IBM warned on July 14 that preliminary second-quarter revenue would be $17.2 billion, well below Wall Street expectations of about $17.9 billion, while adjusted earnings of $2.93 a share also missed the $3.01 consensus. The shortfall was driven by infrastructure revenue, including mainframes and hardware, which fell 7% year over year, while software rose 5% and consulting was roughly flat. The company said clients pulled forward purchases of AI-related hardware in late June to get ahead of expected price increases, delaying some software and consulting deal closures. The update sent IBM shares down as much as 23% before the opening bell, its worst single-day reaction in years.

TSMC’s CoWoS advanced-packaging capacity is fully booked through 2026, with lead times of 52–78 weeks and equipment expansion taking years. Nvidia is estimated to hold about 60% of CoWoS capacity, while AMD has roughly 11%. With AMD needing to split limited CoWoS supply between its Venice EPYC CPUs and MI400 GPUs, internal competition for packaging could prevent a fast ramp in shipments even if AI demand surges. That physical constraint could hinder AMD’s ability to convert demand into revenue, posing a material execution risk to a valuation above 70x forward P/E.

Thai renewable-energy engineering firm Gunkul Engineering is benefiting from the country’s push to develop a hub for green data centers. Net profit in the first quarter of 2026 rose 24% year on year to 456 million baht, while revenue also gained 24% to 2.6 billion baht. The company said it holds more than 100 billion baht in EPC order backlog and expects 2026 revenue to reach 10 billion baht. Founded in 1982 and pivoting into renewables from 2007, the SET-listed company operates across Thailand, Malaysia, Japan and Vietnam.

Coffee futures have jumped on concerns that El Niño weather patterns could disrupt harvests in key producing regions, pushing the market into what StoneX described as “meme stock” trading territory. The move reflects a sudden agricultural supply shock rather than dynamics typical of equities. As the world’s second-largest traded commodity, coffee’s futures pricing is highly sensitive to climate-related disruptions. The article does not cite spillover effects to other commodities or broader indexes, and says AI-infrastructure financing and geopolitics have no direct causal link to coffee’s price moves.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s fiscal 2026 budget request, for the first time, creates a standalone $13.4 billion line item for “autonomy,” spanning drones, counter-drone systems, unmanned vessels and enabling software. Mercury Systems is cited as an early beneficiary, with last quarter’s bookings up 74% year over year, book-to-bill at 1.48 and backlog at a record $1.6 billion, pointing to front-loaded demand in defense electronics. The broader backdrop includes rising global military spending—$2,887 billion in 2025—and a shift toward “consumable” intelligent platforms, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

China’s DRAM maker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is seeking to use an AI-driven memory shortage to win positions in global OEM supply chains, but U.S. restrictions that keep ASML EUV lithography tools out of China leave it with higher DDR5 costs and delayed progress in HBM. That dynamic limits its ability to dislodge Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix in the high-margin AI memory segment. Micron’s current high gross margin has structural support, but China’s expanding capacity could raise competitive pressure over the medium to long term.

Micron’s latest fiscal Q3 results were strong, with revenue rising 4x year over year and gross margin hitting 84.6%, as AI-driven demand lifted high-bandwidth memory pricing. The analysis argues that Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron are simultaneously ramping investment toward roughly $130 billion in a single year, far above prior cycle peaks. It warns that this scale of capacity build-out could flip supply-demand dynamics later and pressure DRAM prices and profitability if AI infrastructure spending undershoots expectations.

U.S. stocks fell on Tuesday as a broad tech selloff weighed on the market, with investors uneasy ahead of chipmaker Micron’s earnings report. The decline intensified after South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service warned about risks in leveraged ETFs tied to memory chip companies, adding to a global chip-stock retreat. Micron’s shares sank more than 13% in the session.

Four Federal Reserve economists said in a June 4 technical note that mortgage servicing rights (MSRs) are highly sensitive to changes in forecasts for how quickly borrowers refinance. They estimated MSR values fall about 4% for every 1 percentage-point rise in the expected refinancing rate, and could decline by as much as 13% in a severe recession scenario. Because MSRs do not have real-time market quotes, their book values rely on models of borrower behavior, which can directly affect quarterly earnings and dividend durability for mortgage REITs that hold large MSR portfolios, such as Rithm Capital.