Money keeps flowing into artificial intelligence companies but out of AI stocks.
In what looks like — once again — a scenario of the left hand scratching the right, Microsoft and Nvidia will be investing a combined $15 billion into Anthropic, while the OpenAI competitor has committed to buying compute power from its two newest stakeholders. At this point, it seems as if a big proportion of AI news can be summarized as: “Company X invests in Company Y, and Company Y will buy things from Company X.”
Okay, that’s unfair. There are a lot of developments in the AI world that are not about investments but, well, development. Google unveiled the third version of Gemini, its AI model, which Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s AI unit DeepMind, said “will be “trading cliché and flattery for genuine insight.” (But I still want an AI chatbot to compliment me on my curiosity when I ask how to cut a pear, so I’m not sure if that’s a pro for me.)
Investors, however, still appear skeptical about AI. Major names such as Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft tumbled Tuesday stateside, giving the S&P 500 its fourth straight session in the red — the longest decline since August.
And if Nvidia — “the top company within the top industry within the top sector,” as CFRA’s chief investment strategist Sam Stovall puts it — fails to satisfy investors’ expectations when it reports earnings Wednesday, we might be seeing the S&P 500’s slide extend.
Anthropic signs deal with Microsoft and Nvidia. Microsoft announced Tuesday it will invest up to $5 billion in the startup, while Nvidia will put in up to $10 billion. That puts Anthropic’s valuation around $350 billion, according to a source.
Google announces its latest AI model Gemini 3. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Tuesday it will require “less prompting” for desired answers. The update comes eight months after Google introduced Gemini 2.5, and will be rolled out in the coming weeks.
[PRO] Potentially resilient stocks amid AI slump. There are some global stocks and non-equity assets that could weather the turbulence in U.S. tech names happening recently, strategists told CNBC.
Miffed over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments related to Taiwan, China on Friday advised its citizens against travelling to the country. Japanese tourism-exposed stocks fell in the aftermath of that warning, while experts caution the impact could be more severe over a longer duration.
Takahide Kiuchi, executive economist at Nomura Research Institute, said tensions between the two Asian powers could result in a 1.79 trillion yen drop in Japan’s GDP over the course of one year — a 0.29% decline in the country’s GDP.
Software company ServiceNow is in advanced talks to buy cybersecurity startup Armis, which was last valued at $6.1 billion, Bloomberg reported.
The deal, which could reach $7 billion in value, would be ServiceNow’s largest acquisition, the outlet said, citing people familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified because the talks are private.
The acquisition could be announced as soon as this week, but could still fall apart, according to the report.
Armis and ServiceNow did not immediately return a CNBC request for comment.
Armis, which helps companies secure and manage internet-connected devices and protect them against cyber threats, raised $435 million in a funding round just over a month ago and told CNBC about its eventual plans for an IPO.
Armis CEO Yevgeny Dibrov and CTO Nadir Izrael.
Courtesy: Armis
CEO and co-founder Yevgeny Dibrov said Armis was aiming for a public listing at the end of 2026 or early 2027, pending “market conditions.”
Armis’s decision to be acquired rather than wait for a public listing is a common path for startups at the moment. The IPO markets remain choppy and many startups are choosing to remain private for longer instead of risking a muted debut on the public markets.
Its latest funding round was led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives’ growth equity fund, with participation from CapitalG, a venture arm of Alphabet. Previous backers have included Sequoia Capital and Bain Capital Ventures.
