alphabet went negative. trump hit 60 countries with tariffs. and AMD came for nvidia.

gm.

three big things last week. all three touch AI in different ways: the money side, the trade war side, and the chip side.

1. alphabet just went negative for the first time since 2004.

alphabet (google's parent company) reported earnings tuesday, and free cash flow came in at negative $5.9 billion. free cash flow (the money a company has left after paying all its bills, and roughly what most investors look at as "real profit") had never gone negative for alphabet since it went public in 2004. stock dropped roughly 7% the next day.

what's driving it: AI spending. alphabet raised its 2026 CAPEX plan (CAPEX = capital expenditures, meaning money spent on physical stuff like servers, buildings, and equipment) to $205 billion (from $185 billion three months ago). its future spending commitments now total $811 billion, up from around $300 billion last quarter.

the bigger picture: for the first two years of the AI wave, investors cheered big AI spending as a sign a company was "in the race." that's flipping. alphabet's negative cash flow is the first real signal from a US mega-cap that the spending party might be too big. expect more of this narrative when meta, microsoft, and amazon report over the next two weeks.

2. trump just hit 60 countries with new tariffs.

on thursday, the US trade representative announced new tariffs on 60 countries, arguing those countries haven't done enough to stop forced labor in their exports (things like uyghur labor in chinese supply chains, child labor in cocoa, etc.). tariff rates range from 10% to 12.5%. duties took effect just after midnight on friday.

separately, and stacked on top of those: canada is now facing a 50% tariff (took effect july 21) and brazil is facing 25%. total trade war escalation. within hours of the friday tariffs going live, a small US spice importer (burlap & barrel) filed a lawsuit challenging whether the trump administration has the legal authority to impose these tariffs this broadly. the legal basis being used is section 301 (a 1974 trade law that lets the president tariff countries that violate trade agreements or engage in "unfair" trade). trump's earlier round of reciprocal tariffs, which used a different law (IEEPA), was struck down by federal courts earlier this year.

what to watch: legal experts don't think these will survive court challenges either, but until they get struck down, the tariffs are real. expect messy price impacts on things like coffee, spices, textiles, and consumer goods.

3. AMD just landed a massive anthropic deal.

quick refresher: AMD (short for Advanced Micro Devices) is the world's second-biggest AI chip maker, behind nvidia. nvidia has dominated the AI chip market so heavily that AMD has been a distant runner-up for years. anthropic (the AI lab behind claude, and openai's main US competitor) has mostly run on nvidia chips and google's homegrown AI chips (called TPUs).

that changed last week. anthropic signed a multi-year deal to deploy AMD chips at massive scale (roughly enough to power all of new hampshire). AMD is also investing up to $5 billion in anthropic as part of the deal. it's the first time a top-tier US AI lab has publicly committed to AMD in a meaningful way, and it cracks open nvidia's near-monopoly on AI chips.

worth noting: AMD stock actually fell 2-4% on the news. classic "sell the news" reaction because the anthropic rumor had been priced in for weeks.

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the US just signed a 30-year nuclear deal with saudi arabia.

energy secretary chris wright signed a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar nuclear cooperation deal with saudi arabia last tuesday. US companies will lead the build-out of saudi civilian reactors, locking out china, russia, france, and south korea (who were all bidding for the same project). the US strategic angle: block china and russia from building critical infrastructure in one of the world's most strategically important countries, and revitalize the US nuclear industry, which has been in decline for decades. the deal permits a joint feasibility study on a saudi uranium enrichment facility (the controversial part), and now enters a 90-day congressional review.

robinhood chain's tokenized stocks jumped 5x in two weeks.

coindesk reported friday that real-world asset (RWA) volumes on robinhood's blockchain have jumped roughly 5x in the past two weeks, to $70 million active market value. twelve tokenized stocks are now clearing $500,000+ in daily volume, with GameStop leading at $26.6 million per day and NVIDIA at $14 million. RWA (tokenized versions of real financial assets like stocks, treasuries, and credit) is quietly becoming a real onchain market.

see you thursday.

not financial advice. aggregated community trends and commentary.