Shares of U.S. chipmaker Intel climbed 3% Thursday, putting the monthly gain over 50%.

The surge pushed the stock past $37, hiking the value of the U.S. government’s 10% stake in Intel to roughly $16 billion.

The Trump administration negotiated an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock in August, purchasing 433.3 million shares at $20.47 per share.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt celebrated the surge with a post on X from the Association of Mature American Citizens, a conservative organization.

Intel shares jumped 7% on Wednesday after news that the company is in early talks with AMD to add the hardware-maker as a customer.

Perplexity AI on Thursday announced that its artificial-intelligence-powered web browser Comet is available worldwide, and will be free to users.

The Comet browser is designed to serve as a personal assistant that can search the web, organize tabs, draft emails, shop and more, according to Perplexity. The startup initially launched Comet in July to Perplexity Max subscribers for $200 a month, and the waitlist has ballooned to “millions” of people, the company said.

Perplexity’s decision to provide Comet for free could help it attract more users as it works to fend off rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic that have their own AI browser offerings.

In September, Google rolled out Gemini in its Chrome browser, Anthropic announced a browser-based AI agent in August and OpenAI announced Operator, an agent that uses a browser to complete tasks, in January. Perplexity made an unsolicited $34.5 billion bid for Google’s Chrome browser in August.

Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.

The company also introduced Comet Plus in August, which is a subscription that gives users access to content from “trusted publishers and journalists,” according to a blog post. Perplexity said Tuesday that CNN, Condé Nast, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Le Monde, and Le Figaro are its inaugural publishing partners.

Perplexity said additional features are also on the way. The company teased a mobile version of Comet and a feature called Background Assistant, which can work on multiple tasks simultaneously and asynchronously.

WATCH: AI startup Perplexity valued at $20B

The tokenization of real-world assets, from stocks to real estate, will spread to financial markets around the world, according to Robinhood Markets Chief Executive Officer Vlad Tenev. 

“Tokenization is like a freight train. It can’t be stopped, and eventually it’s going to eat the entire financial system,” Tenev told a panel at a crypto conference in Singapore on Wednesday. 

“I think most major markets will have some framework in the next five years,” he said, though he added that reaching 100% could take more than a decade.

A tokenized asset is a digital representation of a real-world asset, like stocks, bonds, or commodities, that can be recorded and traded on a blockchain or distributed ledger.

In June, Robinhood began offering more than 200 tokenized U.S. stocks to customers in the European Union, giving them a new way to gain exposure to the underlying assets. The move sent its stock surging to a then-record high.

“I think it will become the default way to get exposure to U.S. stocks outside the U.S.,” Tenev said. 

He expects the practice to gain traction once there is greater licensing and regulatory clarity in more jurisdictions.

“I think that will come, starting in Europe, but then expanding to the rest of the world,” he said.

On the other hand, Tenev expects the U.S. to be among the last economies to actually fully tokenize, due to what he calls the greater sticking power of the financial infrastructure. 

The crypto industry has long predicted that a mass tokenization of assets on the blockchain was coming, promising greater market efficiency. 

And, along with Robinhood’s launch of tokenized stocks, there’s been more signs this year that real implementation is coming, with institutional giants Morgan Stanley and BlackRock signaling interest. 

“I actually think cryptocurrency and traditional finance have been living in two separate worlds for a while, but they’re going to fully merge,” Tenev said at the event.

He cited stablecoins — digital currencies designed not to fluctuate wildly, and pegged to a commodity or a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar — as an early example of a tokenized real-world asset.

“I think that crypto technology has so many advantages over the traditional way we’re doing things that in the future there’s going to be no distinction,” Tenev said.