Good afternoon and welcome to Markets Desk.
The Pentagon is restocking its arsenal in a serious way. The Defense Department has awarded RTX's Raytheon a twenty-two point nine billion dollar contract to scale Tomahawk cruise missile production above one thousand units annually. The deal follows significant drawdown of stockpiles during US strikes against Iran, and it signals that military readiness spending is moving from reactive to structural for RTX.
Staying in tech, Nvidia is backing financing for an OpenAI data center project in Ohio, adding another chapter to the hyperscaler buildout story. Technology giants continue to commit billions toward capacity expansion as demand for AI infrastructure shows no sign of plateauing. For Nvidia, the move deepens its strategic ties with OpenAI well beyond chip supply agreements.
And on the smart money front, Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund built concentrated stakes north of five billion dollars in SanDisk and Micron heading into the second quarter, only to see those positions unwind sharply when the memory trade reversed in July. The fund's thirteen-F also shows a significant reduction in bearish put positions, suggesting the drawdown hit at a moment when downside protection had already been stripped away.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
