AI drone company Swarmer soars on IPO debut

AI drone software company Swarmer soared 520% on Tuesday, its first day as a public company, and shares continued to climb in premarket trading on Wednesday.

Swarmer sold 3 million shares at $5 each, raising ~$15 million in total and giving it an initial market cap of about $60 million. By the time the closing bell rang on Tuesday, it was worth $382.8 million, according to FactSet.

Swarmer makes AI software that allows operators to coordinate large fleets of unmanned drones. Its technology has been used on the battlefield in Ukraine, and the company’s IPO comes amid the ongoing conflict in Iran.

The company made $310,000 in revenue in 2025, down 6% on the prior year, while its total losses also ballooned from $2.1 million in 2024 to approximately $8.5 million in 2025.

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Hyperscalers and hard hats

If you build it, gains will come

Matt Phillips

Luke Kawa

Federal Reserve leaves rates unchanged; dot plot still signals lower rates in the cards for 2026

A relatively dovish reaction function from the US central bank.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell Holds An News Conference On Interest Rates

Matt Phillips2h

Constellation, Talen, and NRG surge as BNP analysts see “golden (AI)ge” ahead for them

Power producers Talen Energy, Constellation Energy, and NRG jumped Wednesday, benefiting in part from a rosy write-up by analysts at BNP Paribas, who launched coverage of all three at “outperform” and argued that the AI energy trade — a big AI-related winner in recent years that has lagged a bit recently — is due for a second wind.

That view was in a broad note on the independent power producer segment of utilities industry that the analysts published Wednesday, titled “The Golden (AI)ge of IPPs.”

Here’s the gist of it:

US independent power producers (IPPs) have lagged the AI basket for 6+ months, after garnering much attention in 2023-1H25. Investors are caught up in the minutia of perceived headwinds: underwhelming pace of power purchase agreement deals, distributed behind-the-meter solutions stealing the ‘time-to-power’ edge, pressure for data centers to bring generation and not tighten the grid, etc.

And yet, as we demonstrate, despite all this noise, the wave of rising load is at the cusp of an acceleration that will nonetheless overwhelm new supply—well into the 2030s, in our view. Hop on or risk missing the resurgent AI trade this decade.

BNP’s price targets for the stocks — Constellation ($407), NRG ($232) and Talen ($549) — implied gains of 32%, 50%, and 68% respectively. (Though today’s gains would reduce those potential upside targets somewhat for new buyers.)

US independent power producers (IPPs) have lagged the AI basket for 6+ months, after garnering much attention in 2023-1H25. Investors are caught up in the minutia of perceived headwinds: underwhelming pace of power purchase agreement deals, distributed behind-the-meter solutions stealing the ‘time-to-power’ edge, pressure for data centers to bring generation and not tighten the grid, etc.

And yet, as we demonstrate, despite all this noise, the wave of rising load is at the cusp of an acceleration that will nonetheless overwhelm new supply—well into the 2030s, in our view. Hop on or risk missing the resurgent AI trade this decade.

Luke Kawa6h

Chinese tech giants rally after hiking AI prices

ADRs of Alibaba and Baidu are gaining in early trading after the Chinese tech giants announced AI price hikes.

Alibaba said that it’s hiking the price of its AI chips by up to 34% and raising the cost of cloud storage by 30%, with Baidu planning on increasing AI cloud product prices by up to 30%.

Tech companies in China and the US are aiming to show that AI is not just a technological breakthrough but also a core tool for moneymaking. And, well, raising the price of what you sell is one of the most basic ways to make more money!

“Baidu’s decision to raise AI cloud product prices by as much as 30%, according to Bloomberg News, is a positive development that signals a shift toward monetization rather than price competition,” wrote Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Robert Lea and Jasmine Lyu. “Baidu’s move mirrors similar steps by Tencent, Alibaba, and Zhipu, catalyzed by surging demand for agentic AI following the launch of OpenClaw.”

J. Edward Moreno

Optics stocks rise as executives signal more AI-related demand

Optics companies have rallied this year on expectations of higher demand for the components they make.

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