Netflix reported Q2 2026 revenue of $12.6 billion, up 13% year over year and in line with management expectations. Operating income came in at $4.2 billion and EPS was $0.80, both slightly ahead of expectations. Revenue growth has slowed for three straight quarters, and the company’s Q3 outlook points to further cooling to about 12%. The stock fell about 7% to $68.95, near its 52-week low, while Netflix reaffirmed full-year revenue guidance of $51.0 billion to $51.4 billion and maintained a 31.5% operating margin target.

Micron reported fiscal-quarter revenue of $41.5 billion, more than quadrupling from a year earlier, while its data center memory business generated $25.3 billion and non-GAAP gross margin rose to 84.9%. The company guided for about $50 billion in fiscal fourth-quarter revenue and adjusted EPS of about $31. Even after the record results, the stock remains about 30% below its 52-week high, reflecting investor concerns that the memory cycle may be nearing a peak despite no weakness in the company’s reported numbers.

As AI clusters expand to tens or even hundreds of thousands of processors, traditional copper interconnects are running into physical limits inside data centers. Silicon photonics is increasingly positioned as the upgrade path, with the optical transceiver market projected to jump about 60% in a single year to roughly $26 billion in 2026. Coherent has deepened its silicon photonics partnership with Nvidia, while Lumentum is expanding capacity as demand outpaces supply. Both companies supply key lasers, transceivers and photonic components that stand to benefit from the shift to optical links.

Netflix reported Q2 2026 revenue of $12.6 billion, up 13% year over year, but cut its Q3 growth forecast to 11.7%, marking a third straight quarter of deceleration. The outlook shift sent the stock down about 9% in after-hours trading. The company also said it repurchased $4.7 billion of shares in Q2, a quarterly record, and expects advertising revenue to reach about $3 billion, roughly 6% of full-year revenue.

Berkshire Hathaway sharply increased its Alphabet stake in the first quarter of 2026 after Greg Abel took over as CEO and later joined a $10 billion private placement in June, bringing its total outlay to more than $20 billion. The purchases made Alphabet Berkshire’s seventh-largest equity holding. The article points to Alphabet’s cloud momentum as a key driver, including a backlog of more than $460 billion and cloud operating income that roughly tripled year over year. The buying has reinforced market confidence in Alphabet’s fundamentals and its ability to monetize AI.

Alphabet said it plans to raise $80 billion in equity capital to fund aggressive spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure, with Nvidia GPUs positioned as a core part of its accelerator lineup. The company has increased investment in internally developed custom AI chips, but management signaled it still relies heavily on Nvidia hardware in the near term. The article adds that Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies are also key Nvidia customers, reinforcing an upswing in AI compute capital spending across major companies. No specific orders or execution timing were disclosed, framing the move as an announced strategic intent rather than an immediate action.

Circle Internet Group (CRCL) shares fell 44.6% in June, including a one-day drop of 17.6%. The decline was driven by plans to launch the Open USD stablecoin later this year—backed by companies including Visa, BlackRock, Alphabet and Samsung—which investors viewed as a direct competitive threat to USD Coin. The stock also came out of five Russell indexes, prompting selling by passive funds, while a small Bitcoin sale by Strategy added to broader risk-off sentiment in crypto-linked equities.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at a conference in March that global capacity for silicon photonics is far short of what AI computing will require, underscoring a new bottleneck in scaling AI infrastructure. The article says Nvidia has invested $2 billion each in Coherent and Lumentum, and $1 billion in Nokia, alongside strategic agreements aimed at securing optical interconnect capacity. It adds that all three companies have posted strong recent earnings and their shares are up more than 100% this year, while still facing risks such as high valuations, business concentration, or execution challenges.

The article says President Donald Trump authorized a U.S. military attack on Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, after which Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz and disrupted 20 million barrels a day of oil shipments, about 20% of global supply. It says the shock pushed the U.S. inflation rate up from 2.4% in February to 4.2% in May, fueling projections for a sharp increase in Social Security’s 2027 cost-of-living adjustment. The report frames the episode as a sudden, material supply hit to the crude market with a direct causal link to higher oil prices.