Anthropic signs 20-year, $19 billion lease at TeraWulf Kentucky data center
Anthropic signed a 20-year lease on Monday for a data center campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, operated by TeraWulf, in a deal expected to generate approximately $19 billion in contracted revenue over the initial term. The campus, called Justified Data, will accommodate approximately 401 MW of critical IT load for high-performance computing operations, TeraWulf said. Capacity will be delivered in phases, with the first tranche expected online in the second half of 2027 and the full 401 MW in place by early 2028. TeraWulf stock climbed more than 16% in premarket trading Monday. The total consideration is approximately $530 million, payable in three installments: $250 million within 14 days of signing, $150 million by December 31, 2026, and roughly $130 million by April 30, 2027, the company said.
MU, SNDK, DRAM Dip Overnight As Memory Stocks Feel Weight Of Samsung’s Post-Earnings Selloff
Samsung issued a stellar second-quarter outlook, but investors took profits after the stock’s recent surge, suggesting the strong performance had already been priced in. Samsung stock was down over 6% in Seoul around 11 am local time. In the U.S., Micron Technology and SanDisk Corp. stocks dropped around 4.5% each, while Western Digital shares slid nearly 4%. The Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM), which has Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron as its top three holdings, was down 4.8% overnight. Samsung on Tuesday forecast second-quarter operating profit of 89.4 trillion won ($58.44 billion), which would be a 19-fold increase over the corresponding quarter last year and more than six times the operating profit in all of fiscal 2025. The figure handily surpassed the LSEG/Reuters estimate of 87.3 trillion won. Samsung forecasts April-June revenue to increase 129% year over year to 171 trillion won.
Microsoft stock target cut at Wolfe on higher capex estimates
Wolfe Research revealed in a note on Monday that it has cut its price target on Microsoft to $525 from $570, pointing to surging memory prices that have forced the firm to raise its fiscal 2027 capital expenditure estimate to $270 billion from $230 billion, while maintaining its Outperform rating. The revision pushes Wolfe's FY27 free cash flow estimate to negative $17.4 billion, compared to a prior estimate of approximately $14.7 billion positive and roughly $48 billion below the consensus of $31 billion. Wolfe said it "remains long-term bullish on MSFT's full-stack monetization approach to AI with Azure growth acceleration and rising Agent monetization potential." The firm forecasts Azure growth of 41% in FY27 and 40% in FY28, ahead of consensus estimates of 40% and 38%, respectively.
The U.S. Army Just Took a Historic Step to Break China's Rare Earth Dominance
Commercial development is targeted to begin in 2027, with initial operating capability expected no later than 2028. That urgent timeframe is scheduled to coincide with the January 1, 2027, federal procurement ban on Chinese rare earth materials used in American defense systems. REalloys expects to finance, build, and operate the facilities under an Enhanced Use Lease structure, creating a commercial processing platform on federal military property while keeping ownership, financing, and operations in private hands. The Army award moves REalloys upstream. Earlier this year, the Defense Logistics Agency backed the company's metallization technology through a contract to expand domestic samarium and gadolinium metal production. The Tooele project reaches further into the supply chain, adding commercial heavy rare earth processing to a platform that already includes metals and alloys. Washington is compressing years of supply chain development into a matter of months. An integrated domestic rare earth industry is taking shape in real time. For decades, China built nearly every step of that industrial chain while much of the West allowed those capabilities to disappear. The effort extends well beyond the rare earth sector itself. Earlier this month, President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to address production bottlenecks across the defense industrial base, citing limited manufacturing capacity, fragile supply chains and long-lead dependencies. This week, President Trump met with the heads of Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and L3Harris as the administration pressed the defense industry to accelerate production and replenish U.S. weapons stockpiles. Three of those companies show exactly why the timeline matters. Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) builds the F-35, and that jet alone carries more than 900 pounds of rare earth materials, including roughly 50 pounds of samarium-cobalt magnets built to hold their strength at extreme heat. All of it falls under the same January 1, 2027, deadline REalloys is racing to meet at Tooele. RTX (NYSE: RTX) carries similar exposure through its Patriot missile system and its radar and electronic warfare lines, both of which run on high-purity dysprosium and terbium. Those inputs still trace back through Chinese processing chains, the same chokepoint REalloys' Tooele complex is meant to break. Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) has the same problem on its B-21 Raider bomber and its radar and space-surveillance work, including the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability program. Like Lockheed Martin and RTX, it has to prove its magnet supply chain is free of Chinese material by the 2027 deadline or risk losing eligibility for covered contracts. Those efforts coincide with the January 1, 2027, procurement restrictions, which require covered defense systems to source compliant rare earth materials and permanent magnets. Meeting those requirements involves far more than finding new suppliers. Rare earth oxides, metals, alloys, and permanent magnets must all be qualified before they can enter defense production, a process that can take months or even years depending on the application. That process is already underway. REalloys is expected to began qualification efforts for defense-grade heavy rare earth materials by the end of 2026, allowing prospective customers to validate North American-produced dysprosium, terbium and other rare earth materials ahead of the January 1, 2027, procurement deadline.
