XRP is seeing the strongest relief bounce on Friday among its peers following the broad market downturn in crypto.

XRP hit its lowest mark since 2024 on Thursday, but the price of the cryptocurrency has increased roughly 20% in the last 24 hours, outpacing bitcoin and ethereum, which have seen 6.5% and 5.2% gains, respectively. Dogecoin has climbed 8% and solana is up 5% in the same period, data from CoinGecko shows.

XRP's "price tends to amplify market movements," said Kaiko research analyst Thomas Probst to Sherwood. "Markets are experiencing a phase of liquidity contraction with increasing volatility. Therefore, rebounds can be frequent, even if they are rarely sustained over the long term."

The relief comes amidst increased activity on the XRP Ledger. Crypto analytics firm Santiment flagged that, during the dip, XRP Ledger saw a four-month high of “whale transactions” over $100,000 and a six-month high of unique addresses on the network in one eight-hour candle. “These are both major signals of a price reversal for any asset,” the firm said. 

Ripple, the company closely tied to XRP and its largest holder, said XRP is “at the heart of every institutional use case,” such as stablecoin payments, tokenized collateral, and lending markets, according to a Thursday blog post. 

In an updated roadmap for the XRP Ledger, the firm outlined upcoming features that act as a “building block for composable financial ecosystems.” These features include a lending protocol, confidential transfers using zero-knowledge proofs, and a new layer of programmability to escrow primitives. 

Meanwhile, spot XRP ETFs absorbed $5.9 million worth of inflows on Thursday, helping the week remain in the black at nearly $24 million.

Now that the big dogs of cloud computing have all reported their quarterly earnings, we can step back and get a sense of the searing demand that AI is driving toward their businesses.

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) — signed contracts for cloud computing services that can’t yet be filled and haven’t yet hit the books.

Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 TRILLION backlog of revenue.

This gargantuan demand could be good news for the “neoscalers” like CoreWeave and Nebius. But even CoreWeave is reporting a substantial backlog of its own — $55 billion last quarter.

The remarkable run-up in prices for memory chips continued into early February, analysts at Bernstein Research say, driven largely by data center demand from hyperscalers and cloud service providers (CSP).

Prices for NAND flash memory wafers — a type of memory used in devices, as it retains data even when powered down — soared 35% between the end of 2025 and February 2.

Spot prices for DRAM — ubiquitous short-term data storage chips — jumped about 28% in that period. But that massively understates the remarkable shift in pricing for what were long seen as commodity tech hardware inputs. DRAM prices are more than 2,000% over the last year, while NAND prices are up more than 600% in that period.

The ongoing momentum provides still more support for memory chip plays like Micron and Sandisk, which have been big market winners in recent months.

In a note published earlier this week, Bernstein Research analysts wrote:

“The parabolic price hike continued in Jan. Indicated price increase for 1QCY26 is much stronger than we expected and we hence see upside to our near term memory pricing projection. Unrelenting CSP demand remained the main driver. PC and Mobile demand hasn’t been destroyed yet because of lean inventory & pull-forward purchase. Going forward price hike is expected to continue but likely at a slower rate, as PC and Mobile demand should contract meaningfully this year. Price however may stay elevated throughout this year, supported by CSP demand.”

Fuel cell-based power provider Bloom Energy posted better-than-expected Q4 earnings and sales results after the bell on Thursday, sending the stock higher aftermarket and into early Friday trading. Here’s some of the positive chatter from analysts reacting to the bullish results:

Barclays: “What to know: 1) 2026 guide well above the Street for all metrics; 2) Product backlog comes in at $6.0bn with services backlog of $14.0 bn, reflecting 100% attach rate on new bookings.”

Morgan Stanley: “An inflection in growth is now beginning to show up in the financials. Significant 4Q25 earnings beat, product backlog up 2.5x, and 2026 revenue guidance meeting our Street-high forecast: >50% YoY as demand begins to ramp. We stay OW, raise PT to $184 on recent project wins.”

JP Morgan: “We are adjusting our estimates and introducing FY28 estimates with this note. Our YE26 price target goes to $166, from $154. While the stock has significantly outperformed YTD, we maintain our Overweight rating and believe that additional contract announcements should provide further positive catalysts and potentially increased visibility into our unit shipment vs margin sensitivity analysis (see below).”

