Story perspectives

AI Chip Demand Lifts Storage; Robinhood Drops, Barclays Raises S&P

4/29/2026

Summary

Seagate Rallies

Seagate shares rallied after its Q4 revenue and profit outlook beat estimates.
Western Digital, SanDisk, Micron and NXP Semiconductors rose on strong AI chip demand.
Robinhood fell over 8% in after-hours trading after Q1 earnings missed.
Oracle stock dropped 3.2% to $167.35, marking a fourth-straight loss in 2026.
Barclays lifted its S&P 500 2026 target to 7,400 and forecast FY26 EPS of $305 with a 30-times big-tech valuation versus 20.5-times non-tech.

Summary

OpenAI IPO

OpenAI plans an IPO that could value the company at up to $1 trillion, Reuters reports.
Microsoft ended its exclusive distribution deal, allowing OpenAI to sell on rival clouds while keeping Azure as its primary partner.
Oracle’s $300 billion, five-year cloud agreement with OpenAI pushed the company’s credit default swaps to a two-week high.
Bloomberg Intelligence warns that a reduction in OpenAI’s compute spending would hurt Oracle more than other AI-infrastructure firms.

History

Historical Context

After Nvidia poured over $1 billion into CUDA in the early 2000s, its GPUs became the backbone of deep-learning research, sparking the AI hardware boom that reshaped data-center strategies. By 2025 Nvidia commanded roughly 80% of AI-training GPU sales, prompting firms like Microsoft, Oracle and OpenAI to chase its chips as valuations soar.

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Seagate Rallies

Seagate shares rallied after its Q4 revenue and profit outlook beat estimates.
Western Digital, SanDisk, Micron and NXP Semiconductors rose on strong AI chip demand.
Robinhood fell over 8% in after-hours trading after Q1 earnings missed.
Oracle stock dropped 3.2% to $167.35, marking a fourth-straight loss in 2026.
Barclays lifted its S&P 500 2026 target to 7,400 and forecast FY26 EPS of $305 with a 30-times big-tech valuation versus 20.5-times non-tech.

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