Ethereum has been stuck between $2,000 and $2,150 in the past week amid ongoing scrutiny toward the Ethereum Foundation, which has seen its talent pool thin out.

“ETH continues to show weakness... ETH/BTC keeps grinding lower, at a 10-month low,” Jasper De Maere, a desk strategist and OTC trader at Wintermute, posted on X. “The marginal risk dollar went into equities, not crypto. When AI semis are working and yields are easing, crypto should follow. It didn’t.”

De Maere continued, “Based on our OTC flow, we see that institutional buying pressure, which was responsible for the recent +ve price action, is now fading quickly, indicating that institutional investors might be at capacity or are re-assessing risk/reward at these new levels.”

Data from SoSoValue shows ethereum ETFs have seen 10 consecutive days of outflows, totaling more than $471.1 million.

Meanwhile, the blockchain’s cofounder Vitalik Buterin, who sits on the board of the Ethereum Foundation, addressed the controversy surrounding the nonprofit over the weekend. Holding around 0.16% of ethereum’s total supply, the foundation is not the center of blockchain network, but rather “one node, with a defined purpose alongside other nodes,” according to Buterin, who says nearly 90% of his net worth is in ethereum.

“EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months,” Buterin said, adding that the EF will sell ethereum less and focus on remaining censorship-resistant, open-source, private, and secure.

“The most high-value ‘product’ of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH,” Buterin continued. “That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset — *necessary* aspects even — that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help.”

Carlos Guzman, vice president of research at crypto trading firm GSR, said Vitalik’s response is a bet on credible neutrality as ethereum’s durable competitive advantage, which attracts liquidity, users, and apps, because “builders and institutions gravitate toward platforms they can trust won’t be captured or co-opted. This is what builds network effects, and network effects are what create durable moats,” Guzman wrote on X.

And yet, Guzman argued credible neutrality is just one piece of the puzzle:

“The risk is that a nimbler chain builds sufficient network effects by executing well on fees, throughput, and UX today while promising credible neutrality tomorrow. Vitalik’s vision is arguably the right one. Whether the ecosystem can execute on it before that window closes remains uncertain.”

Oklo shares jumped following the announcement that the company has been selected by the US Department of Energy for advanced negotiations under the Surplus Plutonium Utilization Program. Under this federal program, Oklo will help to turn excess legacy Cold War nuclear material into commercial fuel for its advanced power plants.

Read more: Inside Oklo’s audacious plan to turn leftover weapons-grade plutonium into a nuclear bridge fuel

Oklo will partner with European nuclear developer Newcleo, validating their October 2025 partnership including a Newcleo-affiliated investment of up to $2 billion, to convert material that already exists into fuel for advanced reactors, using it to generate electricity and consume it through fission.

“Fuel supply constraints are a key throttle to advanced reactor development,” said cofounder and CEO Jacob DeWitte. “This program creates a pathway to use existing surplus material as bridge fuel for advanced reactors to bring more reactors online sooner.”

Advanced nuclear companies are facing roadblocks trying to find fuel. This deal gives Oklo a chance to reduce its dependence on foreign supply chains. Wall Street is closely watching what this means for Oklo’s business model. Wedbush maintained its “outperform” rating and a $110 price target on the stock, emphasizing that this is a helpful “addition” to Oklo’s multipronged fuel strategy, rather than a stand-alone fix.

Just last month, Oklo announced a collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Nvidia “to support critical infrastructure development and accelerate the deployment of nuclear energy.”

Qualcomm is spiking after a Bloomberg report that the chip company is poised to sell “millions” of AI chips to TikTok owner ByteDance.

The report, citing people familiar with the matter, said these custom processors would be used to “support the social media company’s AI agent software.”

Qualcomm had come under pressure earlier this year because of softness in its China handset business in light of difficulty accessing memory chips, which are in a severe supply crunch. At one time, the company had seemingly been counting on supporting AI-enabled devices to earn its role in the boom — and still might be doing that, with analysts speculating over a potential partnership with OpenAI for an AI smartphone chip.

But it’s also been telegraphing a shift toward playing a bigger role upstream in providing hardware for data centers.

In the press release that accompanied Qualcomm’s recent earnings report, President and CEO Cristiano Amon touted the company’s entry into the data center business, with initial shipments to a “leading hyperscaler” on track for later this year, and said that investors could expect to hear more on Qualcomm’s growth plans in data center and physical AI at its Investor Day on June 24.

Seems like they’re on track.

Traders are happy about potential peace. But they’re even more happy that Micron exists.

