Latest / Key Markets & Headlines / Key Markets & Headlines — Thursday, May 21, 2026

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Key Markets & Headlines — Thursday, May 21, 2026 · Key Markets & Headlines

• Key markets and headlines for today. The single most market-moving story this morning comes from Nvidia, ticker N-V-D-A, which disappointed investors with its latest sales forecast. The company said revenue in the three months ending in July will be ninety-one billion dollars. That’s above the average analyst estimate of eighty-seven billion, but it fell short of some of the more bullish projections that reached as high as ninety-six billion. Nvidia shares dropped about three percent in late trading after the results were released, as investors reacted to a forecast that failed to significantly exceed expectations. The company is facing mounting competition in artificial intelligence computing from rivals including Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, and Google. Even as CEO Jensen Huang continues to project strong long-term demand for AI infrastructure, the market is clearly looking for even faster growth and more upside surprises. This result is reverberating across the AI chip sector and is likely to influence broader sentiment around technology and AI-related equities. Turning to other major equity headlines and corporate news, there’s a lot of movement in the artificial intelligence and technology space. Advanced Micro Devices, ticker A-M-D, the leading challenger to Nvidia in AI computing chips, pledged to invest more than ten billion dollars in Taiwan to expand partnerships and add packaging capacity. The company is working with partners including ASE Technology Holding, Powertech Technology, Sanmina, and Inventec to bolster its capabilities in the region. This move underscores the intensifying competition in the AI hardware space and the strategic importance of Taiwan in the global semiconductor supply chain. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI software, is on pace for its first profitable quarter after a surge in revenue driven by demand for its artificial intelligence products. The company expects to post ten point nine billion dollars in revenue for the second quarter, more than doubling from the prior three-month period. Operating profit for the June quarter is expected to hit five hundred fifty-nine million dollars. However, the company does not necessarily expect to be profitable in future quarters as it ramps up spending on computing resources and other costs. Anthropic has also agreed to pay Elon Musk’s SpaceX nearly forty-five billion dollars over the next three years for computing resources as part of an expanded deal to support its Claude AI software. According to a securities filing, Anthropic is expected to pay SpaceX one point two five billion dollars per month through May twenty twenty-nine, with capacity ramping in May and June twenty twenty-six at a reduced fee. Either party can end the agreement with ninety days’ notice. Anthropic recently inked a deal to access more than three hundred megawatts of computing capacity from a large SpaceX data center in Memphis, known as Colossus One, and has since expanded the partnership to include capacity at a second SpaceX data center. SpaceX itself, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies, has filed publicly for its initial public offering, moving Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite, and artificial intelligence company a step closer to delivering what could be the world’s biggest-ever debut. SpaceX chose Nasdaq for its listing under the symbol S-P-C-X, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company is targeting as much as seventy-five billion dollars in its IPO at a valuation of more than two trillion dollars, which would surpass the twenty-nine point four billion dollar IPO record set by Saudi Aramco in twenty nineteen. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering, with Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan also working on the deal. Formal marketing is expected to begin as early as June fourth, ahead of pricing as soon as June eleventh. OpenAI is preparing to file for an initial public offering in the coming weeks and is targeting a public debut sometime in the fall, according to a person familiar with the plan. The ChatGPT creator is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to make a confidential IPO filing as soon as Friday, though the exact timing remains uncertain. OpenAI has been laying the groundwork to go public as part of a broader effort to raise more capital and fund its push for chips, data centers, and talent, after completing a one hundred twenty-two billion dollar funding round in April at an eight hundred fifty-two billion dollar valuation. The company still faces challenges ahead of a potential listing, including heightened competition, missed internal revenue and user growth targets, executive departures, and ongoing lawsuits related to its chatbot business. SoftBank’s stocks soared nearly twenty percent in Tokyo after reports said two companies backed by the Japanese investor—OpenAI and SB Energy—are preparing for US initial public offerings. SoftBank is one of the largest OpenAI shareholders, with about a thirteen percent stake. SB Energy, which develops energy infrastructure for data centers, also said it would file a confidential draft registration statement for a proposed IPO in the US. SB Energy has raised more than one point eight billion dollars over the past year from SoftBank, OpenAI, and Ares Management to fund its data center expansion plans. The surge in SoftBank shares, the biggest intraday gain since March twenty twenty, reverses losses from the past week after the company’s earnings. In other AI and tech news, Google, ticker G-O-O-G-L, launched Gemini three point five, a family of models focused on agentic work and personalized task management, at its Google I-O developer conference. The rollout included three