Here's a quick overview of the main events of the day:
Meta is launching a cloud service to sell AI computing power to customers.
Shares of CoreWeave and Nebius fell by 14% and 17%, respectively, due to Meta.
Whale Rock Capital made a profit of 73% thanks to chip bets.
Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in the latest round.
Asian M&A exceeded $750 billion in the first half of the year.
Nonfarm payrolls in June were only 57,000, but the market reacted positively.
SoftBank is entering the AI computing power rental market in the US.
International Investments
The technology world has been shaken by news that is reshaping the cloud competition landscape. Social network Meta is preparing a new business unit, Meta Compute, which will sell external customers access to artificial intelligence and unused computing power from its data centers, according to Bloomberg. The project, led by Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure, Daniel Gross from Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Dina Powell McCormick, president of the company, aims to make Meta a direct competitor to cloud market leaders Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
In 2026, Meta will invest $115 to $135 billion in AI infrastructure, and the new business is expected to generate revenue from a portion of these costs. On Tuesday, Meta's shares jumped 8.8% to $612.91, adding approximately $125 billion to the company's market value. In contrast, shares of GPU power rental company CoreWeave fell by 14% - the company has a $21 billion contract with Meta, and the market is concerned that the largest customer is becoming a direct competitor. The group Nebius, which has contracts with Meta worth up to $27 billion, weakened by 17%. The Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and its Japanese telecommunications subsidiary announced independently of Meta on Thursday that they will be renting computing resources to US companies, adding another dimension to the topic, according to Bloomberg.
Among the winners of the first half of the year, the New York hedge fund Whale Rock Capital Management stands out. Its flagship fund earned 72.5% this year, while the long-only fund earned 82%, with gains of 9.2% and 9.4%, respectively, in June, according to Bloomberg, citing a source familiar with the results. Key bets that propelled Whale Rock to the top of the rankings included flash memory manufacturer Sandisk, whose shares rose by more than 850% in the first half of the year, South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix (+300%), and printed circuit board manufacturer TTM Technologies (+170%). Whale Rock also invested in the AI company Anthropic, which achieved a valuation of $965 billion in the latest funding round, and for the first time in history, surpassed its competitor OpenAI.
Bloomberg released a global overview of mergers and acquisitions for the first half of 2026 on Wednesday: the Asia-Pacific region reached $750 billion, which is 30% more than in the same period last year. Digital infrastructure and healthcare were the main drivers for investors, despite geopolitical tensions related to the conflict between the US and Iran.
Significant Events with Global Impact
The main economic figure of the day came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: in June, only 57,000 new jobs were added outside of agriculture, roughly half of the consensus estimate of 113,000, and well below the revised May figure of 129,000. Revisions also subtracted 74,000 jobs from April and May. Despite this, the unemployment rate fell to 4.2 percent, but only because the labor force participation rate fell to 61.5 percent—the lowest level since March 2021, as noted by CNBC. Paradoxically, the markets reacted to the weak data with gains: stock futures rose, the yield on two-year Treasury bonds fell by 3.5 basis points to 4.13 percent, and investors revised their expectations for interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve later this year, as the weak labor market allows the Fed to wait.
Capital markets are closed from Thursday through Monday, as Friday, July 3rd, is a substitute holiday for Independence Day in the United States. Under normal trading conditions, the weak payroll data would add weight to the ongoing sell-off of chip stocks: on Wednesday, Micron and Sandisk lost over 10 percent, AMD and Intel lost around 9 percent, and the overall PHLX Semiconductor (SOX) index weakened by 6.7 percent after doubling during the second quarter.
Tradingeconomics.com