11AM Hour: Alphabet Tumbles, SpaceX Slumps, Iran Deal Latest & Remembering Alan Greenspan 6/22/26

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Sara Eisen (1:03)

Good Monday morning again. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla, live from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Today, we are joined by veteran investor, Dan Niles, now expecting a so-called speed bump for stocks. Find out the risk he sees ahead.

Carl Quintanilla (1:16)

It's a beneficiary of the AI infrastructure buildout, and now the building material supplier, CRH, looking to expand its US footprint, acquiring competitor Arcoza, and its largest deal ever. We're joined exclusively by CEO Jim Minter.

Sara Eisen (1:30)

And as the White House touts progress in the first round of US-Iran talks, and the US authorizes Iranian oil sales through August, we're gonna talk to one former diplomat about the key challenges he still sees ahead for the current talks.

Carl Quintanilla (1:42)

As for the markets, pretty nice open. Have this midday stumble here with the NASDAQ down about 1%. Big story at the moment is gonna be comm services down 4.5%, and a lot of that is gonna be Google, down 6.5%, Meta down three almost, not helping too much, but that is, as we said earlier, one of the worst days for Alphabet in about a year.

Sara Eisen (2:02)

Yeah, I mean, not a specific catalyst.

There was news over the weekend that one of its key AI researchers moved over to Anthropic. This after another key researcher went to OpenAI before that. Perhaps that's weighing on the trade, but overall just Meg 7 lower, even though there's strength in ships like Intel and Micron. We're getting some breaking news right now on SpaceX's AI business. Deirdre Bosa has that for us.

Deirdre Bosa (2:26)

Hey, good morning guys. So SpaceX has signed another major compute deal, this time with Reflection AI. This is an open source startup last valued at $25 billion. Now Reflection will get access to NVIDIA's top of the line AI chips used to train and run advanced models. It has agreed to pay SpaceX $150 million a month starting July 1st through 2029 Now if the deal runs through the end of its term, that is about $6.3 billion in total. Either side can walk away with 90 days notice after the first three months. Now the backdrop guys is of course what SpaceX is doing with Colossus. This is Elon Musk's massive AI data center build out. It was built in part to power Grok as a rival to OpenAI and Anthropic Chatbots, but now SpaceX is increasingly turning that infrastructure into a business itself, selling compute to outside AI companies like Reflection. Now it has already struck compute deals with Anthropic, Google and Cursor which it's now acquiring. Reflection is the latest customer, but it's also a strategically different one because it is focused on Open Source AI. Now Reflection's pitch is that customers should have more control, models that they can customize, run themselves, eventually own themselves. Reflection however, it has not yet released a public frontier Open Source model. The competition here is moving extremely fast, especially from China, Jipoo's latest model, GLM 5.2. It has been getting a ton of attention here in Silicon Valley as a powerful Open Source model at a fraction of the cost. Some actually calling it the next deep seek moment. Guys, so this deal, it's really about Reflection trying to get the compute that it needs, the horsepower it needs to catch up and compete against these Chinese models, but also SpaceX building out its data center business.

Sara Eisen (4:13)

Maybe that's why Google is under pressure. Just another Chinese model does it cheaper and investors are excited about it.

Deirdre Bosa (4:21)

Yeah, a lot of things are happening.

DeepMind had some very high-profile departures, but that's not really new. We've seen talent move around the major frontier labs here in the US. But Sara, I think you're right. It is really these Chinese models and the momentum that we've seen for Open Source that really gained another leg after the philanthropic cut-off access to Fable and Mythos, its top models, which made a lot of companies and governments, in fact, stand back and realize, hold on, we can't build on a model if access can be cut off at any moment. And so you see them taking another look at Open Source. And the best models right now, they are Chinese in terms of benchmarks and adoption. But there are players here in the US who are taking a harder look focusing. Reflection AI that's doing this deal with SpaceX is one of them. They've raised a lot of money. They're valued at $25 billion. And they want to get to the frontier at Open Source so that they can make that more available to American companies. NVIDIA with its NemoTron family of models is another player here.