point five Flash, a lightweight, cheaper model that will be the default for the Gemini app, and Gemini Spark, a beta-phase, general-purpose AI agent that can reason using information in connected apps. Omni, a model that can transform text, images, and video prompts into cinematic video outputs, was also unveiled, as was three point five Pro, the company’s heavyweight model, which is currently being used internally and will be available next month. Google is positioning its updated models as speedy, agentic AI assistants as it competes with OpenAI and Anthropic for enterprise AI adoption and autonomous workflow deployments. Exa Labs, a San Francisco-based startup aiming to build a search engine tailor-made for the age of artificial intelligence, raised two hundred fifty million dollars at a two point two billion dollar valuation in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The deal more than triples the five-year-old startup’s valuation since it raised eighty-five million dollars at a value of seven hundred million last fall. Exa is part of a wave of startups vying to transform the search industry, a market long dominated by Alphabet’s Google. Parallel Web Systems, led by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, recently raised one hundred million dollars at a two billion dollar valuation in a round led by Sequoia Capital. Exa Labs is using the new capital to more than double its workforce and afford increasingly expensive computing power, operating a five million dollar cluster of graphics processing units and moving much of its computing budget to Amazon Web Services. Cybersecurity startup Socket has raised a new funding round valuing the company at one billion dollars. Thrive Capital, led by Josh Kushner, led the sixty million dollar financing round. Socket’s services have gained new relevance with the rise of artificial intelligence coding tools from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor. In March, Socket was one of several security companies that warned about a malicious actor replacing a popular open-source software package called Axios npm with dangerous code, an attack later attributed by Google and Microsoft researchers to hackers linked to North Korea. Turning to corporate strategy and leadership moves, Microsoft has hired game industry analyst Matthew Ball as Xbox chief strategy officer and appointed Scott Van Vliet as chief technology officer, with Asha Sharma highlighting their experience across gaming, media, and cloud platforms in a broader leadership expansion at Xbox. In a memo to Xbox employees, Sharma said that Matthew has been partnering with the company on strategy since day ten and will officially start this month, reporting to her. Intuit, ticker I-N-T-U, is cutting about seventeen percent of its staff, or about three thousand workers, as part of a move to trim costs while the financial software company invests in artificial intelligence products. The job reductions are meant to simplify the organization and make it a faster, leaner, more focused company, according to a statement reporting its fiscal third-quarter results. Intuit expects to incur about three hundred twenty million dollars in restructuring charges, largely in the current period. For the quarter ended April thirtieth, Intuit reported revenue increased ten percent to eight point five six billion dollars, ahead of analyst estimates, and said revenue would increase by a range of eleven to twelve percent in the current period ending in July. Airbnb, ticker A-B-N-B, is also in the headlines. CEO Brian Chesky defended his company’s use of Chinese artificial intelligence models, saying US lawmakers who worry Chinese firms can access Americans’ user data are misunderstanding the technology. Chesky emphasized that Airbnb is not a customer of Alibaba or other Chinese companies, and that they are not providing data to any Chinese companies. He clarified that Airbnb is primarily using a variety of open-source models, including US open-source models, and that an open-source model does not have access to data. This was Chesky’s first public response to a US House probe into Airbnb’s use of Alibaba’s Qwen large language model for its customer service chatbot. Last month, House committees on China and homeland security sent a letter to Airbnb, asking for information about its use of Chinese AI models as part of an investigation into what they described as a Chinese campaign to accelerate its AI capabilities by exploiting American innovation. Chesky said the company is cooperating with congressional committees to answer their questions. Airbnb also announced it will let guests arrange luggage storage, airport pickups, and car and equipment rentals, its latest effort to expand beyond short-term rentals. During its annual product event, the company announced a partnership with luggage storage platform Bounce, which works with retail stores, hotels, and locker rentals in one hundred seventy-five cities to let people stow their bags before check-in or after checkout for a small fee. Airbnb is also expanding private car pickups in major markets outside the US with airport transfer firm Welcome Pickups. The tie-up with Bounce follows a deal last year with Instacart to add grocery-stocking to the Airbnb app, a service now expanding to more than twenty-five cities in the US. The company is in talks with other companies globally to offer similar services overseas. Meta Platforms is facing pressure from Beijing to unwind its controversial takeover of Manus, a Chinese-founded AI operation. The co-founders of Manus are exploring options to fulfill Beijing’s demand, including raising about one billion dollars from external investors to buy back the AI operation. The founders may contribute their own money to finance the rest of the transaction. If they proceed, the next step would be to set Manus up as a Chinese joint venture with those backers, ahead of a Hong Kong initial public offering. Palantir is challenging