 The week in review
Over the five sessions to Friday, major share indices fell while selected robotics and software stocks rose. The Nasdaq Composite fell 1.55%, the S&P 500 lost 0.88% and the ASX 200 slipped 0.53%. European benchmarks fell: the Euro Stoxx 50 1.43%, the DAX 1.04% and the FTSE 100 1.19%.
Chipmakers led the decline. ASML dropped 5.56%, AMD 5.51% and Broadcom 3.95%, while Nvidia fell 2.12% in a week that saw Apple overtake it as the world's most valuable company and reports of illegal Nvidia B300 chips inside China Telecom's network. TSMC added 0.19%. In software, Meta fell 7.87% in a week that brought Senate scrutiny of its data-centre tax credits and a class action in Australia; Alphabet dropped 6.77% after issuing a privacy-policy change that could allow targeted ads using Gmail and Photos data. Amazon lost 3.35% and Microsoft 1.32%. Enterprise and Australia-listed software names rose instead: WiseTech up 8.58%, Xero 7.94% and SAP 6.34%.
Several robotics stocks rose, while robotics funds were mixed. Intuitive Surgical added 5.41%, Fanuc 3.70%, Tesla 2.84% and Symbotic 2.03%, while DroneShield fell 6.82%. Robotics ETFs were mixed: the KraneShares humanoid fund gained 0.12% and Themes Robotics 0.71%, but the ASX-listed ROBO and RBTZ funds fell 3.59% and 3.70%. The Global X Robotics & AI ETF closed down 1.17%. |
The week's biggest stories
Business
A SpaceX regulatory filing has revealed that Elon Musk, who controls roughly 85% of the company's voting power, must approve any merger with Tesla.
Security
Bitcoin Core, the primary software powering the bitcoin network, will stop keeping security fixes under months-long embargo when the bug is one an artificial intelligence model could quickly find.
AI
Microsoft has released three new voice-centric AI models through its Microsoft Foundry platform, designed to reduce awkward pauses in human-machine conversations.
AI
OpenAI has switched to training its most advanced AI models without internet access, building an offline testing environment where models interact only with indexed, cached web content.
Business
NextDC, one of Australia's leading data centre operators, saw $3 billion wiped from its market value this week after slashing profit forecasts and construction spending amid a dispute over a Melbourne power line.
|