Nasdaq Rises on AI Dip Buying

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Welcome to Risk Reversal's MRKT Matrix, your AI-generated podcast curated by Guy Adami and Dan Nathan, breaking down the day's most impactful stock market and business headlines. We're your hosts, Brunson and Alex, and all of today's market data is provided by Factset.

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I'm Alex.

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And I'm Brunson. We kicked off the new week of trading with a bit of a buy-the-dip rebound for some of the tech shares that got hit particularly hard last week.

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The major indices got a boost ahead of this week's earnings slate from tech giants like MetaPlatforms and Tesla, with chipmakers like Micron leading today's recovery. Amazon jumped after Morgan Stanley named it a top pick, while Goldman Sachs issued a buy rating on CoreWeave, coming to the rescue of the stock at the center of a lot of last week's decline.

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But unlike last week, where tech was under pressure while some other defensive sectors traded well, today, the equal-weighted S&P 500 was lower, with roughly 60% of individual listings falling. Over in Europe, markets slid as weekend protests in France and Italy raised fiscal spending alarms, while over in Asia, China posted a beat on Q3 GDP.

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Back to the CoreWeave story, Barron's reports that Goldman Sachs upgraded specialized data center provider CoreWeave to a buy, sparking a sharp rebound on the open. Goldman noted that CoreWeave's underlying long-term enterprise contracts remain intact, emphasizing that while debt servicing costs have risen, core demand for specialized high-density GPU hosting is far from saturated. However, the squeeze higher in the stock was somewhat fleeting, as it fell into the red by the afternoon.

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On another angle in the AI debt story, Reuters reports that Anthropic has offered Blackstone double-digit yields to secure a specialized chip financing facility. To fund hardware expansions without diluting equity ahead of its IPO, Anthropic is turning to private credit markets, with credit analysts highlighting that Frontier AI labs are paying junk bond yields to secure GPU capacity, underscoring the massive capital intensity of the current compute race.

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Speaking of Anthropic, CNBC details how Anthropic's pending initial public offering has become a litmus test for the entire AI trade. Underwriters are watching investor appetite closely, with institutional portfolio managers admitting that Anthropic's IPO pricing will determine whether public markets are still willing to underwrite mega cap AI cash burn curves.

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Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal just pulled back the curtain on the obscure private body holding ultimate veto power over the entire company, the Long Term Benefit Trust. Holding special Class T common shares, this five-member trust, which includes high-profile figures like former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, owns zero equity and shares in no corporate profits, yet holds the legal authority to elect and dismiss a majority of Anthropics Board of Directors, receives mandatory advance notice on major debt issuances or AI model deployments, and can effectively override traditional shareholder interests to enforce its mandate of advancing AI for humanity's benefit.

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That's right. It creates a completely unprecedented dual-layer governance challenge for institutional buyers who will be subject not only to founder super voting stock, but to an independent non-shareholder trust with the power to overrule corporate profit motives if they clash with safety guidelines. With no public company ever listing under a non-shareholder override of this magnitude, institutional investors are demanding full disclosure of the trust's exact voting mechanics and agreement terms in the upcoming S1 registration statement before underwriting the IPO.

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In other AI buildout news, Bloomberg reports that Microsoft scrapped a major UK data center agreement with operator NScale. The decision comes amid rising power grid connection delays and shifting regional compute requirements. With European tech reporters noting that, grid constraints and power availability are increasingly forcing hyperscalers to cancel multi-million dollar European site allocations. Alex, our deep dive today focuses on an exclusive investigation from the information, which reveals that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is actively co-designing Huawei's next generation Ascend AI processors to directly bypass US chip export controls.

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Exactly. By optimizing its open weight software algorithms directly onto Huawei's custom hardware architecture, DeepSeek is achieving performance efficiency gains that narrow the technological gap with Nvidia's flagship chips.

This software hardware co-design approach allows domestic Chinese tech firms to maximize raw compute output without relying on restricted Western silicon fabrication.

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That creates a long-term strategic threat for American chipmakers. As semiconductor analysts observe, China's domestic AI ecosystem is rapidly adapting to export curbs by pairing efficient algorithmic designs directly with native silicon, establishing a formidable parallel hardware supply chain.

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Turning back to some of those defensive sectors that have benefited during the recent market volatility, Axios Markets breaks down why healthcare stocks have been staging a stealth rally amidst broader tech volatility. Investors seeking steady cash flows and high dividend yields are rotating into pharmaceuticals, with market strategists pointing out that healthcare offers a balance sheet sanctuary for capital fleeing high leverage growth trades.