Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk.
European natural gas is back above one hundred euros a megawatt-hour this morning, a threshold that rattles energy markets across the continent. The move is being driven by two converging pressures — escalating Middle East tensions tightening supply fears, and colder temperatures lifting demand at exactly the wrong time for European inventories.
That geopolitical anxiety is also showing up in crude and broader risk sentiment, which feeds directly into the tech selloff extending into this session. Intel is cratering in premarket trade after a deeply disappointing earnings report, and Amazon's results are adding fuel to the fire, stoking fresh doubts about whether the artificial intelligence trade can justify the extraordinary valuations the market has assigned to it.
And on that note, the AI buildout story is not going away quietly. The hyperscalers — Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and SpaceX — are on track to collectively spend somewhere between eight hundred three billion and eight hundred twenty-eight billion dollars on capital expenditure in two thousand twenty-six alone, with executives signaling even higher commitments heading into two thousand twenty-seven. The gap between that spending conviction and today's stock reaction tells you everything about where investor nerves currently sit.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
