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Robinhood Tokenization talk
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Robinhood slips amid cross talk on its tokenization plans

Robinhood gave back a bit of the sharp gains that pushed it to new highs in recent days after OpenAI issued a statement on Robinhood’s announcement that it planned to sell “tokenized” versions of shares in the hot AI startup.

Matt Phillips

Robinhood Markets shares slipped roughly 4% in early trading after OpenAI issued a public statement that “tokens” do not represent equity investments at the $300 billion privately held AI startup.

(Disclosure: Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company. I own Robinhood stock as part of my compensation.)

Earlier this week, Robinhood had spotlighted plans to sell what it called “stock tokens” in Europe, as well a limited “stock token giveaway on OpenAI and SpaceX” to eligible customers on the continent.

The market seemed to love the notion of tokenized stock trading — as well as the company’s general push deeper into the world of crypto and decentralized finance — with shares seeing a nearly 13% gain on Monday after the token announcement.

That added to weeks of romping for Robinhood, against the backdrop of an increasingly rapid regulatory revolution connecting cryptocurrencies with the broader financial system.

Despite the excitement, a plan to “tokenize” trading will involve plenty of technical details that it seems traders are trying to grok in real time.

For example, OpenAI on Wednesday stressed in a public statement that tokens are not the same as actual equity shares in the company, posting this at the close of trading on Wednesday, sending Robinhood shares down.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev posted this response, acknowledging that while the tokens aren’t “equity” per se, they “effectively give retail investors exposure to these private assets.”


For good measure, Barclays analysts on Thursday published a note clarifying their understanding of what Robinhood’s stock tokens actually are, writing:

“Rather than owning the equity, the tokenholder technically enters into a derivatives contract with Robinhood Europe, and that derivatives contract, which is designed to track the price of the underlying asset, is what is tokenized and recorded on a blockchain. Some of the additional technical details provided have, from our conversations, caused some consternation among investors.”

But as investor consternation goes, any surrounding Robinhood seems pretty small in context. The shares remain up 150% so far in 2025, with most of that gain booked in the last three months.

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Data center trade deep in the red

The data center trade is seeing its steepest sell-off since the market rout that was ignited by President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden tariff announcement back in April.

Goldman Sachs’ themed basket of AI data center shares was down more than 6% at around 12 p.m. ET, putting it on track for its worst day since the tariff announcement.

Losses hammered seemingly every form of input needed for the sprawling concrete server warehouses at the heart of the investment boom.

Hardware makers including data storage companies like Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings, as well as DRAM maker Micron — some of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year — were taking a licking, as were networking stocks Cisco and Arista Networks and data center builders such as Vertiv Holdings and electrical and mechanical contractor Emcor.

Optimism for all things AI has seemed to evaporate throughout the week, as the stock market greeted lackluster quarterly numbers from Oracle and Broadcom with jittery sell-offs and concern about growing debts that could crater cash flows.

Those worries seem to be spreading to ancillary beneficiaries of the AI boom on Friday, gouging a chunk out of charts that retail dip buyers have not — at least so far — stepped in to buy as we head into the weekend.

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Oracle denies Bloomberg report that it’s delaying some data centers for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027

Getting a multi-hundred-billion-dollar backlog for cloud computing revenues from data center projects is easy. Building them is hard.

Oracle extended declines to as much as -6.5% on the day on the heels of a Bloomberg report that the cloud giant has pushed back the completion dates for some of the data centers it’s building for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027, citing people familiar with the work. Oracle denied this report, telling Reuters that there have been no delays to any sites required to meet its contractual commitments and that all milestones remain on track.

Shares had fully pared their report-induced drop ahead of Oracle’s reply, but remain in the red for the day.

Bloomberg said the reported postponement was attributed to labor and material shortages.

Oracle has been spending more on capex than Wall Street had anticipated, leading to higher-than-expected cash burn. Management boosted its full-year capital spending plans by $15 billion after reporting Q2 results earlier this week.

Oracle’s cloud infrastructure sales came in short of estimates in its fiscal 2026 Q2, a signal that markets already had reason to doubt its ability to quickly turn its humungous RPO (that is, remaining purchase obligations) into revenues.

Traders also seem to be of the mind that potential delays to data center completions are going to limit sales for what goes into them.

Some of the bigger losers since the Bloomberg headline hit the wires include:

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Broadcom’s post-earnings tumble is weighing on Google’s entire AI ecosystem

Broadcom’s post-earnings plunge is prompting a sharp pullback in Google-linked AI stocks, which had been on fire thanks to the warm reception to Gemini 3.

The stocks getting hit hard:

A basket of these Google-linked AI stocks compiled by Morgan Stanley is suffering one of its worst losses of the year. This brisk retreat also follows the release of GPT-5.2 by OpenAI.

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Citi initiates coverage of Planet Labs with “buy” rating

Planet Labs was up after aerospace and defense analysts at Citi initiated coverage with a “buy/high risk” rating and $19 price target.

The stock is up more than 40% this week, after a strong earnings result that spotlighted the company’s growing opportunity in linking its core business of capturing daily images of the planet with AI technologies.

Citi analysts noted the potential for a positive flywheel effect for Planet Labs as it deepens its focus on integrating AI into its offerings:

“AI is accelerating the conversion of pixels to decisions, where Planet’s daily scan and deep archive offer a uniquely large training corpus and broad-area foundation for automation. AI-enabled solutions (MDA/GMS/AMS) are gaining traction with customers such as NATO and the U.S. DoW, validating the approach of integrating AI into broad-area monitoring products... These AI moves create a compounding advantage: more coverage generates more training data, which improves models, which in turn increases product utility and addressable demand.”

The stock has also caught the attention of some of the retail trading crowd, with call options activity spiking on Thursday as traders rode the market reaction to the results.

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Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.