Today’s Market Recap：Renewed Inflation Fears Weigh on US Stocks, Walmart Sinks 9%, Bitcoin Breaks $72,000

Bessent: U.S. Treasury Repurchase Operations Could Be Expanded Further; Iran Will Face “Unprecedented” Isolation. U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent stated that the Treasury has ample policy tools at its disposal, noting that liquidity is particularly tight in 30-year U.S. Treasuries, and that the scale of repurchase operations will depend on market conditions. The Treasury has doubled the single-transaction limit for liquidity repurchase operations on 10- to 30-year Treasuries to at least $4 billion. The AI investment boom has made companies “virtually insensitive” to yields when issuing bonds. A plan of action regarding Iran will be announced next Monday, and the U.S. will impose the “toughest-ever” economic sanctions. The U.S. Dollar Index has rebounded for three consecutive days recently; he reiterated the strong dollar policy and expressed confusion over the reasons behind rising oil prices.

Anthropic’s IPO size may match SpaceX’s, challenging the record for the largest IPO in history. According to media reports, Anthropic expects its IPO to raise at least as much as the historical record previously set by SpaceX. The company may file its IPO documents publicly as early as the end of this month and is currently finalizing calculations regarding the fundraising amount.

Broadcom Seeks Over $60 Billion in Debt Financing to Build Chip Infrastructure for AI Companies Like Anthropic. Broadcom is in talks with Blackstone and Apollo to raise over $60 billion in debt financing through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), with the total deal size potentially reaching up to $100 billion, to support the construction of AI chip infrastructure, with Anthropic as a key example. This financing builds on the “AI XPV Partnership” framework established by the three parties in June of this year.

Micron to Invest $10 Billion Over the Next Decade to Boost Memory R&D; Construction at Boise Campus to Begin in 2027. Micron announced the establishment of the Micron Research Lab, committing $10 billion over the next decade to focus on cutting-edge fields such as memory, computing architecture, packaging, and manufacturing. The lab will be located in Boise, with construction expected to begin in 2027. This investment is separate from the company’s existing $250 billion commitment and represents an additional boost to R&D spending.

OpenAI CFO Addresses All-Hands Meeting: Q3 ARR Up 35%, IPO Expected in 2027 or Earlier. Facing dual pressures—Q2 revenue growth of just 18% and a series of executive departures—OpenAI’s CFO disclosed the latest Q3 figures at an all-hands meeting: overall ARR has grown 35% to date, with enterprise ARR up 50%, and confirmed that the company “will go public in 2027 or earlier.” She also reassured employees that there is no need to worry about Anthropic potentially beating them to an IPO, stating, “We’re running our own race.”

Samsung to Announce Shareholder Return Plan Exceeding 100 Trillion Won, Returning 50% of Free Cash Flow to Shareholders. Driven by a surge in cash flow from the AI storage supercycle, Samsung Electronics plans to launch its largest-ever shareholder return program totaling over 100 trillion won, returning 50% of free cash flow to shareholders, with special dividends and share buybacks and cancellations as the primary options. Earlier this week, SK Hynix announced the repurchase and cancellation of 40 trillion won in treasury shares, marking a concentrated wave of shareholder returns across the South Korean semiconductor industry.

SK Hynix Releases CPO Roadmap: Optical Interconnect Technology Extends to Memory Interfaces for the First Time. SK Hynix, in collaboration with the University of Virginia and other institutions, published a paper on the CPO technology roadmap in *Nature Electronics*. The paper notes that while computing power triples every two years, interconnect bandwidth increases by only 1.4 times; the “bandwidth wall” has become a core bottleneck for AI scaling, and CPO is identified as a key direction for breaking through this barrier. The longer-term vision is to extend CPO to memory interfaces, enabling multiple AI accelerators to share the same memory pool and improve memory utilization efficiency.

Walmart’s Q2 Same-Store Sales Growth Hits Six-Year Low; Full-Year Earnings Guidance Falls Short of Expectations; Stock Plummets Over 9%. Walmart’s second-quarter revenue of $187.94 billion and adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $0.81 both exceeded expectations, but domestic same-store sales growth fell to 2.6% (the lowest in more than six years), and full-year EPS guidance also fell short of expectations. Lower pharmacy prices and smaller average transaction sizes weighed on results, reflecting caution and weakness in U.S. consumer spending amid high gas prices and a cooling labor market.

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