to buy for employees and retail investors. It’s a signal of confidence, not a fundamental catalyst. Bottom line: this was a great quarter, and the market sold it anyway because memory stocks trade on direction, not level. Growth is decelerating, margins have plateaued, and pricing momentum is fading. The counterweight is a contract book unlike anything in past cycles. The real test isn’t this quarter. It’s whether 2027 contract prices hold when new supply arrives. Record earnings. Flattening slope. In memory, the slope wins.

$AMZN Proved AI Demand Is Real. The Market Is Now Pricing the Bill. AWS revenue came in at $46.0B, up 39.3%, its fastest growth in nearly five years and ahead of the $44.9B estimate. Operating income of $28.1B beat both the $26.1B consensus and the top of Amazon’s own guidance. Andy Jassy said he expects AWS to grow more than 40% in both 2027 and 2028. And the stock fell as much as 12% after hours. The demand question is settled. This week, all three major clouds accelerated: AWS: $46.0B, +39% Azure: $33.2B, +48% Google Cloud: $30.7B, roughly doubled AWS has now accelerated for six straight quarters, from 17% to 39%, on a base that’s now running at roughly $184B a year. Jassy says the constraint is capacity, not customers. Nobody serious is arguing AI cloud demand is fading. So why the selloff? Look at the cost side. Capex: Amazon raised its 2026 capital spending plan to $220B last quarter, mostly because of higher memory chip costs. That’s the same memory squeeze that crushed $INTC’s PC business today. Cash: trailing free cash flow had already turned negative at −$7.6B, from +$18.2B a year earlier. Debt: long-term debt climbed to $128.9B from $65.6B at the start of the year. Amazon is funding the AI build-out with borrowed money and every dollar of operating cash it generates. The near-term misses gave the market an excuse. EPS of $1.89 missed $1.96. Revenue of $201.9B was a hair below $202.1B. Advertising, one of the highest-margin businesses at Amazon, fell short of estimates. And Q4 operating income guidance of $31B came in below the $33B expected. None of these is a big miss alone. Together, after the stock jumped more than 15% on its last report, they were enough. The pattern this week. Look at how each hyperscaler was judged: $MSFT: Azure accelerated and capex came in under plan. Stock up. $GOOGL: Cloud doubled, but the cash engine (Search) stalled. Stock down. $AMZN: AWS accelerated, but cash flow is negative, debt is up and the profit guide was light. Stock down. The market is no longer rewarding growth alone. It’s rewarding growth that doesn’t require borrowing to fund it. What would change the story. The 2027 capex outlook and the path back to positive free cash flow. Analysts were expecting negative free cash flow for 2026 and a recovery starting in 2027. If the call pushes that recovery out, the pressure stays. If AWS keeps compounding at 40%+ while capex growth flattens, today’s selloff ends up looking like the cost of being early. Bottom line: AWS just delivered its best growth in five years, and the CEO is guiding for more. The stock is falling because Amazon is paying for that growth with negative cash flow and nearly double the debt. This is no longer a demand debate. It’s a return-on-capital debate, and the market wants to see the returns before it pays for more spending. Demand is proven. The bill is due. Watch free cash flow.