That’s the best way to describe the price action on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump’s comments this weekend that a deal with Iran has been “largely negotiated,” along with reports that the US Navy has restarted shepherding vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, have contributed to a worldwide rally in stocks and sell-off in crude oil.

Some normal things you’d expect to see are happening:

• Within US markets, the SPDR S&P Retail ETF is up; the Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR Fund is selling off. A world in which high gasoline prices are placing less pressure on household budgets is positive for more discretionary spending versus necessities. Checks out.

• Europe is typically much more adversely impacted by energy price shocks than the US. Accordingly, the iShares MSCI Eurozone ETF is outperforming the SPDR S&P 500 ETF. Checks out.

  • Zooming out, the iShares MSCI ACWI ex-US ETF is crushing SPY by over 1%. Checks out — that’s what was happening before the war was on anyone’s radar.

But... there’s also some weird stuff beneath the hood.

When global stocks outperform the US by a ton, it’s generally because tech is out of favor. After all, the US market is heavily weighted toward megacap tech giants. However, a big reason why ACWX is trouncing the US is because of how insanely well the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF and iShares MSCI Taiwan ETF are doing! Those countries, of course, are even more heavily levered to AI hardware than the US market. The new Street-high view on Micron in particular is fueling gains for Korean stocks, where fellow memory chip giants SK Hynix and Samsung are the biggest components.

The tech-heavy Invesco QQQ Trust is putting in a bigger gain than European stocks, as of 11 a.m. ET.

It’s extremely rare for Europe, a major portion of global equities, to be lagging US tech when ACWX is leaving SPY in the dust.

The combination of global equities outperforming by at least 1% while the Nasdaq 100 bests EZU hasn’t happened since December 16, 2022. If that holds, it would be only the sixth time this has happened in the past 15 years.

(My kingdom for an MSCI ACWI ex-US ex-Korea ETF... bonus points if you can throw in an ex-Taiwan, too!)

The lesson seems to be: peace is great; the small pieces that help the brains of the AI boom access information are even better.

TeraWulf shares are rising after the company announced it has acquired a 1-gigawatt hyperscale data center site in eastern Kentucky.

The project, known as the Muskie Data Campus, marks an expansion of the company’s digital infrastructure capabilities and accelerates TeraWulf’s transition from a bitcoin miner into an HPC and AI infrastructure provider. The newly acquired site spans 285 acres and is engineered to support more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity over time, with the first 500 megawatts scheduled to ramp up in the second half of 2028.

The Muskie Data Campus represents TeraWulf’s second major digital infrastructure campus in Kentucky, alongside the company’s 480-megawatt Justified Data campus in Hancock County.

“This acquisition further reinforces the strategy we discussed on our first quarter earnings call: securing and developing large-scale, power-advantaged sites capable of supporting the next generation of HPC workloads,” Paul Prager, chairman and CEO of TeraWulf, said. “As we said then, the defining constraint in this market is no longer computing hardware — it is power, transmission infrastructure, and execution certainty.”

TeraWulf reported strong Q1 earnings results in early May. While heavy capital expenditure resulted in a GAAP loss, the company generated $34 million in revenue. The stock is up more than 120% year to date.

Shares of Wolfspeed and Navitas Semiconductor are rising after power chip company Vicor boosted its Q2 guidance and a potential technological breakthrough by China’s Huawei is helping to boost US chip stocks with a big Asia footprint.

Vicor attributed the strong guidance in part to “royalties from an additional licensee to its patented power system technology.” Wolfspeed is a little more upstream from Vicor in the power chip industry as a silicon carbide producer.

Huawei, one of China’s national tech champions, said it’s developed a “LogicFolding” technology that will allow it to start producing 1.4-nanometer chips by 2031.

This announcement helped lift sentiment across Chinese semiconductor names. Semtech, another stock with historically elevated sales exposure to Asia, was up big in early trading but pared most of its gains. ASML is modestly lower, perhaps a nod to the idea that Huawei’s ability to manufacture chips this tiny without its top-notch EUV lithography machines (in light of export restrictions to China) undercuts its critical role in advanced semiconductor manufacturing.

(The irony of any US stocks going up on a Chinese tech self-sufficiency push is not lost on us, especially given competition from Chinese silicon carbide suppliers helped push Wolfspeed into Chapter 11 bankruptcy!)

TSMC, for its part, plans on having chips that small in mass production by 2028.

It’s different this time.

That’s the call from UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri, who more than tripled his price target on memory specialist Micron to $1,625 from $535. If his view were realized, the company would be worth north of $1.8 trillion.

