Amazon fuels AI optimism while Apple sinks premarket on weak outlook

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company shares touched intraday all-time highs on Monday after Elon Musk confirmed early-stage talks with the chipmaker about a potential collaboration on his Terafab semiconductor initiative. Musk responded on X over the weekend to a newsletter from tech journalist Tim Culpan, who wrote that TSMC is exploring ways to work with Terafab to help the startup chipmaker run its new semiconductor factories in Texas, saying, "Just discussions, but something may come of it." Terafab is Musk's plan to build a giant semiconductor factory to serve Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. US chip maker Intel, which joined Terafab back in April, was down roughly 2%. TSMC is the world's largest foundry, and its business has boomed on demand for semiconductors used in artificial intelligence, with the stock up about 60% year to date as the company expands in the US to manufacture chips for clients including Apple, Nvidia, and AMD.

Morgan Stanley said on the 5th that semiconductor giants Nvidia and Broadcom are relatively unlikely to be affected by the worsening data center power shortage in the United States. The firm estimated last month that even if U.S. data center developers adopt measures such as "behind-the-meter" power generation, which integrates power plants with data centers, and fuel cells, they will face a net power shortfall of 34 percent by 2028, equivalent to a shortfall of 32 gigawatts. Morgan Stanley noted that because Nvidia and Broadcom have clear visibility on chip deployment, geographic expansion, and coordination among data centers, semiconductor suppliers, and power supply networks, these bottlenecks will not threaten the two companies' 2027 outlook. On the other hand, if semiconductor production capacity cannot be expanded, customers may delay delivery schedules or cancel orders, and memory, optical components, power management, and analog components are most vulnerable to inventory-related disruptions. Goldman Sachs has also pointed to growing constraints on U.S. data center construction, seeing the short-term impact of political backlash as limited, while Morgan Stanley cites labor, power, and politics as the three challenges.

Amazon Web Services Chief AI and Technology Officer Matt Wood said the cost of delivering a given level of AI intelligence is falling by one or two orders of magnitude every three to six months outside the most advanced frontier models, a decline he attributed to improving efficiency as companies learn to operationalize frontier models at lower cost. Speaking to CNBC on Thursday, Wood rejected the idea that more capable AI agents must become less safe, saying developers can surround models with controls, guardrails, security and privacy protections while still improving the underlying technology, and pushed back on the notion that companies must choose between development speed and safety. Wood also defended AWS's $220 billion infrastructure investment, pointing to customer demand and internal business metrics, and said he expects additional computing capacity and greater operating efficiency to bring AI to more businesses and users. Accelerating AWS growth helped push Amazon above $3 trillion in market value for the first time in August 2026, after second-quarter results showed AWS revenue growing at its fastest pace since 2021; the stock surged more than 15% in one session, adding nearly $400 billion in market value, before gaining as much as another 5.3% as it crossed the threshold. TD Cowen analyst John Blackledge said AWS's AI business exited a quarter at roughly a $25 billion annual run rate, its fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth, and pointed to CEO Andy Jassy's view that AWS could eventually generate $1 trillion in revenue, compared with the $600 billion long-term opportunity Jassy discussed in his April shareholder letter. Amazon expects AWS to remain capacity constrained through 2026 and 2027 because of AI demand, even as it plans to double AWS capacity by the end of 2027.

BNP Paribas raised its price target on AMD by 60% to $960, citing remarkable strength in CPUs driven by artificial intelligence, while keeping a Neutral rating on the Dr. Lisa Su-led company. Analyst Karl Ackerman wrote that AMD is increasingly becoming a leading provider of AI infrastructure, successfully pivoting from a silicon pure-play to a full-stack systems platform, and said the firm's new agentic CPU model supports above-consensus estimates driven by AMD's leadership and roadmap to capture a growing share of a roughly $245B agentic CPU total addressable market by 2030. Ackerman noted that AMD's Helios AI accelerators have become a credible second source to Nvidia, backed by 14 gigawatts of commitments, and that the success of Helios, improvements in ROCm integration, and the recent acquisition of World Labs bolster AMD's opportunity to address frontier AI deployments, with OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic having announced multi-gigawatt agreements and AMD potentially capturing at least 8% of the more than $1T 2030 GPU market. The analyst added that AMD expects ASICs and XPUs to serve roughly 25% of the accelerator market over time, with the Cerebras partnership pairing Helios for high-throughput inference with Cerebras' Wafer-Scale Engine for ultra-low-latency token generation, and the Taalas acquisition adding IP and engineering talent for AMD's own low-latency silicon. AMD shares were modestly lower in Monday trading.

Schneider Electric agreed to buy PTC for about $22.6 billion in an all-cash deal aimed at tapping into the artificial-intelligence boom, sending PTC shares rallying. Qualcomm shares moved higher after the company agreed to license patents underpinning Huawei Technologies Co.'s novel LogicFolding chipmaking technique. Taiwan Semiconductor shares gained as sentiment was boosted by discussions between the Taiwanese chip giant and Elon Musk's Terafab on potential collaboration.