the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency over whether it can compete for a contract to modernize the agency’s data analytics system. Palantir argues that the DIA is wasting taxpayer money by trying to build its MARS system internally instead of allowing commercial vendors to bid, while the White House says it wants private-sector firms to have a fair chance to compete. The dispute could lead the General Services Administration, the DIA, or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to cancel or overhaul the program entirely, especially given how much AI has advanced since MARS was first launched nearly a decade ago. GameStop has increased its stake in eBay, ticker E-B-A-Y, to about six point six percent, according to a Schedule 13D filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Together, the twenty-five thousand shares of common stock beneficially owned directly and the shares of common stock underlying put and call pairs constitute approximately six point five five percent of the outstanding shares of common stock, based on the four hundred forty-four million shares outstanding as of April twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-six. Earlier in May, eBay’s board of directors rejected an unsolicited, non-binding buyout offer from GameStop. Expedia Group, ticker E-X-P-E, announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire CarTrawler, an Ireland-based B2B platform powering car rental, ground transport, and insurtech solutions for the global travel industry. Alfonso Paredes, President of B2B and Chief Commercial Officer at Expedia Group, called the CarTrawler acquisition another huge, exciting step towards building the most complete B2B travel platform. Samsung Electronics could distribute about forty trillion won, or twenty-six point six billion dollars, to chip employees as a bonus for this year after the company struck a last-minute deal with labor unions to avert a strike. Samsung employs seventy-eight thousand people in its semiconductors division. While bonus levels will vary, workers stand to get five hundred thirteen million won on average, equivalent to three hundred forty thousand dollars, according to Bloomberg calculations based on proposed terms and estimates for twenty twenty-six operating profit. Samsung employees earned one hundred fifty-eight million won on average in twenty twenty-five. Other estimates, including by Yonhap News, calculated that employees in the booming memory division could be in line for individual payouts of around six hundred million won. The move follows rival SK Hynix, which last year also agreed to a bonus payout. AT&T, ticker T, plans to invest nineteen billion dollars in California through twenty thirty to expand fiber and wireless connectivity statewide and transition away from aging copper networks. The company said the network modernization effort is enabled by updated federal policies. The nineteen billion dollar commitment represents expected investment through the end of the decade. AT&T also reaffirmed all twenty twenty-six and multi-year guidance and capital return plans. Bank of America and Citigroup are talking to investors about the makeup of the debt package financing Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, ticker W-B-D. Early conversations include about thirty billion dollars of high-grade bonds, around twelve billion of junk bonds, and seven point five billion of loans. The roughly fifty billion dollar financing, one of the most highly anticipated offerings of the year, may start as soon as the next couple of weeks. The financing package includes investment-grade notes in multiple parts, loans denominated in US dollars and euros, and roughly twelve billion of high-yield second-lien bonds with maturities of five, eight, and ten years. Warner Bros. was the object of a bidding war that ended earlier this year, with Paramount beating out Netflix in a one hundred ten billion dollar transaction to create one of the world’s largest entertainment empires. James Murdoch has agreed to buy a significant chunk of Vox Media, with Lupa Systems acquiring Vox’s podcast network and New York magazine in a deal announced Wednesday. The properties include popular shows such as Pivot with Kara Swisher and culture news sites including the Cut and Intelligencer, while other Vox Media assets including the Verge and Popsugar are not included. Bloomberg previously reported that Murdoch offered three hundred million dollars for the properties, though financial terms were not disclosed. The Vox podcast network, home to shows including Criminal and Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel, has been the fastest growing business within Vox Media and will immediately put Lupa at the top of the podcast field, according to the company. Turning to macro and credit markets, junk debt is beating just about everything else in fixed-income markets after surging yields wiped out gains on most other bonds. With high-yield credit spreads near two-decade lows, investor unease is building. The lower-rated notes extended their outperformance over investment-grade bonds this week to the most so far in twenty twenty-six at one point six percentage points, according to Bloomberg indexes tracking global debt. The juicier spreads on junk debt, which compensate investors for taking greater default risk, have cushioned the blow from a global bond selloff over the past week. That’s helped speculative-grade debt keep year-to-date returns positive, unlike most sovereign or investment-grade securities. The outperformance of junk debt signals that investors expect major economies will be able to weather higher interest rates at current levels. Junk bond issuance has also been on a tear this year. Fundraising in the US high-yield market is running at its most in five years, up over forty percent on the same period in twenty twenty-five, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Moody’s Ratings cut Mexico’s credit score to the lowest tier of investment grade, citing the