$INTC Got Crushed by the Same Thing Making Memory Stocks Rich Intel beat on Q3: EPS of $0.52 vs $0.40 expected, gross margin of 44% vs 42%, revenue in line at $16.5B. Then it guided Q4 revenue to $15–16B against a $17.1B estimate, and EPS to $0.25 vs $0.43. The stock fell more than 20%. Intel blamed “softness in the PC market.” That’s true, but it undersells what’s happening. The PC market isn’t soft. It’s collapsing. Global PC shipments fell 20.1% year over year in Q3 to 62.7 million units, the worst quarter since 2023. Part of that is payback: PC makers stockpiled earlier this year to get ahead of memory price hikes, pulling demand forward. Omdia now expects Q4 shipments to fall another 24% and 2027 to fall another 7%. Intel’s Q4 guide is simply that forecast showing up in the numbers. The cause is AI. Every PC needs DRAM and NAND, and AI data centers are absorbing that supply. Memory component prices have reportedly more than quadrupled, and memory now makes up close to 40% of a typical PC’s bill of materials. When the most expensive part of a laptop quadruples in price, PC makers either raise prices or cut memory, and buyers either pay more or wait. Intel added to the pressure. It raised PC processor prices for the third time in under a year, effective October 5, with cumulative increases around 30%. Higher chip prices on top of higher memory prices is a recipe for demand destruction. This is the flip side of the memory story covered here earlier this month. The same supply squeeze that’s driving record profits at $MU, SK Hynix and Samsung is starving the PC market. Intel’s guide is, ironically, one more data point that memory demand is outrunning supply. Data center is doing its job. Data Center and AI revenue came in at $7.32B vs $6.67B expected, up about 17% from $6.26B last quarter. Server CPUs are riding the same AI build-out as everything else. The problem is that PCs are still the bigger business, and that’s where the guide broke. Why −22% and not −8%. Valuation. Intel hit an all-time high around $133 earlier this year, finally clearing its dot-com peak, and at one point it was up more than 225% year to date. That rally was built on the turnaround story: Tesla as the first major 14A foundry customer, reports of Apple foundry talks, a $23B equity raise to fund the build-out. When a stock is priced for a comeback, a 9% revenue guide miss gets punished hard. The CFO warned back in Q1 that PC demand would weaken in the second half. The market just didn’t price how much. What this means for the rest of the sector. $AMD reports soon, with the same PC exposure. Expect the same question. $DELL, $HPQ and other PC makers face the same memory squeeze on margins and volumes. Memory names get an indirect confirmation that pricing power is intact. Bottom line: Intel’s quarter was fine. Its next quarter is hostage to a PC market being squeezed by the AI memory boom. The foundry story that drove the rally isn’t broken by this report, but foundry revenue is years away, and PCs pay the bills today. Until memory prices ease, which TrendForce suggests may not happen even in 2027, the PC side of Intel stays under pressure. AI is eating the PC. Intel is still mostly a PC company.

US Stock Pre-Market Report - October 29, 2026 •U.S. equity-index futures pointed lowerbefore the open, with Nasdaq 100 futures down 346.0 points, or 1.15%, to 29,633.5, S&P 500 futures falling 31.0 points, or 0.40%, and Dow Jones futures declining 157.0 points, or 0.30%. •European markets outperformed with FTSE 100 up 0.44%, CAC 40 gaining 0.69%, and DAX advancing 0.71%, highlighting a regional divergence ahead of the New York open. •AI spending scrutiny pressured growth stocks as investors reassessed AI infrastructure payoffs after mixed big-tech earnings, favoring companies showing cash-flow leverage from AI investments. •Earnings breadth broadened beyond megacap tech with strong results from Caterpillar, Eli Lilly, Carvana, Chipotle, Fortinet, while Alphabet slid 10.2% and ServiceNow plunged 18.7% on guidance concerns. nextfin.ai/news/us-stock-pre…

$GOOGL’s Cloud Doubled. The Stock Fell 8% Anyway. Here’s Why. Same night, two very different reactions. $MSFT ripped after Azure accelerated. $GOOGL dropped about 8%. Revenue was roughly in line at $127.6B, but Search, YouTube, Google Services and operating income all came in below estimates. To understand the selloff, look at what each business means to the stock. Search stalled. Search revenue came in at $63.35B. Last quarter it was $63.27B, essentially flat sequentially. Year over year, growth slowed to roughly 12%, from 17% in Q2. Management warned in July that Q3 would lap a strong acceleration from last year, so some slowdown was expected. But consensus was $64.85B, and missing by $1.5B on the highest-margin business in the company revives the oldest fear in the Alphabet debate: is AI answering questions instead of ads getting clicked? AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly users. If Search revenue flattens while AI usage soars, that’s the question the market will price first. YouTube ads also missed at $11.21B vs $11.43B. Two ad engines below expectations in the same quarter is a pattern, not a blip. Cloud took off. Google Cloud revenue hit $30.71B against a $29.1B estimate. A year ago it was about $15.2B, so Cloud roughly doubled, accelerating from 82% growth in Q2. It added about $6B in a single quarter. Last quarter, Cloud backlog reached $514B, with just over half expected to convert to revenue within 24 months. This is now one of the fastest-growing large businesses in the world. So why does the stock fall? Because Search pays for everything. It’s the cash engine funding $195–205B of capex this year, a budget raised twice already. When the funding engine slows while spending keeps climbing, investors see margin pressure ahead. That’s exactly what showed up: operating income of $40.6B was flat quarter over quarter and missed the $43.2B estimate, as depreciation from the build-out piles up. The capex detail. Capex came in at $51.4B, below the $55.8B estimate. Like $MSFT and $TSLA, Alphabet spent less than expected this quarter. Unlike Microsoft, it didn’t get credit for it, because the revenue side of its core business disappointed. Ignore the EPS headline. EPS of $2.12 looks terrible against roughly $3 expected. But Alphabet now marks stakes like its SpaceX position to market every quarter. In Q2 that produced a $99B gain and a $9.11 EPS. GAAP EPS swings with other companies’ stock prices. Operating income is the clean read, and that’s the miss that matters. One more thing to watch: who’s behind the Cloud growth. A large share of AI cloud demand comes from a handful of frontier labs. Anthropic’s IPO filing, for example, shows up to $114.5B committed to Google through 2033, and Anthropic itself disclosed heavy customer concentration. Cloud’s growth is real, but parts of it depend on very few buyers. Bottom line: tonight the market judged Alphabet as a Search company that happens to own a booming cloud business, not the other way around. Cloud doubled. Search stalled. Until Search reaccelerates, or Cloud gets big enough to carry the margin story on its own, the stock will keep trading on the ad line. Cloud is the future. Search is the paycheck. The paycheck slipped.

