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Nebius soars after signing AI infrastructure deal with Meta worth up to $27 billion over 5 years

Nebius is skyrocketing in early trading on Monday, up nearly 14% as of 8 a.m. ET, after the Amsterdam-based company announced a new five-year deal with Meta worth as much as $27 billion.

The social media giant will initially buy dedicated AI computing capacity across multiple locations for $12 billion, which will be one of the first large-scale deployments of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, according to the company’s press release, with delivery beginning in early 2027.

Meta will also buy an additional $15 billion worth of Nebius’ planned capacity if it’s not sold to other customers over the same five-year period.

Nebius added in the press release that its guidance for 2026, in which the company is forecasting an annualized revenue run rate of $7 billion to $9 billion, per its Q4 earnings results, remains unchanged, signaling that the gains from the new deal will likely start rolling in after this fiscal year. This latest deal with Meta, which adds to their previous $3 billion deal announced in November, also notably relies on its partnership with another Big Tech company, Nvidia, which recently invested another $2 billion in Nebius.

This news of another major hyperscaler deal is sparking a bid for many of the other so-called neocloud companies, like CoreWeave, IREN, Applied Digital, Cipher Mining, and Riot Platforms, which also sell hardware and cloud capacity to AI infrastructure-obsessed tech giants.

For Meta, the deal underscores the company’s current financial focus: capital is to be used to expand in AI as quickly as possible, but spending in other areas is to be more cautious. Over the weekend, Reuters reported that the company was looking at layoffs that could affect more than 20% of its staff.

So far, dropping tens of billions of dollars on talent and compute capacity hasn’t catapulted Meta to the top of the AI leaderboards — just last week, The New York Times reported that the company was delaying the release of its Avocado model because it simply wasn’t good enough.

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Bitcoin’s push toward $74,000 leads crypto-linked stocks higher

Crypto-linked stocks such as Coinbase, MARA Holdings, Strategy, Cipher Mining, and IREN are up early as bitcoin’s recent bounce continues.

Shortly before 9 a.m. ET, bitcoin was trading around $74,000, near its highest levels since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28 that marked the start of open hostilities.

Bitcoin is up roughly 25% since it slipped below $60,000 in intraday trading on February 6. Crypto watchers are spotlighting the neighborhood of roughly $77,800 — near the 50-day moving average — as the next price point to watch to see whether the recovery could stick.

Shortly before 9 a.m. ET, bitcoin was trading around $74,000, near its highest levels since the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28 that marked the start of open hostilities.

Bitcoin is up roughly 25% since it slipped below $60,000 in intraday trading on February 6. Crypto watchers are spotlighting the neighborhood of roughly $77,800 — near the 50-day moving average — as the next price point to watch to see whether the recovery could stick.

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When Jensen Huang speaks, Nvidia usually falls

Ahead of Nvidia’s GTC keynote address this afternoon, I’ll make a confession: I find often find myself a bit entranced when CEO Jensen Huang speaks. It’s something about his oration and imagination — and the ability to back that up with the products that enable ever-increasing sales and profits.

However, lately, the market has been anything but impressed. Through 2025 and 2026, most of Nvidia’s major events (earning reports, CES, or GTC) were met with selling pressure.

That’s a track record the CEO will be looking to improve upon during today’s keynote address, slated to begin at 2 p.m. ET. And he’s being spotted to an early lead, with shares up a little less than 2% as of 10:42 a.m. ET.

The GTC, or GPU Technology Conference, is Nvidia’s twice-a-year event to discuss its outlook and product roadmap.

Note: On all of Nvidia’s down days in the above chart, shares also underperformed the S&P 500 on the session.

High-profile events have not, by and large, been positive catalysts for the stock. This probably doesn’t have much to do with anything the leader of the world’s most valuable publicly traded company actually says, and is more a function of how high expectations get any time you can circle an Nvidia date on the calendar.

The two recent exceptions were:

Update: A previous version of this post/chart misstated the reaction associated with Nvidia’s Q1 2026 earnings.

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Hon Hai’s profit miss is still good news for the AI boom

Major Nvidia and Apple supplier Hon Hai (better known as Foxconn) reported a set of mixed Q4 results.

The electronic components manufacturer posted revenues of NT$2.61 trillion, ahead of estimates for NT$2.45 trillion, but net income of NT$45.21 billion came in below the anticipated NT$59.86 billion.

While this is one way to interpret those results...

...the other would be to note that revenues beat expectations, that its AI-linked business’s sales beat those of its smartphone division in Q4 (the peak season for the latter), and that the company said “the AI server sector is expected to see strong growth in 2026.”

And then there’s this headline from Dow Jones, to underline the point:

Foxconn Expects 2026 AI Server Rack Shipments to Grow Exponentially

There’s... no bad news about AI demand here, and the market seems to agree, with Nvidia up 1.1% in premarket trading as of 7:17 a.m. ET on Monday.

Most likely, we’ll get some more reassuring commentary on the state of the ongoing spending tech campaign when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote address at the chip designer’s GTC in San Jose.

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Micron rises after closing acquisition of PSMC’s Tongluo P5 site, plans to nearly double clean room manufacturing space

Micron rose 4% in premarket trading on Monday after the memory manufacturer announced that it had closed the acquisition of Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation’s (PSMC) P5 site in Tongluo, Taiwan, which had been announced in mid-January.

The rally comes amid big gains for the other big high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chip companies. South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix rose 2.8% and 7%, respectively, on Monday.

In addition to the closing of the deal, Micron plans to begin construction of a similar-sized second cleanroom at this site by the end of fiscal 2026. That will add approximately 270,000 square feet of space, in addition to a retrofitting of the existing clean room, at roughly 300,000 square feet, to begin in March, per the companys press release.

The expansion plans will therefore almost double the site’s clean room space — rooms that are specifically engineered to minimize potential contaminants and regulate variables like temperature, moisture, and pressure, which is essential to the production of microscopic chips.

Both clean rooms at the new site will act as an extension of Micron’s vertically integrated mega campus in Taichung, located some 15 miles away from the site, to expand its supply of DRAM products, including HBM, to support surging AI demand.

The Tongluo site, as a whole, is expected to meaningfully support Micron’s shipments starting fiscal 2028, as the company continues to scale up in Asia to meet its memory demand.

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