The Information’s profile of custom chip specialist Broadcom includes this tidbit:

“And now Microsoft is also in talks to design future chips with Broadcom, which would involve Microsoft switching its business from Marvell, another maker of custom chips, according to one person involved in the discussions.”

Shares of Marvell Technology briefly dipped into the red after this report hit the wires, but then pared that drop to trade modestly higher. The company codesigns the Maia line of ASICs for Microsoft that are custom-built for Azure. Microsoft is its second-biggest hyperscaler client, behind Amazon.

Marvell tumbled on a ho-hum earnings report earlier this week before going on to surge after CEO Matt Murphy offered a $10 billion revenue target for its upcoming fiscal year, which was above analysts’ expectations.

Perhaps this is a bit of Information fatigue, given how Microsoft was quick to deny a report from the outlet earlier this week about how the tech giant lowered its sales targets for AI products.

There’s not much rhyme or reason to it, but memory stocks are ending the week with a stellar showing.

Shares of high-bandwidth memory specialist Micron, hard disk drive sellers Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital, and flash memory company Sandisk are all rising today.

Three of these stocks dropped about 20% in November as credit risk seeping into AI and a downturn in speculative momentum stocks weighed on the theme, with Sandisk faring the worst.

Micron, Western Digital, and Seagate have all since rebounded strongly and are about 5% or less from reclaiming all-time highs, while Sandisk has made up the least ground.

While GPUs (and, more recently, TPUs) get most of the headlines, data centers also need a boatload of memory chips that store information and feed it to those processors.

Ulta’s latest makeover is happening on Wall Street. Shares leapt Friday morning as analysts hiked their price targets after the beauty retailer topped Q3 estimates and raised its full-year outlook after the bell Thursday.

Earnings came in at $5.14 per share, handily beating analyst expectations of $4.64. Revenue also topped estimates at $2.86 billion, compared with the $2.72 billion expected. Ulta has benefited from resilient beauty spending, even as consumers pull back elsewhere and hunt more aggressively for discounts.

Ulta now expects full-year net sales of about $12.3 billion, up from a prior forecast of $12.0 billion to $12.1 billion. The retailer also lifted its earnings outlook to $25.20 to $25.50 per share, up from $23.85 to $24.30 previously. This marks Ulta’s second straight quarter of hiking its sales and profit forecast. Analysts are taking note:

• Goldman Sachs maintained its “buy” rating and raised its price target to $642 from $584.

• DA Davidson maintained its “buy” rating and raised its price target to $650 from $625.

• JPMorgan maintained its “outperform” rating and raised its price target to $647 from $606.

• Baird maintained its “outperform” rating and hiked its price target to $670 from $600.

• Telsey Advisory maintained its “outperform” rating and raised its price target to $640 from $610.

• Piper Sandler maintained its “outperform” rating and raised its price target to $615 from $590.

• Canaccord Genuity maintained its “neutral” rating and raised its price target to $674 from $654.

Another big four airline has put a price tag on the 43-day government shutdown.

Southwest Airlines on Friday said lower revenue due to a temporary decline in demand during the shutdown, together with higher fuel costs, will ding its annual earnings before interest and taxes by between $100 million and $300 million. The carrier lowered its full-year EBIT outlook to $500 million, down from a prior range of $600 million to $800 million.

According to Southwest’s filing, bookings have returned to previous expectations following the end of the shutdown. Its shares dipped down about 1% in premarket trading.

The carrier joins Delta Air Lines in assigning a cost to the government closure. Earlier this week, Delta said the shutdown would cost it $200 million in the fourth quarter.

What would you, as a viewer, rather watch:

Every new piece of content that’s appeared on Netflix since the pandemic started, or all the original series ever produced by HBO as well as the 100-year-plus portfolio of Warner Bros. films?

That’s one lens through which to view the streaming giant’s agreement to buy Warner Bros. studio and streaming assets for an equity value of $72 billion or an enterprise value of $82.7 billion (which factors in the debt Netflix is assuming from the acquired entity).

Since the end of 2019, Netflix has sent over $87 billion in cash out the door to add content assets to its vast library.

The good news is that presumably, you won’t have to make that choice. Presumably, in the event that this merger is approved and any existing distribution deals lapse, this library will be rolled up under one roof. That’ll probably entail higher subscription costs for Netflix subscribers; what the net cost for those who subscribe to both services ends up being is one of many things that are very much up in the air.

“By adding the deep film and TV libraries and HBO and HBO Max programming, Netflix members will have even more high-quality titles from which to choose,” per the press release. “This also allows Netflix to optimize its plans for consumers, enhancing viewing options and expanding access to content.”

Oklo has no revenues and an extremely high valuation.

Put the two together and this happens:

After the close on Thursday, a filing showed that the nuclear energy company entered into a pact with various financial institutions to sell up to $1.5 billion worth of its stock in an at-the-market equity offering program.