The S & P 500 ran into a brick wall Friday and finished the week lower, just one day after closing at a record high. The rotation out of tech stocks, which supported the Dow , was on full display. The across-the-board rally on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the third time this year was long forgotten. .SPX .IXIC,.DJI 5D mountain S & P 500, Nasdaq and Dow last week For the week, the broad-market S & P 500 lost roughly 0.6%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 1.6%, breaking a two-week win streak. The sector shuffle that made materials, financials, and industrials weekly winners — and communications services and information technology weekly losers — pushed the Dow 1% higher last week, its third consecutive weekly gain. Despite December historically being a strong month, the S & P 500 and Nasdaq are down 0.3% and 0.7%, respectively. The Dow is up nearly 1.6%. Perhaps the big man will bail out Wall Street. The so-called Santa Claus rally , a seasonal pattern that occurs in the final five trading days of the year and the first two of the new year, would begin on Dec. 19. Until then, here are four significant moments that drove the market last week. 1. Broad(com) worries Friday’s market was slammed by tech selling, led by Broadcom ‘s 11.5% plunge. The chipmaker’s quarterly beat and raise on Thursday were overshadowed by misinterpreted remarks from management during the earnings call. The Broadcom hit stoked AI-stock valuation worries that have been simmering. During the sell-off on Friday morning, Jim Cramer said the custom chipmaker’s business was “on fire,” and that the decline could be a buying opportunity. Broadcom was our worst performer of the week, followed by Meta Platforms and Nvidia . 2. Tarnished Oracle The second session sell-off of Oracle on Friday didn’t help. The stock was crushed nearly 11% on Thursday following a quarterly sales miss, a disappointing guidance update, and an increased spending outlook. The magnitude of the stock decline was compounded by what management did not address on Wednesday evening’s conference call: OpenAI’s ability to fulfill its massive commitments to purchase AI computing power from Oracle. On Friday, shares sank another 4.5% after Bloomberg reported that Oracle was pushing back the completion dates for some data centers it is completing for OpenAI. Oracle pushed back , asserting “all milestones remain on track.” 3. Nvidia gets China OK While Nvidia caught shrapnel from AI trade worries, the all-purpose artificial intelligence chip king received long-awaited good news last week. After Monday’s close, President Donald Trump said on social media that Nvidia will be allowed to ship its second-best H200 chips to “approved customers in China,” and the U.S. government would take a 25% cut. Nvidia reached a deal in August with the U.S. government to provide 15% of made-for-China, throttled-down H20 sales in exchange for export licenses. It turns out China did not want the H20s. The question of whether China will want H200s was debated all week. 4. Powerful guidance On the industrial side of the AI trade, GE Vernova was our top performer despite Friday’s 4.6% decline. The energy equipment company, whose products and services help power AI data centers, closed at a record high Wednesday on incredibly positive guidance all the way out to fiscal 2028. CEO Scott Strazik, on CNBC, amplified the compelling near- and long-term growth story that management outlined at Tuesday evening’s investor meeting. On Wednesday, we raised our GE Vernova price target to $800 per share from $700, and reiterated our buy-equivalent 1 rating. The Honeywell spinoff, Solstice Advanced Materials , and Dover were also weekly winners. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AVOG, META, NVDA, GEV, SOLS, DOV. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk appears on a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, on Sept. 23, 2025.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle on Friday pushed back against a report that said the company will complete data centers for OpenAI, one of its major customers, in 2028, rather than 2027.
The delay is due to a shortage of labor and materials, according to the Friday report from Bloomberg, which cited unnamed people. Oracle shares fell to a session low of $185.98, down 6.5% from Thursday’s close.
“Site selection and delivery timelines were established in close coordination with OpenAI following execution of the agreement and were jointly agreed,” an Oracle spokesperson said in an email to CNBC. “There have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments, and all milestones remain on track.”
The Oracle spokesperson did not specify a timeline for turning on cloud computing infrastructure for OpenAI. In September, OpenAI said it had a partnership with Oracle worth more than $300 billion over the next five years.
“We have a good relationship with OpenAI,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two newly appointed CEOs, said at an October analyst meeting.
Doing business with OpenAI is relatively new to 48-year-old Oracle. Historically, Oracle grew through sales of its database software and business applications. Its cloud infrastructure business now contributes over one-fourth of revenue, although Oracle remains a smaller hyperscaler than Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
OpenAI has also made commitments to other companies as it looks to meet expected capacity needs.
In September, Nvidia said it had signed a letter of intent with OpenAI to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia equipment for the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup. The first phase of that project is expected in the second half of 2026.
Nvidia and OpenAI said in a September statement that they “look forward to finalizing the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks.”
But no announcement has come yet.
In a November filing, Nvidia said “there is no assurance that we will enter into definitive agreements with respect to the OpenAI opportunity.”
OpenAI has historically relied on Nvidia graphics processing units to operate ChatGPT and other products, and now it’s also looking at designing custom chips in a collaboration with Broadcom.
On Thursday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan laid out a timeline for the OpenAI work, which was announced in October. Broadcom and OpenAI said they had signed a term sheet.
“It’s more like 2027, 2028, 2029, 10 gigawatts, that was the OpenAI discussion,” Tan said on Broadcom’s earnings call. “And that’s, I call it, an agreement, an alignment of where we’re headed with respect to a very respected and valued customer, OpenAI. But we do not expect much in 2026.”