Wall Street Flat Ahead of Jackson Hole; Marvell Plunges

The Dow Jones rose 0.21% to 53,730, and the S&P 500 gained 0.12%.

The Nasdaq, however, fell 0.14%, and the Russell 2000 slipped 0.08%, showing a market moving sideways with no major swings overall. The VIX, known as the market's fear gauge, stood at 16.9.

Marvell Technology's shares fell 7.5% in premarket trading. The company reported second-quarter revenue of $2.5 billion, in line with market expectations, and also raised its revenue outlook.

However, investors' attention was focused on the AI chip contract with Google rather than current earnings. The contract was reported to take effect in 2029, and disappointment over the later-than-expected timing sent the stock lower.

Software company Elastic's shares soared 21%. First-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue rose 15.2% year over year, beating market expectations, and it raised its annual revenue outlook to roughly $2 billion, with profit forecasts also topping estimates.

Buy-now-pay-later company Affirm rose 9%. Its fourth-quarter gross merchandise volume reached $14.1 billion, well above the market forecast of $13.4 billion, and active users grew 20% to about 28 million, reflecting strong results.

News that a consortium of private equity firm Advent International and payments company Stripe had abandoned its bid to acquire PayPal dampened investor sentiment.

PayPal's board was reportedly judged that the constrained acquisition price did not adequately reflect the company's value, and the collapse of the deal left the stock unable to avoid a decline.

WTI was down more than 1% at $82.64, and Brent fell 0.58% to $89.18.

Oil prices are believed to have dropped after Iran's top diplomat expressed a positive stance, saying resuming diplomatic negotiations with the United States is not impossible. The crude futures market currently remains in backwardation.

Bitcoin is currently trading at $79,158. It briefly broke above $80,000 earlier this week, but has since been correcting.

Analysts say that as bitcoin has entered overbought territory, the likelihood of profit-taking sales and new short positions has increased.

Nvidia has halted its 'AI Compute Partnership' program, a financing support initiative aimed at smaller cloud providers.

The program pursued a revenue model that would take a share of GPU sales. It was reportedly shut down early over concerns that Nvidia could face scrutiny from regulators for exploiting its dominant position.

The program helped neocloud providers secure GPUs worth billions of dollars, and included an agreement under which Nvidia would buy back that capacity if the providers failed to secure end customers. Nvidia's related commitments reportedly reached about $36 billion.

A clause giving it a say in customer decisions also drew criticism as excessive interference.

Some argued that Nvidia was using its dominant position to meddle even in its partners' revenue, raising concerns that this could trigger an antitrust investigation by regulators.

Authorities are focusing less on Nvidia's high market share itself than on whether it is using that share to restrict competition.

The Justice Department is gathering information from competitors and other parties, closely examining the possibility that Nvidia is abusing its market dominance.

The department had designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, but the court found this unconstitutional.

The court said the measure violated the First Amendment and was intended to punish the company for criticizing the government.

The ruling is seen as a clear example that the government may not legally blacklist a specific company as a public deterrent.

Anthropic is accelerating its IPO amid developments including the court ruling lifting the Defense Department blacklist. It plans to publish its IPO prospectus after Labor Day and list as early as late September or early October.

Anthropic is also considering letting existing shareholders sell some of their holdings alongside the new shares issued in the IPO.

It is also weighing extending the lock-up period tied to the IPO, and aims to improve the efficiency of its Claude models through an acquisition strategy to develop its own semiconductors.

Although the X acquisition was called off, Anthropic has shifted to talks on cooperating with X, seeking a strategy to shorten development timelines and raise the efficiency of Claude models by bringing AI chip design in-house.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made remarks cautioning against Big Tech's push to develop their own chips. He stressed that Nvidia does not simply sell a single semiconductor that handles one specific AI task.

Huang said Nvidia offers a full AI factory platform that combines GPUs, CPUs, networking, and software to support everything from AI model training to inference. This is interpreted as a signal that in-house chip projects could be stalled by practical hurdles.

Analysts point out that producing custom chips faces many practical hurdles. Designing a chip and actually manufacturing millions of them are entirely different problems, and entrusting production to a foundry inevitably brings yield issues.

Competition for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) is also intensifying, and companies pursuing in-house chip production are expected to face a double burden of securing both foundry capacity and HBM.

However, critics note that this $100 million is only a fraction of the total investment the company is expected to make across its various businesses.

Concerns are growing over the overall investment scale as construction costs rise, and critics argue SpaceX faces the challenge of ensuring its growth keeps pace with its investment.

As more vessels operate with their Automatic Identification System (AIS) turned off, so-called 'dark crossings,' the number of tankers actually carrying oil could be far higher.

Based on this, the revised Middle East crude export volume could be adjusted upward by 1 million barrels per day, which the analysts say would limit any spike in oil prices.