• Stocks: After a strong start, indexes slipped slowly and steadily lower as investors hedged their bets ahead of tomorrow’s CPI report.
• Commodities: Pakistan’s defense minister said the US and Iran are close to a deal, but oil prices inched higher as the two sides remain at an impasse.
• Bonds: A strong auction for three-year notes eased concerns about Treasury yields, but tomorrow’s 10-year auction may be disrupted by inflation.

AI

Morning Brew Design

Two AI infrastructure giants, Nvidia and Intel, are both raising staggering sums for the purpose of building more AI infrastructure—but they’re using two very different methods.

Intel just raised $20 billion through an equity offering of 210.5 million shares each priced at $95, above the $15 billion the company originally announced it was looking to raise yesterday. Intel will use the money, “for general corporate purposes, which may include, but are not limited to, capital expenditures and working capital,” according to a statement. Specifically, it wants to focus on investing in physical AI, advanced packaging, and purpose-built silicon.

The announcement comes on the heels of Intel’s Q2 earnings report last month, in which it revealed its fastest revenue growth in about 15 years. The company also raised its capex guidance to $20 billion, up from its previous $18 billion.

Nvidia rallies the Street

Intel, like many tech companies, can’t stop spending money on AI. And while Intel looks to the equity markets for cash, Jensen Huang is taking a different approach to raising capital.

Nvidia has signed a memorandum of understanding with six major investment firms to commit $500 billion in financing for—you guessed it—AI infrastructure. But these firms, featuring Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo Global Management, Brookfield Asset Management, KKR, and Goldman Sachs, aren’t simply funding datacenters.

Essentially, the deal will use compute power itself as collateral, with AI infrastructure transformed into an “investable asset class.” The firms above will provide the money for companies that want to build out a datacenter and buy Nvidia’s chips, removing the chipmaker from the circular deals that has some investors worried that the AI trade is really just one big house of cards sitting on Nvidia’s shoulders.

“We await further details, but our first take is a positive one—the burden sits with the consortium, not NVDA’s balance sheet,” wrote Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya of the deal.

Sign of the times: At the same moment that investors have become increasingly skeptical about the amount of cash Big Tech is spending to build AI infrastructure, Wall Street is continuing to weave itself into the web of financing that’s propping up the massive datacenter boom.

A deal like this will either propel the AI trade to new heights, or send it tumbling down—and take some of the biggest names in finance down with it.—LB

      

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Stocks

🟢 What’s up

• Blackstone popped 3.89%, Apollo Global Management climbed 6.26%, and KKR gained 6.88% on plans to mobilize more than $500 billion for building AI infrastructure.
• Plug Power jumped 5.21% on strong second-quarter results and a higher full-year revenue outlook.
• Fermi surged 21.09% after landing a $6.5 billion lease with AI cloud provider TensorWave for its Project Matador campus.
• Jabil climbed 5.94% following a UBS upgrade that cited continued AI spending from Big Tech.
• Riot Platforms rallied 4.33% after signing a $9.1 billion compute capacity deal with Anthropic.
• NIQ Global Intelligence soared 41.95% after topping Wall Street’s earnings and revenue estimates.

🔴 What’s down

• SpaceX slipped 3.93% on profit-taking after its recent rally.
• AppLovin dropped 5.99% following a Bank of America downgrade over slowing growth expectations.
• Life360 declined 24.76% despite an EBITDA beat, with investors discounting a one-time tariff benefit.
• Hims & Hers Health lost 3.97% after narrowing the top end of its full-year EBITDA outlook and swinging to a quarterly loss.
• On Holding tumbled 20.29% on mixed quarterly results and a lower full-year revenue forecast.

Stock of the day

The Trump dump

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc, Photos: Eric Lee/Getty Images

Trump Media, President Trump’s media business, just reported earnings—though it didn’t bother announcing the numbers on Truth Social. It’s understandable why: Things aren’t looking too great.

Trump Media reported revenue of $1.7 million in Q2, primarily from advertisements on Truth Social. That’s up nicely from $900,000 in the same quarter last year—but the company’s net loss of $238.1 million was more than 10 times worse than the net loss of just $20 million last quarter, while operating expenses soared about 275% year over year.

Shares sank 5.11% today, and have now fallen over 32% in 2026.

The problem is crypto’s recent downturn: Trump Media said the “vast bulk” of its losses were due to “unrealized losses on digital assets, digital assets pledged, and equity securities.” In other words, the company bet it all on bitcoin, but the crypto king’s decline has left Trump Media wounded, with no sign that the bleeding will stop anytime soon.