$MSFT Did What Meta Couldn’t: More Growth, Less Spending Revenue of $92.3B beat $90.7B. EPS of $4.89 beat $4.73. And the number that matters most: Azure grew 48%, against the 45% Microsoft itself guided in July and around 45% the Street expected. The stock ripped after hours. After a week of AI capex anxiety, this report answers the question everyone has been asking: is the spending turning into revenue? Azure is accelerating, not plateauing. Under Microsoft’s new, narrower Azure definition, growth was 42% last quarter. Now it’s 48%, with Azure revenue at $33.2B, up roughly 13% in a single quarter. Microsoft Cloud overall grew 30% to $63.9B. At this scale, acceleration is rare. It means demand is still running ahead of the capacity Microsoft can bring online. The surprise: capex came in light. Microsoft guided to more than $50B of capex this quarter. It spent $39.4B, about $7B below the Street’s $46.6B. Compare that to the past week: $META: capex up again, free cash flow negative. $TSLA: capex pushed into Q4. $MSFT: spent less than planned and still beat on growth. There are two possible explanations, and both matter. Last quarter CFO Amy Hood said efficiency gains in a supply-constrained fleet get monetized almost immediately, so Microsoft may be squeezing more revenue out of each GPU. Or deliveries of chips, power or data center capacity slipped, pushing spend into next quarter. The first is a margin story. The second means the capex bill is still coming. The call should clarify which one it is. The one number to watch: backlog. Commercial remaining performance obligation, contracted revenue not yet recognized, came in at $677B. Last quarter it was $678B. That’s flat quarter over quarter, and well below the ~$706B estimate. Year over year, backlog growth has gone from 110% to 84% to roughly 73% now. Last quarter Microsoft emphasized that all of the sequential RPO growth came from customers other than frontier AI labs like OpenAI. If backlog has stalled, the market will want to know whether big AI-lab contracts are slowing, or whether Microsoft is simply converting backlog into revenue faster than it’s adding new deals. Everything else was solid. Devices and Consumer beat. Search and advertising came in at $6.6B vs $6.4B. Microsoft returned $10.2B to shareholders. The OpenAI line was a small $207M gain, not a drag. Why this matters beyond Microsoft. This is the bull case for the AI cycle in one report: demand accelerating, monetization showing up in revenue, and capital spending under control. For $NVDA, memory names and the neoclouds, an accelerating Azure is the strongest demand signal the market has seen this earnings season. A lower capex number cuts the other way for suppliers in the short term, which is why the call matters. Bottom line: the best hyperscaler print of the season. Azure accelerated past its own guide while spending billions less than planned. The only crack is a flat backlog, and that’s the question for the call. If RPO flattening is just faster conversion, this quarter strengthens the entire AI trade. If it’s slowing deal flow, it’s the first warning sign from the strongest player in the cycle. Growth up. Spend down. Watch the backlog.

US Stock Pre-Market Report - October 28, 2026 •U.S. equity futures were mixed before the open, with Nasdaq 100 futures up +0.36% on AI and memory-chip strength, while Dow futures fell -0.28% amid cyclical pressure. •Oil prices surged after a Saudi refinery attack, with WTI crude near $101.89 (+2.0%)and Brent near $115.36 (+1.3%), reintroducing inflation and margin concerns. •Markets await the Fed decision and megacap earnings, with Alphabet and Microsoft reporting after the close; investors focus on AI spending, cloud demand and margin guidance. •Company earnings drove sharp moves: Vertiv jumped 15-16% on raised guidance, Enphase fell over 10% on weak outlook, and Robinhood slid 8% as crypto revenue dropped 55% year over year. nextfin.ai/news/us-stock-pre…