Evercore ISI: “The most noticeable and arguably most anticipated metric Bloom provided was its current product backlog which currently stands at $6B representing a ~2.5x increase YoY, with total current backlog (product and services) ballooning to $20B. These impressive backlog metrics should provide confidence in the company’s ability to deliver on its newly established $3.1-$3.1B 2026 revenue target (vs. cons. of ~$2.1B) and double its non-GAAP operating income ($450M midpoint vs. $221M 2025A).”

Stellantis shares are tumbling on Friday, down as much as 25% in trading in Milan and its US listing suffering similarly in the premarket, after the Jeep owner announced it would take €22 billion (~$26.5 billion) worth of charges related to scaling down its electric vehicle ambitions.

Announcing a “reset” of its business, Stellantis detailed that the charges “largely reflect the cost of over-estimating the pace of the energy transition that distanced us from many car buyers’ real-world needs, means and desires,” as well as “previous poor operational execution.” The company’s board has also authorized the company to issue up to €5 billion of nonconvertible subordinated perpetual hybrid bonds, in order to preserve “a strong balance sheet and liquidity position” while the business looks to get back to positive free cash flow generation.

The breakdown of the losses are as follows:

• €14.7 billion for changing product plans (largely reflecting significantly reduced expectations for battery electric vehicle products).

  • Write-offs related to canceled products of €2.9 billion.

  • Impairment of platforms of €6.0 billion.

  • €5.8 billion of the sum will be cash payments spread over the next four years, relating to “cancelled products as well as other ongoing BEV products whose volumes are now expected to be considerably below prior projections.”

• €2.1 billion of charges related to the resizing of the EV supply chain.

  • €0.7 billion of that will be cash payments also spread over the next four years.

• €5.4 billion related to other changes in the company’s operations.

Stellantis’ strong bet on electric vehicles under former boss Carlos Tavares has been de-emphasized since Antonio Filosa became the CEO in June 2025, but this morning’s announcement suggests a much more significant shift in strategy.

The company also noted that these initial measures have returned its business to positive volume growth, sharing in a separate report that the company notched 1.5 million units shipped in Q4 2025, up 9% year on year.

Stellantis will host a call at 8 a.m. ET to discuss the preliminary results, before releasing its full-year report on February 26.

The company also said it will not pay an annual dividend in 2026 and announced that it agreed to sell its 49% stake in battery manufacturer NextStar Energy to LG Energy Solution.

Investors are reacting premarket to US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary signaling a crackdown on unapproved drugs that are marketed as being similar to FDA-approved products.

In an X post on Thursday, Makary said the FDA would “take swift action against companies mass-marketing illegal copycat drugs, claiming they are similar to FDA-approved products,” adding that the agency “cannot verify the quality, safety, or effectiveness” of such products.

While Makary’s post didn’t single out specific companies, it came shortly after telehealth firm Hims & Hers rolled out a much cheaper compounded version of Novo Nordisk’s newly launched Wegovy pill, starting at $49 a month. Hims’ product is not FDA-approved and has not undergone clinical trials to prove safety and efficacy, and Novo yesterday threatened legal and regulatory action.

The launch had initially sparked a sell-off in shares of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the latter of which is expected to debut its own oral weight-loss pill in April and has pledged lower pricing.

Following Makary’s comments, Hims shares have fallen about 6% as of 6 a.m. ET, while Novo and Lilly partially erased earlier losses, rising 7.5% and 3.8%, respectively.

Last quarter was one for the record books when it came to Big Tech’s purchases of property and equipment. Combined, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta spent nearly $400 billion on capex, sans leases, in total last year, mostly in service of building out the AI infrastructure that they hope will furnish their futures.

And 2026 is only getting more expensive.

The four are expected to spend 50% more in 2026 than in 2025: roughly $600 billion. Amazon said it’s on the hook for $200 billion in capex this year, while Google expects to spend between $175 billion and $185 billion. Not too far behind, Meta estimated its 2026 capex would be $115 billion to $135 billion. Microsoft didn’t give an estimate, but analysts have its 2026 calendar year capex at around $114 billion. However, it should be noted that analysts’ expectations for 2026 were way lower than the reality for the rest.