Good morning, you're tuned in to Markets Desk.
Retail earnings dominate the week ahead, with Home Depot, Target, Lowe's, and Walmart all reporting in the coming days. Wall Street will be parsing those results closely for signals on consumer resilience, housing activity, and how sticky inflation remains at the register heading into the back half of the year.
Shifting to semiconductors, SK Hynix surged this week after Singapore's sovereign wealth fund announced a significant investment in the South Korean chipmaker. That kind of institutional conviction in high-bandwidth memory is a direct read on sustained demand for AI infrastructure, and it reinforces the broader thesis that the picks-and-shovels trade in AI remains very much alive.
And speaking of AI, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made headlines arguing that the industry's best path to rebuilding public trust isn't better marketing — it's delivering actual scientific breakthroughs, specifically calling out cancer cures as a benchmark. Amodei acknowledged the sector has overpromised and underdelivered, and that credibility now has to be earned through results, not roadmaps.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