Shares are down about 5.5% as of 7:20 a.m. ET.

This is Oklo’s third equity offering of the year, per Bloomberg data.

The stock had been on a tear recently ahead of this announcement, rising nearly 30% over the prior three sessions amid elevated options market activity.

SoFi Technologies is down more than 7% in early trading on Friday after the company revealed plans to raise $1.5 billion through a public stock offering, with shares to be priced at $27.50 each — a discount of roughly 7% from Thursday’s closing price of $29.60.

The offering includes a 30-day option for the underwriters to purchase up to 8,181,818 more shares, equivalent to an additional 15% of the nominal offering, which is expected to close December 8.

Proceeds from the offering will go toward “general corporate purposes,” SoFi said, including “enhancing capital position, increasing optionality and enabling further efficiency of capital management, and funding incremental growth and business opportunities.”

The sale comes as SoFi’s stock has been on a tear this year — nearly doubling (up 97%) in 2025 before this morning’s slump. The company also posted better-than-expected Q3 sales and profits back in October, driven by growth outside its original lending business, including trading, wealth management, mortgages, and credit cards.

CEO Anthony Noto has repeatedly emphasized SoFi’s push beyond lending. In November, the company launched a priority waitlist for SoFi Crypto, enabling users to trade dozens of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, ethereum, and solana.

The stock is hovering around the offering price of $27.50 on Friday.

Netflix this morning announced that it will acquire the Warner Bros. side of the Warner Bros. Discovery business — which includes its studio and streaming businesses — in a deal worth $82.7 billion, or $27.75 per share.

Per the press release:

“The transaction is expected to close after the previously announced separation of WBD’s Global Networks division, Discovery Global, into a new publicly-traded company, which is now expected to be completed in Q3 2026.”

The streaming giant beat out competition from other suitors like Comcast and Paramount Skydance, the latter of which had been crying foul about the sales process just yesterday, having sought a deal for the WBD business in full, including its vast array of networks, which will now be spun out as Discovery Global.

Unless halted by regulators, when the deal closes in the estimated 12 to 18 months, Netflix will pick up IP such as the “Harry Potter” franchise and DC universe through the Warner Bros. studio division, as well as the company’s burgeoning streaming division, including HBO Max — an addition that one recent report suggested might not significantly boost Netflix’s market share, sending shares tumbling on Wednesday.

While it’s still far too early to say what impact the potential deal will have on the biggest film and TV streaming business in the world, and the wider world of entertainment in general, NFLX investors haven’t seemed hugely enthused by the prospect throughout the process, and shares have slipped as much as ~3.2% in premarket trading.

US senators are on the verge of introducing a bill that would block Nvidia from selling its H200 or Blackwell chips to China for 30 months, the Financial Times reports. The H200 is Nvidia’s best chip from the Hopper generation, while the Blackwell line is its current flagship offering.

Shares of the chip designer are little changed in the wake of this report, still up more than 1% on the session. The reaction makes sense, seeing as previous positive indications on Nvidia’s ability to sell advanced chips to China failed to inspire much positive momentum in its shares.

The stock got a short-lived jolt higher (that didn’t last the day!) on November 21 after Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration had discussed the possibility of selling its H200 chips to China.

Nvidia has effectively been shut out of China’s AI market in 2025. First, export restrictions meant it could no longer sell the H20, a nerfed version of its Hopper chip, to the world’s second-largest economy. After that export ban was lifted, demand from China “never materialized,” per Nvidia CFO Colette Kress. Reports indicate that China banned its leading technology giants from purchasing these semiconductors, instead pushing them toward domestic alternatives.

President Donald Trump had mused about allowing Nvidia to sell Blackwell chips to China prior to his meeting with Chinese President Xi in late October, but failed to do so. The two leaders did not discuss the topic at that time.

Per the FT, this upcoming bill would be a bipartisan effort, being cosponsored by the leading Republican and Democrat members of the Senate Foreign Relations East Asia subcommittee.

Like their quantum computing counterparts, AI-linked energy plays are benefiting from an explosion of bullish options activity on Thursday.

• Oklo is up double digits with call volumes above 106,000 as of 2:46 p.m. ET, more than double its 20-day average for a full session, with a put/call ratio of about 0.6. Call options with a strike price of $110 that expire this Friday (which are now in-the-money thanks to today’s surge) are seeing the most activity.

• Nuscale, another nuclear energy play, has seen nearly 140,000 call options change hands versus a 20-day average of 51,073.

• And fuel cell company Bloom Energy has traded nearly 80,000 calls, roughly twice its 20-day average, with a put/call ratio of about 0.3.

During his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast released on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked up the potential for nuclear energy, saying, “In the next six to seven years I think you are going to see a whole bunch of small nuclear reactors.”

This adds to the evidence that the speculative bid is back in a big way after smaller stocks tied to the AI boom and quantum computing cratered from mid-October through most of November as credit risk began to seep into the AI trade.

