AI Business & Industry

Today's Stories

1. 1

   Tempus AI Stock Jumps After Moderna-Merck Vaccine Success

   Social media conversations about Tempus AI intensified after Moderna and Merck reported Phase 3 success in personalized cancer vaccines, and observers point to notable stock gains as a result. The development is seen as validating broader applications in precision oncology and sequencing technologies, and it highlights Tempus's data capabilities and recent acquisitions as potential long-term growth factors.

   Tempus AI reported Q2 2026 revenues of $382.5M, up 21.56% from the prior year, and recently saw 103 insider sales over the past 6 months, including 70 by CEO Eric Lefkofsky.

2. 2

   Applied Materials CEO: AI Is Biggest Inflection in Semiconductor Industry

   Applied Materials CEO Gary Dickerson said AI is driving the semiconductor industry's most consequential growth inflection, with about 80% of this year's growth in wafer-fab equipment tied to AI-driven areas like advanced logic, high-bandwidth memory, and advanced packaging. Dickerson said this AI cycle is more pervasive than prior transitions, including mainframes to PCs and mobile computing, because demand comes not only from people but also from AI agents consuming compute capacity. The company's advanced-packaging business is growing by more than 50% this year.

   Applied Materials is investing $5 billion in its EPIC Center in Silicon Valley to speed commercialization. Dickerson said an advanced package next year could contain more than 300 chips, more than 500 billion transistors, and more than 2,000 miles of wiring.

3. 3

   AI buildout sustainability in question

   The article questions whether the AI infrastructure buildout can continue at its current pace, examining the factors that could slow it down. This matters because the AI buildout has significant economic implications, and any slowdown could affect businesses and investors who have bet on continued growth.

   Watch for signs of whether the buildout pace will hold, as the article does not provide a definitive answer.

4. 4

   AI growth could make these 2 S&P 500 stocks decade-long buys

   The article argues that if AI leads to unprecedented economic growth, Visa and Mastercard are once-in-a-decade buying opportunities, given their control over the payments layer and their work on agentic payments and stablecoins. In a bullish scenario where U.S. GDP grows at 6.7% annually instead of the past 10-year rate of 5.7%, the economy would be 91% bigger in a decade, driving more payment volume and fees for Visa and Mastercard. They processed $30 trillion in combined annualized total payment volume in their latest fiscal quarters.

   Visa's Intelligent Commerce Connect and Mastercard's Agent Pay are platform solutions for AI transactions, and both companies are integrating stablecoins into their infrastructures, positioning them to benefit if agentic payments take off.

5. 5

   Market Prices Broadcom vs AMD: Same AI Boom, Different Bets

   Broadcom's AI semiconductor revenue sits near $8.4 billion per quarter, with a disclosed AI chip backlog of around $73 billion. Management now sees line of sight to more than $100 billion in AI revenue in 2027. Broadcom is treated as a contracted infrastructure utility, while AMD is priced like a call option on gaining GPU market share from Nvidia. AMD's forward P/E ratio is much higher because it has a small slice of the AI accelerator market now, but its data center revenue could jump from several billion to tens of billions if it wins real share.

   AMD's MI355X packs more memory than Nvidia's B200 and shows better throughput and lower cost per token on some big language model tests when workloads fit on fewer GPUs. But Nvidia's Rubin platforms, which began shipping this summer, cut token costs by as much as tenfold versus older Blackwell setups.

6. 6

   Google Launches Copyright-Safe AI Book Tool

   Google launched Expert Intelligence (EI), an AI feature for e-books bought on Google Play Books. It lets readers ask questions, take quizzes, or get infographics via Gemini Notebook, starting with over 100,000 English-language nonfiction titles from publishers like Penguin Random House, Macmillan, and O'Reilly Media. Unlike typical LLMs, EI only uses information from the book itself, not training data. This comes after publishers sued Google in July over copyright infringement in Gemini AI, and early reactions from publishers and the Authors Guild praise the tool for respecting copyright.

   Google is giving away free e-books, including 'The Power of Habit' and 'Radical Candor,' to select U.S. users for a limited time. The feature may expand to textbooks and academic journals, depending on regional contracts and author opt-in terms.