A black bear casually sits in a dumpster (Getty Images)

Markets end the week in the red as Broadcom and Oracle concerns drag the entire AI trade down

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 were all negative on Friday.

12/12/25 4:02PM

The markets ended Friday down, as negative sentiment following Broadcom’s earnings combined with a Bloomberg report saying Oracle is delaying some data centers for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027 weighed on everything connected to the AI trade, from data center trades like Sandisk and Western Digital to AI REITs like Equinix and Digital Realty as well as other AI-geared stocks like Constellation Energy, Arista Networks, and Corning.

Oracle’s subsequent denial of the report pared some of its losses but did little to reverse the trend, and while Nvidia had gotten a boost premarket from a report it was considering boosting H200 production, it lost all those gains and finished lower. AMD also suffered from the AI worries, as it had previously signed a substantial deal with Oracle to supply 50,000 chips for its data centers.

All three major US stock indexes were negative on Friday. Tech was the worst-performing sector ETF by far and sank the Nasdaq 100 nearly 2%. The S&P 500, which just notched a closing all-time high, gave up all those gains and more to end down for the week.

Stocks that moved higher:

Cannabis stocks including Tilray, Canopy Growth, and SNDL Inc. soared on the reports that the Trump administration is close to reclassifying marijuana.
Planet Labs rose after aerospace and defense analysts at Citi initiated coverage with a “buy/high risk” rating and $19 price target.
Lululemon soared after posting better-than-expected Q3 results after the bell yesterday, with an upbeat full-year outlook and announcement that its CEO will depart in January.
After a good night’s rest, investors decided they liked Rivian’s AI Day event after all, sending the stock surging.

Stocks that moved lower:

Shares of kid-focused gaming platform Roblox fell after JPMorgan downgraded its rating to “neutral” from “overweight,” saying hits like “Steal a Brainrot” are past their peak.
Fermi dropped after it disclosed that the first tenant for its planned Project Matador power grid site has terminated its $150 million contract.

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“The Big Short” investor Michael Burry — famous for betting against the 2008 housing bubble — just warned of a major risk in Nvidia’s latest annual report, pointing to a sixfold surge in purchase obligations over the past year.

In a Substack post Thursday, Burry called the increase from $16.1 billion to $95.2 billion in just 12 months “troubling,” noting that Nvidia has been forced to place noncancelable purchase orders well before knowing the final demand for its AI chips. The surge is partly tied to supplier TSMC requiring longer-term contracts, he added.

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Vistra beats Q4 earnings expectations for adjusted EBITDA, but dips on income decline

Power provider Vistra, a key player in the AI energy trade, reported better-than-expected adjusted earnings results early Thursday, but shares dipped in early trading as Q4 net income dropped.

The Texas-based company, which supplies nuclear- and natural gas-fueled power to wholesale and retail markets, reported:

Net income of $233 million, a decline of 52% from Q4 2024.
Adjusted EBITDA from ongoing operations of $1.74 billion vs. the $1.71 billion expected by Wall Street analysts.
Vistra maintained previously issued guidance for full-year EBITDA from ongoing operations and adjusted free cash flow from ongoing operations.

Vistra shares soared 258% in 2024 amid a flurry of excitement over the AI energy boom. Last year was more muted, with the stock rising 17%. So far in 2026, shares were up roughly 9% before the report.

Vistra beats fourth-quarter core profit estimates on AI-driven power demand

Net income of $233 million, a decline of 52% from Q4 2024.
Adjusted EBITDA from ongoing operations of $1.74 billion vs. the $1.71 billion expected by Wall Street analysts.
Vistra maintained previously issued guidance for full-year EBITDA from ongoing operations and adjusted free cash flow from ongoing operations.

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Sandisk rises on partnership with SK Hynix to standardize memory chip architecture tailored for AI data centers

Sandisk is up 3% in premarket trading on Thursday after it began its global standardization strategy of high-bandwidth flash (HBF) memory solutions with SK Hynix.

SK Hynix commented in a press release on Thursday that “by making HBF an industry standard, together with Sandisk, we will lay the foundation for the entire AI ecosystem to grow together,” adding that the companies will set up a dedicated workstream to work on the standardization under the Open Compute Project, the world’s largest organization dealing with data center technologies.

First debuted last February, Sandisk’s HBF technology lies in between ultrafast high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and high-capacity SSDs. That is, these have more storage capacity than HBMs, but are still fast enough to be utilized in AI inferencing (albeit not as quick as HBM).

Sandisk has previously argued that this hybrid architecture is central to AI services that need user applications but require a significant amount of fast interconnect between GPUs. The latest announcement also notes that HBF technology is expected to be more cost-efficient compared to alternatives of similar scale.

The launch, which was shared in an kickoff event on Thursday evening, starts SK Hynix and Sandisk’s workflow, which was announced when the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding “to standardize the specification, define technology requirements and explore the creation of a technology ecosystem” last August, per Sandisk’s press release at the time. Ultimately, by collaborating with SK Hynix, one of the three key HBM suppliers, to standardize and commercialize the technology, Sandisk is manufacturing somewhat of a first-mover advantage to offer the system-level “AI-optimized memory architecture” required for AI inference markets, rather than focusing on the performance of a single chip element.