00:00 Speaker A
Time for today’s trending tickers. First off in the auto sector, Ford is trading up around 4 and a half percent in pre-market.
00:09 Speaker A
The story here is what we learned during Ford’s earning call last night. and I’m not talking about the fact that Ford like other major auto makers topped expectations or that it revised its guidance slightly lower for the year. No.
00:23 Speaker A
The significant story here is that Ford is putting production of its flagship electric truck on the back burner. The automaker is moving workers from its EV unit to boost production of its diesel and hybrid versions of the F-150.
00:38 Speaker A
Next up, one of the biggest stories of the week and in fact, one of the biggest AI deals ever. Alphabet is trading higher, both tickers up nearly one and a half% in pre-market.
00:48 Speaker A
That’s after Google and Anthropic announced the details of the multi-billion dollar deal we told you about earlier this week. In brief, Google will supply up to 1 million specialized chips to Anthropic, the company behind the Claude Chatbox.
01:02 Speaker A
called Tensor processing units. The hardware devices provided by Google will help produce Anthropic’s reliance on costly GPUs from Nvidia.
01:13 Speaker A
With this deal, Google strengthens its position as an investor in in Anthropic and as an AI hardware provider. The only question while we we know the deal is worth tens of billions of dollars, Google declined to comment on how it will be funded.
01:27 Speaker A
And while we’re on the subject of AI hardware, let’s take a look at Intel. You know, by now, it’s reported earnings last night and shares have been soaring since the American chip manufacturer said it had beat analyst expectations on growing demand.
01:39 Speaker A
They shot up nearly 9% earlier this morning and here’s where they stand right now up just below 8% higher in the pre-market.
01:47 Speaker A
And for more news on advanced technologies, we told you yesterday that some quantum computing names were drawing a lot of attention from investors after a Wall Street Journal report that the White House was considering taking equity stakes. Since then, we have reported that the White House had White House is not considering such a move.
02:04 Speaker A
Still, these three stocks, ION Q, Righetti, D-Wave, well, they keep rallying and that’s certainly in part because of the broader momentum in quantum computing, a space where companies including Google have been touting major advances.