Shares are surging 8% in early trading, and are up more than 780% over the past year. The AI boom’s brainpower needs to “remember” (that is, access) the information it’s processing, driving a spike in memory chip prices.

Despite Micron going up and to the right for months on end, Arcuri argues that a) its future profitability is still underappreciated, and b) investors should be willing to pay more for these earnings, because a large chunk of demand is already locked down.

Micron’s forward price-to-earnings ratio is about 8.25x versus 20.9x for the S&P 500 as a whole, which is effectively investors’ way of showing they expect the company’s pricing power and runaway profit growth will sour.

“We believe the market will start to put a more ‘normal’ multiple on the stock and Micron will continue to re-rate higher as more details emerge about the structural changes AI has driven to the entire memory complex,” he wrote.

Long-term purchasing agreements are providing strong visibility to the ample runway for high profits through 2029, per Arcuri, which will help the company avoid its typical boom-bust cycle.

These supply pacts “allow Micron to trade some near-term revenue for demand visibility and a smoother earnings profile,” he concluded.

The sunny sentiment on Micron is also lifting peers, with Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings all up between 2.8% and 3.9% as of 8:50 a.m. ET.

Server stocks are rallying as Dell, Super Micro Computer, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise ride the momentum of Hong Kong-based Lenovo. The PC maker’s stock rose 19% on Friday, hitting an all-time high, on record Q4 earnings.

Powering the positive earnings report was the company’s AI-related revenue, which grew 84% in the fourth quarter and now makes up over a third of total revenue. Investors seem to think the increased demand for servers could have trickle-down effects for other companies.

“The company’s results and commentary reinforced the outlook for strong AI-infrastructure demand while indicating resilient broader traditional server and storage spending,” wrote Woo Jin Ho, a senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “Lenovo’s $21 billion AI-server pipeline and remarks that demand is outpacing supply support Dell’s AI-demand momentum and point to robust orders.”

AI’s insatiable computing demand is reshaping the hardware industry and driving up server demand.

Dell will report first-quarter earnings on Thursday, May 28.

Fresh on the heels of releasing a Snapchat dupe, which sent Snap down earlier this month, Meta seems to be meddling with Reddit, quietly releasing a Reddit-like Facebook app called Forum yesterday. After news of the “dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and the communities you care about,” Reddit’s stock is down 4.5% today.

Last month, Reddit’s earnings report handily beat analysts’ expectations, but it continues to struggle with the perception that bigger tech companies — including Meta — investing heavily in AI will eat its lunch. The stock is down nearly 40% year-to-date.

Ross shares are rising after the company delivered strong Q1 results, with sales topping Wall Street’s projections.

The stock soared 6.3% just after the open.

Key numbers:

• Earnings per share of $2.02 vs. $1.47 year over year (estimate: $1.72).

• Sales of $6.01 billion, up 21% year over year (estimate: $5.61 billion).

• Comparable sales growth of 17% (estimate: 8.58%).

CEO Jim Conroy attributed the results to better traffic in stores. “Customer traffic was the primary driver of the strong sales trend as compelling merchandise assortments, higher customer acquisition and engagement from our ongoing marketing initiatives, and an improved in‑store experience are resonating with shoppers.”

The company also noted that transaction volume grew across all key demographics, including “income levels, ethnicities, and age groups, including younger customers.” Sales were also likely buoyed by standard seasonal tailwinds, including consumer spending from tax refunds.

Backed by the strong quarter, the company lifted its full-year targets. Ross now projects same-store sales growth of 6% to 7%, up from the prior forecast of 3% to 4%, topping Wall Street’s estimate of 4.64%. It boosted its annual EPS guidance to a range of $7.50 to $7.74, versus the prior outlook of $7.02 to $7.36.

Ross Stores has been one of the retail sector’s standout performers this year, rising around 20% year to date as of Thursday’s close.

Imax is on pace for its best trading day since 2021 following a Wall Street Journal report that it’s exploring a sale. Shares are up more than 15% in premarket trading on Friday.

The premium screen company has reportedly approached entertainment companies for a deal, though talks are early and may not come to fruition. Imax has been boosted in recent years by its higher ticket prices — a K-shaped trend in movie theaters — and last year accounted for more than 5% of domestic box office sales.

Theatrical release windows have become a large debate in Hollywood this year, amid the bidding war between Paramount and Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery. It’s unclear if an entertainment buyer would favor its own films for Imax over a rival’s.

In the first quarter, Imax booked $81.4 million in sales, beating Wall Street expectations but down about 6.5% from last year, when China’s “Ne Zha 2” smashed records.