Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk, your close-of-day read on what moved the needle.
Nvidia finds itself in unfamiliar territory — not a chip shortage or export control, but a governance question. The board is reportedly preparing to investigate whether CEO Jensen Huang was targeted by a foreign intelligence operation. That raises a question markets hate: key-man risk at the world's most valuable semiconductor company, where Huang is effectively irreplaceable.
Shifting to cloud, Amazon Web Services posted thirty-nine point three percent growth last quarter, its fastest clip in nearly five years. Andy Jassy's bet on enterprise AI infrastructure is paying off in real revenue terms, not just narrative. That kind of acceleration at AWS scale gives Amazon's stock a durable fundamental story that goes well beyond retail margins.
And in what would be the most consequential tech IPO in recent memory, Anthropic is targeting a valuation of one point four trillion dollars, planning to sell eight hundred twenty-five million shares priced between seventy and seventy-eight dollars apiece. If that range holds, it would put the Claude maker in rarefied air, testing whether public markets are ready to price frontier AI at sovereign-wealth-fund multiples.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
