Kilroy Kilroy's Daily BriefingsKilroy online Subscribe
Markets
AI Stocks

AI Stock News Briefing — Tuesday, August 25, 2026 at 6:15 AM

AI Stocks8/25/2026🕐 6:15 AM⏱ 7:03Market watchPre-market

Top stories, ranked by relevance.

Story cards stay below the sticky dock while audio, chapters, date, and brief navigation remain accessible.

▶ Listen at 0:20

#1NVDA — Earnings eve: the whole tape is holding its breath

Nvidia reports fiscal Q2 2027 after the close Wednesday, August 26, with consensus around $92.07B in revenue — roughly 97% year-over-year growth. Shares fell 2.91% Monday to $208.48, but futures flipped green Tuesday with Nasdaq 100 contracts up 0.9% and NVDA itself up more than 1% pre-market. Street average price target sits near $304.73; prediction markets put a ~96% odds on an EPS beat and ~78% on data center revenue clearing $85B.

#2NVDA — AI server prices going up more than 15% as memory costs bite

Bloomberg reports Nvidia has told its biggest customers — Microsoft, Google, Oracle among them — that server prices are rising north of 15% in many configurations, effective on systems shipping early next year. It hits both Grace Blackwell and the flagship Vera Rubin racks. Memory has ballooned from 5–10% of an AI server's bill of materials under Blackwell to 25–30% under Vera Rubin, roughly $370,000 to about $2 million per rack.

#3SOX/SEMIS — Chip complex leads Monday lower, Dow shrugs it off

The S&P 500 slipped 0.28% to 7,652.86 and the Nasdaq lost 0.76% to 25,980.19, while the Dow actually gained 140.15 points to 53,417.16 on financial strength. Semis did the damage: SOXX fell 2.67%, with TSM off 3.7%, AMD down 3.49% and Broadcom off 1.3%. Investors were de-risking ahead of Nvidia, a key inflation print, and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole keynote Thursday.

#4MU — Micron drops 5.83% as Netlist patent fight targets DDR5

Micron fell 5.83% to $910.43 Monday, though it's still up about 189% year to date. The overhang is Netlist's ITC complaint plus a parallel Central District of California suit over DDR5 RDIMM and MRDIMM patents — the exact products feeding AI server memory. Super Micro was named in the same ITC filing and fell 5.56% to $35.17. Micron has its entire calendar 2026 HBM output already locked to price and volume agreements; 43 analysts still carry a Strong Buy consensus.

#5ANTHROPIC (private) — October IPO chatter now points at $2 trillion-plus

Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 draft with the SEC on June 1 and investors briefed by the FT now peg an October listing at $2 trillion or more, which would be the largest IPO in history. The institutional roadshow ramped through August. Annualized revenue is reportedly tracking toward $100B to $120B by year-end. Not tradable yet — a watch item, and a read-through on private AI valuations.

#6MRVL — Marvell slides 4% into its August 27 print

Marvell fell about 4% Monday ahead of Thursday's fiscal Q2 2027 report. Street looks for roughly $2.7B in revenue, up about 35% year over year, on EPS near $0.65. The swing factor is the expanded Alphabet custom-silicon deal spanning TPU inference accelerators, NICs, storage and memory interface controllers — and whether management raises FY27 and FY28 again. 38 analysts rate it Buy with zero Sells.

#7MDB — MongoDB down 6.53% despite a Citi target hike

MongoDB fell 6.53% to $402.69 in what looks like pre-earnings de-risking ahead of its September 1 report. That's against a fresh Citi price target raise to $545 from $455 with a Buy rating, citing durable enterprise demand for Atlas. The 35% gap between target and Monday's close says the market is pricing real execution risk. MDB is roughly flat year to date at +0.76%.

#8TSLA — Tesla off 3.83% on 50% Canada tariffs and a 2.98M-vehicle China recall

Tesla dropped 3.83% Monday after President Trump said tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks, auto parts and steel go to 50% effective January 1, 2027 — a hit across the whole US auto complex. Separately, Tesla is recalling 2.98 million vehicles in China over emergency door releases being hard to locate after a crash. TSLA is down 20.34% year to date.

#9MACRO — Data center backlash graduates from local zoning fight to market risk

Political opposition to AI data centers is now showing up in Wall Street models. Local opposition blocked or delayed 75 projects worth $130B of planned construction in Q1 2026 alone, residents in more than a dozen communities are pushing recall elections, and the NRSC has flagged data centers as a "sleeper issue" for the midterms. It's a real constraint on the buildout thesis underpinning power, REIT and hyperscaler capex names.

#10META / AMZN / GOOGL — Hyperscalers diverge from the chips

While semis got hit, the platform names went the other way Monday: Meta +1.66% to $559.02, Amazon +1.33% to $262.07, Alphabet +0.94% to $348.06. Meta lifted 2026 capex guidance to as much as $145B, explicitly citing higher component prices, and Alphabet guided full-year capex to $195B–$205B. Meta still sits about 29% below its high and down 14% year to date; Alphabet is up roughly 10%.

🗂 Edition Navigator