The S&P 500 Looks Pricey at 22x Earnings. On Cash Flow, It’s a Terrifying 32x.
Alphabet's Q1 2026 free cash flow collapsed 46% while capex more than doubled, and Meta's 2025 FCF dropped 19% despite 22% revenue growth. HPE is up 73% YTD and Caterpillar now trades at 48x earnings, meaning the value stock rotation Hough recommended is largely already priced in. At 32x projected free cash flow versus 22x earnings, the S&P 500 leaves little margin for error when AI capex distorts reported profits. Those specific figures are directional, and the actual reports rhyme with them. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) posted FY2025 free cash flow of $73.3 billion, up just 0.7% year over year, even as capex jumped 74% to $91.4 billion. In Q1 2026 it got worse. FCF collapsed 46.63% to $10.12 billion while capex more than doubled to $35.67 billion. Sundar Pichai then guided 2026 capex to $175 to $185 billion, which is a number that used to be a country's defense budget.
Meta Stock Surged 9% to $612.91 on July 1 After Reports That Mark Zuckerberg Is Building a Cloud Business to Compete With Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet
Meta's capital expenditures (capex) increased 84% year over year in 2025 to $72.2 billion. The figure is projected to total between $125 billion and $145 billion this year. Demand for these resources far outpaces supply. Alphabet paying Space Exploration Technologies $920 million per month for AI compute capacity is a clear sign of how constrained the industry is.
Ex-Nasdaq CEO Warns SpaceX’s ‘Unprecedented’ Lockup Expiration Could Flood the Market With $800 Billion in Shares
$800 Billion Wave of SpaceX Stock Is About to Hit the Market Greifeld framed the setup this way: “SpaceX was the largest IPO ever. But let’s remember it's been in business for 23, 24 years… it's really the largest lockup expiration ever. Between now and the end of October there's around $800 billion of shares that can come onto the market. We've never seen anything like that.”
3 Utility ETFs to Buy Now as AI Data Centers Trigger a 1970s-Scale Power Buildout
Utilities are now planning generation and transmission build-outs on a scale not seen since the 1970s, and three ETFs offer different ways to own that capex cycle: Utilities Select Sector SPDR Fund (NYSEARCA:XLU), Vanguard Utilities Index Fund (NYSEARCA:VPU), and First Trust Utilities AlphaDEX Fund (NYSEARCA:FXU). The EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2026 projects total US installed generating capacity rising between 50% and 90% by 2050 across modeled cases, with data center server load a major incremental contributor. Grid Strategies' analysis, cited by Colorado's Legislative Council, names data centers as the largest driver of US electricity demand. PJM, the grid covering the mid-Atlantic and Midwest, hosts the nation's highest concentration of data centers and is already running fast-track interconnection processes. Constellation Energy closed a $16.4 billion acquisition of Calpine to assemble a 60-gigawatt clean-energy platform aimed at hyperscaler contracts, and Vistra has pushed deeper into long-term power deals with companies like Meta. Vistra's 2025 framing was that electricity demand is "trending like it's the 1990s, fueled by AI and crypto".
Big Tech data centers are driving up power bills at America's Rust Belt factories
Capacity charges are designed to compensate power generators for ensuring the grid has enough electricity for peak usage and to spur development of new supply. They generally account for about 10% of residential bills but can represent up to three times that for manufacturers, according to interviews with manufacturers, attorneys and energy experts. PJM's capacity prices jumped from $28.92 per megawatt-day in 2024 to the current $329.17 per megawatt-day — a 1,038% rise — driven primarily by data center growth. Average industrial electricity prices were up 31% in Pennsylvania and 26% in Ohio as of December 2025 from 12 months earlier, compared with a 7% rise nationwide for industrial users.
President Donald Trump Took a Direct Jab at the Fed, Yet Again -- and It's a Disaster in the Making for Wall Street
Despite recent all-time highs for the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq Composite, U.S. inflation is fostering worry among investors on Wall Street. The FOMC cutting the federal funds target rate six times to its current range of 3.50%-3.75%, Trump has been adamant that policymakers reduce interest rates to 1% or lower. Nine out of 18 officials have at least one hike this year (and six of those 9 have multiple hikes). Only one person has a cut this year, and one participant (presumably Warsh) didn't submit an SEP
U.S. inflation outlook underpins bitcoin bulls after best week since March
The U.S. two-year breakeven inflation rate, the financial market's expectations of price pressure in the economy over two years, has dropped below 2% for the first time since 2024. That’s when the deflationary impulse from falling oil prices should remind everyone that the Fed isn’t going to hike and that - if anything - the next move will be a cut," Robin Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, said in a report.
All to play for
Global earnings are forecast to rise more than 20% over the coming year. This growth has been driven largely by tech, provided a major tailwind to markets and should continue to drive them higher, more than offsetting any drag from high valuations. The headline rate fell back to 2.8% in June from an energy-related high of 3.2% in May, while the core rate eased to 2.4% from 2.6%. It is a similar story for UK rates with the market continuing to believe they could be nudged up 0.25% to 4.00% late this year. The long-awaited release of the Defence Investment Plan which boosts defence spending by £15bn over the next four years.