Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk.
Intel shares pushed higher today on a report the chipmaker is in early talks with South Korea's SK Hynix over a potential partnership to manufacture memory chips on American soil. It's a meaningful signal for a company deep in a turnaround effort, and investors responded with cautious optimism, seeing memory as a credible new revenue lane.
Elsewhere in the semiconductor space, optical component makers Lumentum and Coherent led the S&P five hundred higher on the session. With some investors growing nervous about the pace of AI data center spending at the headline level, money is rotating further down the supply chain, hunting for demand signals in the infrastructure layers that keep those facilities running.
And the dominant macro story of the day belongs to the Federal Reserve and the White House. The Fed delivered its first rate hike since two thousand twenty three, and within hours President Trump took to social media demanding the central bank cut rates to one percent or lower. That puts the administration on a direct collision course with an independent Fed, and bond markets will be watching this tension very carefully in the sessions ahead.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
