Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
We begin with breaking news out of Washington. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has died following a brief illness at the age of seventy one. Graham was one of the most prominent figures in the Republican Party, a fixture in foreign policy debates and a close ally of multiple presidential administrations. His passing leaves a significant vacancy in the Senate.
Turning to the technology sector, executives across the AI landscape are pushing back against demand skepticism, with several saying appetite for artificial intelligence infrastructure remains, in their words, almost unlimited. The nuance here is that enterprises are shifting focus toward what they're calling valuemaxxing, meaning they want measurable returns, not just raw compute. That's keeping chip stocks volatile as the market tries to price the maturation of the AI cycle.
And on the entrepreneurship front, a Minneapolis restaurant owner has overhauled his struggling eatery by removing prices from the menu entirely, adopting a pay-what-you-can model. Post Modern Times now serves one hundred fifty five meals daily, with ninety percent of diners contributing nothing. Yet donations are sufficient to pay staff at least twenty five dollars an hour, offering a rare data point on whether radical pricing models can actually pencil out.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