That could be an issue for one of Trump Media’s lines of business: a forthcoming merger with nuclear fusion producer TAE Technologies, predicated on DJT’s ability to fund the deal with crypto proceeds. However, management said the deal remains on track to close in Q4, and that it will drive future shareholder returns.

Maybe they’re confident that the company’s newest business opportunity will yield dividends. Trump Media has begun selling access to the Truth Social API for between $60,000 and $100,000 per month, and management says it’s inked “more than 10 customer agreements to date, primarily high-frequency trading firms.” Hopefully that will turn out to be a better investment than the Trump Phone.—MR

Investing

Morning Brew Inc, Photo: Getty Images

As you’ve read above, the AI trade is getting increasingly overheated. On one hand, AI companies keep posting record results quarter after quarter. On the other hand, hyperscalers are raising eye-popping sums to keep the spending spree going. That leaves investors with a difficult question: What do you do now?

Rather than chase the Nvidias, Microns, and other AI darlings dominating headlines, Lazard is taking a decidedly less flashy approach. The asset manager is looking at lower-risk infrastructure businesses across energy, water, transportation, and communications—think roads, bridges, power grids, and cell towers—via a series of infrastructure-focused funds, including the new Lazard Listed Infrastructure ETF.

The appeal is predictability. Lazard targets companies whose regulatory agreements or long-term concession contracts can generate steady cash flows, giving investors something that sits somewhere between the stability of bonds and the upside of stocks. More than half of Lazard’s Global Listed Infrastructure Portfolio is concentrated in Europe and the UK, where the firm sees particularly strong long-term investment needs.

That has led the portfolio managers to some not-so-household names like toll-road operators Ferrovial and Vinci, British utility National Grid, Illinois-based Exelon, telecom tower owners American Tower and Crown Castle, and New York utility Consolidated Edison.

The healthcare hedge

Those companies offer a picks-and-shovels way to benefit from AI without betting directly on the hottest chip stocks. But for investors looking to diversify away from the AI trade altogether, healthcare might be the move, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Healthcare and semiconductor stocks have recently started moving more sharply in opposite directions: When chip stocks sell off, healthcare tends to catch a bid. That relationship makes some intuitive sense: Semiconductors are highly cyclical and increasingly tied to expectations for massive AI spending, while demand for medicines, treatments, and insurance tends to stay relatively steady regardless of what the economy—or Nvidia—is doing.

A healthy outlook

The growing inverse relationship is another sign that investors are getting more cautious around AI—and they’re increasingly putting money behind that caution. According to LSEG Lipper data, roughly 50 US healthcare funds attracted $1.5 billion in June and another $2.44 billion in July, reversing three straight months of withdrawals.

Wall Street is warming to the beaten-down sector, with analysts pointing to historically cheap valuations and an improving earnings outlook. In Bank of America’s July survey, global fund managers reported a net 32% Overweight position in healthcare, more than double June’s 14%. LSEG also expects S&P 500 healthcare earnings to return to double-digit growth beginning in the fourth quarter of 2026 and to continue through the end of 2027, following a 16.7% decline in the second quarter.

That said, the AI trade is certainly not going away anytime soon. But for investors feeling a little queasy about AI, healthcare may be just what the doctor ordered.—SY

      

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News

• Apollo Global is providing $2.6 billion in financing to the New York Yankees.
• Phia co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni knew their platform took credit for sales it didn’t actually drive.
• Target appointed its first ever “chief AI officer.”.
• President Trump said the federal government is looking into whether it can stop New York City’s pied-à-terre tax.
• Nvidia just released its first open-source model.
• Hollywood media mogul Ari Emanuel’s next big bet? Live theater.

Calendar

Economic reports: Inflation is back on the menu with the July CPI reading. CPI fell 0.4% in June, but economists think it increased 0.1% last month, or climbed to 3.4% annually. Core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, is expected to rise 0.2% in July and 2.5% year over year.

Earnings announcements: Earnings from Tencent, Cisco, Coherent, Nebius Group, WeRide, Cerebras Systems, Vestas, and StubHub keep the good times rolling.

Everything else: Put on your special glasses and catch the solar eclipse tomorrow afternoon—if you’re far enough north it’ll be a full eclipse blocking out the sun, but for the US it will only be a partial eclipse.

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