AI’s Reckoning: Markets Wobble as Infrastructure Bets Get Bigger

Markets & earnings

• Tech stocks slid Monday amid an AI-spending selloff — the Nasdaq fell 0.6%, though the broader market was roughly flat. The tech-heavy Nasdaq slid 0.6% to end at 24,975.82 points, with declining issues outnumbering advancers on the Nasdaq. Intel shares fell 7.9% despite beating earnings and raising its profit forecast, reporting Q2 earnings of $0.42 per share against a consensus of $0.21, on revenue of $16.13 billion.

AI infrastructure & financing

• Nvidia is reportedly weighing a $250 billion financing backstop for OpenAI’s data centers, though Hugging Face’s CEO has called for more transparency following a recent security incident. That WSJ figure on Nvidia is still unconfirmed by other outlets.
• Nvidia has locked down memory supply from SK Hynix as part of a $500 billion AI deal.
• Moody’s has warned that AI spending threatens the credit quality of Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet, and bond-market anxiety is growing over AI capex budgets.

Open-weight AI

• Moonshot AI released Kimi K3’s open weights on July 27 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter model, roughly 1.4 terabytes at MXFP4 quantization, free to download.

Other notable stories

• SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the first test flight since its IPO, and separately SpaceX’s post-IPO “honeymoon” is reportedly over as investors push for results.
• Uber and Waymo are ending their exclusivity arrangement in Atlanta and Austin.
• Lawmakers have raised concerns that a proposed defense partnership tied to Musk’s companies could compromise U.S. military secrets.