China has been using its dominance in the rare earth industry to slash prices, driving foreign competitors out, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on Wednesday stateside in an exclusive interview. He characterized the country as having “a nonmarket economy.”

In response, the Trump administration will “exercise industrial policy” to set price floors in a range of industries. Price floors are a limit of how low suppliers can charge for goods or services. They are typically set above the market rate and are essentially a form of government price control.

Meanwhile, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley reported blockbuster second-quarter earnings that shot way past analyst expectations. They joined other major U.S. banks, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, in ihaving a blowout quarter that was turbocharged by robust dealmaking and stock market highs.

And despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s continued saber-rattling at China on the trade front, traders don’t seem ready to let go of equities. On Wednesday stateside, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite rose, and the Russell 2000 hit a fresh record. After all, earnings reports are indicating that the economy isn’t yet faltering, despite firms already experiencing higher costs because of tariffs, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Beige Book.

Whether traders continue pushing equities to new highs amid fractious trade relations with China will depend, in part, on the earnings of major technology companies such as Tesla and Intel due next week.

The Abu Dhabi investor that’s funding AI while trying to save TikTok — with help from Trump

Backed by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund and launched in March 2024, MGX has emerged as a key source of capital as companies race to build out the enormous computing power needed to meet expected AI demand.

Certain transactions suggest a level of coziness with Trump.

Earlier this year, MGX reportedly provided $2 billion in funding to the crypto exchange Binance, using a cryptocurrency purchased from the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial. Its chairman Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan also visited Trump in the White House this spring to announce a $1.4 trillion investment in the U.S. over the next decade.

— Steve Kovach

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite rose on Wednesday stateside. An earlier version did not specify which indexes rose.

Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday that moving some AI functions away from the could help reduce energy usage.

Over time, he suggested, a large number of multi-gigawatt data centers won’t be sustainable.

“You look to yourself, well, what are the kind of things that need to happen? I think there’s two vectors to it,” Haas said. “One is low power, the lowest power solution you can get in the cloud. Arm really contributes there. But I think even more specifically is moving those AI workloads away from the cloud to local applications.”

While he said AI training will likely always happen in the cloud, running AI, called inference, can happen locally — meaning on the chips inside people’s phones, computers and glasses. History has shown “we always go to hybrid models around computing,” according to Haas.

He suggested that hybrid dynamic will play out when it comes to AI, which will help alleviate huge power investments.

Chip designer Arm’s technology powers devices made by a number of major Big Tech players, including Microsoft and Amazon. Semiconductor giant Nvidia has a major stake in Arm and actually attempted to acquire the company in 2020.

Arm and Meta on Wednesday said they would expand their partnership to “scale AI efficiency across every layer of compute – spanning AI software and data center infrastructure,” according to a press release. Arm stock saw gains following the announcement, finishing the day up 1.49%.

Haas told Cramer that the partnership with Meta is “largely around data centers, but more broadly…around software and the software stacks associated with it.” He also discussed Arm’s involvement in Meta’s new Ray-Ban Wayfarer glasses, saying the AI for the technology is running both in the cloud and locally.

“For example, when you say, ‘hey, Meta,’ into those glasses, that’s not happening on the cloud, that’s actually happening in your glasses, and that’s running on Arm,” Haas said.

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Disclaimer The CNBC Investing Club Charitable Trust owns shares of Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia.

Salesforce shares rose as much as 5% in extended trading on Wednesday after the software vendor issued new financial targets for the next few years.

The company said it now expects revenue of over $60 billion in 2030, above the $58.37 billion consensus among analysts polled by LSEG.

The guidance excludes impact from the pending acquisition of data management company Informatica. The $8 billion deal, announced in May, is slated to close in the fiscal fourth quarter or in the first quarter of the 2027 fiscal year.

“We have had some lower-stage growth for a while,” Robin Washington, Salesforce’s chief operating and financial officer, said during an investor briefing at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. “That is reaccelerating.”

She company called for an organic year-over-year revenue growth rate above 10% in the 2026 through 2030 fiscal years. The growth rate has been under 10% since mid-2024.

Investors have been concerned, in part because of the rise of “vibe-coding” tools for automatically generating software with a few words of human input. Industry observers have predicted that artificial intelligence services might threaten longstanding software providers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in April that AI is creating up to 30% of new code at the company.

“There’s a certain amount of, let’s just say, nonsense that’s out there,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Wednesday. “Like, for example, that these products are writing all the software, and that is not what’s happening.”

As of Wednesday’s close, Salesforce’s stock had fallen 29% for the year, while the Nasdaq has gained 17%.

To increase revenue, Salesforce is counting on its Agentforce software for automating customer service and other business processes, said Washington, who also sits on Salesforce’s board. The company introduced Agentforce last year as a way for brands to add chat-based customer service agents that connect large language models to internal data.

“Investors continue to ask why Agentforce adoption has been slower than anticipated,” analysts at RBC Capital Markets wrote in a note to clients earlier this month.

Salesforce executives are hoping product enhancements will attract more business.

The company on Monday released Agentforce Voice, which allows clients to have agents answer customer service calls. On Tuesday, Salesforce announced larger partnerships with AI model developers Anthropic and OpenAI, bringing their latest models to Agentforce.

At Dreamforce, Salesforce pointed to Agentforce adoption at FedEx, Pandora, PepsiCo, Williams Sonoma and other companies.

WATCH: People don’t understand Agentforce is part and parcel of Salesforce, says CEO Marc Benioff