Good morning, you're listening to Markets Desk, and here's what's moving the tape.
Salesforce is making the most aggressive case it can that artificial intelligence has not made its business obsolete. The cloud software giant posted record first-quarter results and launched its largest-ever accelerated share repurchase, a staggering twenty-five billion dollars financed partly with debt. The move juices earnings per share, but management cut full-year free cash flow growth guidance roughly in half, a tradeoff the market will be watching closely.
Shifting to memory, Sandisk has become one of the more remarkable stories in technology this cycle, climbing from thirty-six dollars to roughly one thousand five hundred ninety dollars in a single year. Fiscal third-quarter revenue surged two hundred fifty-one percent year over year, with data center revenue exploding six hundred forty-five percent, a direct reflection of how voracious AI infrastructure buildout has become for high-bandwidth memory.
And in commodities, a long-term call is circulating that ExxonMobil will outperform the S and P five hundred through two thousand twenty-six, resting on the argument that Middle East geopolitical fragility keeps a structural floor under crude prices, giving integrated majors like Exxon an earnings cushion that the broader index simply does not have.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