country’s weakening fiscal position and stoking concern that Latin America’s second-largest economy is heading toward junk status. The firm downgraded Mexico to Baa3 from Baa2, while revising its outlook to stable from negative. The move comes a week after S&P Global Ratings revised Mexico’s credit outlook to negative from stable. The peso was little changed. The downgrade reflects a sustained weakening in fiscal strength that accelerated in twenty twenty-four and is expected to persist. Rigid spending, a narrow revenue base, and continued support to Petroleos Mexicanos limit the government’s ability to stabilize debt in a low-growth environment. Ahead of the decision, Moody’s had sought clarity from authorities on how the Middle East conflict could affect a budget plan presented in early April, in which the government forecast a narrower deficit next year, as well as progress on a strategic overhaul of Pemex and USMCA talks. Hedge funds have been selling the scorching rally in US semiconductor stocks to book profits, while keeping their overall exposure to the AI theme, according to traders at Goldman Sachs. Semiconductors and semiconductor equipment was the most net-sold US subsector over the past month, Goldman’s prime desk said in a client note. At the same time, funds increased their short wagers on US equity macro products, index, and exchange-traded-fund instruments used to hedge against broader market risks. These short positions are now at a ten-year high. This points to refraining and managing semiconductor exposures within the overall portfolio amid the group’s explosive price rally, not a regime shift away from the AI theme. Overall exposure to US artificial intelligence stocks tracked by Goldman’s technology, media, and telecommunications AI basket remains near record highs. Over the past month, managers have actively unwound risk in US tech stocks against the price rally, retained a cautious stance across most cyclical pockets, and more recently started to hedge beta exposures again via macro products amidst higher inflation prints and rising bond yields. The White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director held a briefing earlier this week for companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Reflection AI over a planned executive order on artificial intelligence. The order would empower government agencies to review advanced large language models before they are officially released. President Trump may sign the order, which aims to establish a voluntary framework for developers of frontier models to tell the government ahead of time about new AI launches, as soon as Thursday. Representatives of cloud providers, semiconductor firms, cybersecurity companies, and banks were also present at the briefing. In event-driven news, AvalonBay Communities and Equity Residential are nearing a deal that will see two of the biggest apartment real estate investment trusts by market value combine. The terms being discussed would provide two point seven nine three shares of Equity Residential common stock, which closed trading Wednesday at sixty-six dollars and twenty-eight cents apiece, for each share of AvalonBay stock. A transaction could be announced as soon as Thursday. AvalonBay has a market value of about twenty-six billion dollars and Equity Residential’s is twenty-four point eight billion. AvalonBay has a portfolio of around one hundred thousand units across more than three hundred apartment complexes in eleven states, including New York and California. Equity Residential owns and manages more than three hundred rental properties consisting of more than eighty-five thousand apartment units. Strategy, the company run by Michael Saylor, has acquired one hundred seventy-one thousand two hundred thirty-eight Bitcoin year-to-date, according to its public filings. That exceeds the roughly sixty-two thousand Bitcoin produced by the entire global mining network over the same period. The purchases appear to represent the majority of net corporate and ETF-related Bitcoin accumulation in twenty twenty-six, according to Benchmark-StoneX analyst Mark Palmer. Strategy funds its Bitcoin purchases through a perpetual preferred stock called S-T-R-C, which pays investors an eleven point five percent annual cash dividend. Markus Thielen, chief executive officer of 10x Research, said the current wave of demand is being driven less by organic market participation and more by financial engineering as Strategy increasingly relies on yield-generating capital market products to fund its Bitcoin acquisition strategy. Wells Fargo has hired a trio of bankers who focus on the technology sector from rivals Citigroup, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank. Mark Gracia joins from Citi as a managing director covering core digital assets and blockchain, based in New York and reporting to Brian Gudofsky, head of technology, media, and telecommunications investment banking. Jusung Kwok has joined from Deutsche Bank as a managing director and co-head of semiconductors in San Francisco, reporting to Tej Shah, the bank’s head of technology investment banking. A third banker, Derrick Chao, was hired from Bank of America in San Francisco to be a managing director in the global M&A group focused on technology, reporting to Jeff Hogan, head of global M&A. Looking at some key charts and broader market trends, earnings leadership remains firmly US-centric across large, mid, and small caps, according to Societe Generale. The latest minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, scored as the most hawkish since July twenty twenty-three, with a majority of members seeing a rate hike as likely if inflation remained hot. Inflation expectations over the next five years in the United States remain relatively anchored, even as commodity prices continue to rise. US energy stocks are back to their highs after a short-lived selloff, according to Strategas. That wraps up the key markets and headlines for today. Thanks for listening.