Space stocks AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab all soared Thursday amid a recovery in the high-beta momentum class of shares coveted by some retail traders.

(High-beta momo stocks are basically shares that have been on a winning streak for a while, and tend to go up a lot more than the overall market on positive days. Goldman Sachs includes all three of the aforementioned space stocks in its themed basket of such shares.)

There’s little other fundamental news out there on the companies themselves.

But a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI impresario Sam Altman has been toying with the idea of entering the space industry, potentially standing up a rival to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service, may also be contributing.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes these stocks seem to trade on a what’s-bad-for-the-Musk-empire-is-good-for-us-and-vice-versa vibe.

The calendar says December, but the price action is starting to look a lot more like September to me:

Quantum computing companies IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are all up at least 7% as of 11:04 a.m. ET, buoyed by a wave of bullish options activity.

• Nearly 50,000 calls in IonQ have already changed hands, well above the 20-day average for a full session, with activity concentrated in strikes from $50 to $55 in contracts that expire between Friday and mid-January. Its put/call ratio is near 0.2, versus an average of over 1 for the past 20 sessions.

• More than 65,000 calls have traded in Rigetti, a hair shy of its full 20-day average. Like IonQ, options activity has a bullish tilt, with a put/call ratio of about 0.7 versus a 20-day average of roughly 1.2.

• D-Wave, which received positive commentary from Evercore ISI on Wednesday, isn’t seeing call activity as elevated as its peers, but the options action is also very skewed toward the bull side, with a put/call ratio of less than 0.3 versus a 20-session average of 0.7.

Pure-play quantum computing stocks nearly doubled from late August to late September amid heavy options market activity thanks to reports on government support for the sector, M&A activity, tech breakthroughs, and a flurry of price target hikes by Wall Street.

Hims & Hers rose in early trading after it announced its acquisition of Livewell, a Canadian telehealth company, marking its official entrance to that market.

The company announced in July that it would expand into Canada by 2026, taking advantage of the patent expiry for semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster GLP-1s, Ozempic and Wegovy. Hims said Thursday that it would do that through an all-cash acquisition of Livewell.

Novo’s patent on semaglutide is set to expire in Canada in January. It would be the first time generics for the blockbuster GLP-1 drugs are available anywhere, and generic drugmaker Sandoz International has already announced plans to make copies of the drug. In the US, Hims sells copycat versions of Novo’s drugs, which has led to conflict between the companies.

On Wednesday, Hims announced that it would purchase YourBio, a device that uses “bladeless microneedles thinner than an eyelash” to collect blood samples, in another all-cash deal. According to its latest quarterly filing, the company had $345.8 million in cash and cash equivalents.

Symbiotic was among the robotics companies that popped on Wednesday, gaining nearly 10% on the news that the Trump administration was on the precipice of a major push to support the industry.

So naturally, management thinks it’s a good time to sell shares — and its largest shareholder, SoftBank, agrees.

After the close on Wednesday, management announced an offering of 10 million shares, with 6.5 million of that as a primary offering from the company to raise money for general corporate purposes, and 3.5 million from a secondary sale by SoftBank, which owns over one-third of its shares.

The stock cratered on the announcement, giving back all of its one-day gains and then some.

Symbiotic went public in 2022 through a SPAC merger with a SoftBank-backed affiliate.

In October, SoftBank sold its entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia to meet an upcoming payment to OpenAI to finance its equity position in the company. Since SoftBank is slated to pay the ChatGPT maker more than $20 billion this month, it would appear that this is another step toward raising the needed cash for that position.

We’ll see if this divestment makes SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son cry.

Snowflake is down 9% in premarket trading on Thursday after the cloud company gave an operating margin outlook that fell short of analyst expectations, reflecting investors’ worries about the profitability of new AI-based products.

The company now expects its adjusted operating income margin for the three months ending in January to come in around 7%, lower than the 8.5% projected by analyst data compiled by Bloomberg. Snowflake also sees product revenue of about $1.2 billion for the coming quarter.

Despite the softer outlook, Snowflake’s most recent quarter was a pretty solid one, with Q3 revenue jumping 29% year over year to $1.21 billion (2% ahead of consensus estimates), driven by higher product revenue, on which CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy commented in a press release that “Snowflake Intelligence, our enterprise AI agent, saw the fastest adoption ramp in Snowflake history.” Earnings also beat, with adjusted earnings per share coming in at at $0.35, 13% ahead of estimates.

The stock’s drop shows how “the bar was high” for Snowflake going into earnings, according to BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski, as investors had high hopes for the company that rose nearly 70% this year even when rival stocks slumped amid fears of AI disruption.

On Wednesday, the company also announced a $200 million multiyear deal with Anthropic that would make the AI startup’s Claude model available within the Snowflake data environment to more than “12,600 global customers across Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure.”