Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

The Shiba Inu community has taken notice as Shytoshi Kusama, the prominent lead ambassador for the $SHIB project, has remained silent on X for 74 days, marking one of his longest periods of social media inactivity to date.

Kusama’s prolonged absence and project focusKusama has historically engaged with Shiba Inu supporters through regular updates, hints in his bio, and even live broadcasts on X, which has served as his main platform to communicate developments related to the popular memecoin.

His current silence began on May 13, when he stopped posting or interacting on X. Previous stretches of minimal online presence were seen in late 2025 and into 2026, indicating a pattern of stepping back from the public spotlight periodically.

In January, Kusama attributed his lower profile to developing an independent artificial intelligence initiative, revealing some progress on that project as his primary focus at the time.

Despite Kusama’s absence, there is heightened speculation within the Shiba Inu community that an update or announcement may soon follow, citing his past tendency to return with fresh information after a hiatus. As of now, however, there is no official indication that a major update is imminent.

Mini dictionary: Shytoshi Kusama is the pseudonymous lead ambassador and spokesperson for the Shiba Inu ecosystem. He often represents community interests and is seen as the unofficial public face for development updates and communications.

While Kusama remains inactive, community-powered SHIB burn campaigns have continued. On-chain tracker Shibburn reports that 7.15 million SHIB tokens were burned in the last 24 hours, marking a 66% increase in the daily burn rate.

Over the past seven days, 60.58 million SHIB were burned, bringing the 30-day total to 288.61 million. Robinhood, a major U.S.-based trading platform, led monthly burn efforts by sending 152,792,823 SHIB to so-called dead wallets across 106 separate transactions.

PeriodSHIB BurnedMain BurnerTransactions24 hours7.15 millionCommunity–7 days60.58 millionCommunity–30 days288.61 millionRobinhood106Total SHIB burned to date has reached 410,840,455,020,349 tokens, completed in 21,280 individual transactions. A notable contribution came from Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, who destroyed 410 trillion SHIB in May 2021, significantly reducing circulating supply.

Even in the absence of leadership updates, the Shiba Inu community has maintained active burn efforts, with millions of SHIB removed from circulation weekly and major platforms like Robinhood participating in sizeable burn transactions.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

NEAR Protocol [NEAR] became one of the first blockchains with a NIST-approved post-quantum signature scheme in production. The Layer 1 AI-native settlement layer announced this in a post on X on Monday, 20th July.

The upgrade has also launched dynamic resharding. This will allow the network to scale itself automatically. The chain also believes in agentic commerce and is now actively preparing for it.

NEAR is building an open, integrated stack for the agent economy. Within this system, NEAR Protocol intends to bring identity, liquidity, private inference, confidential execution, settlement, governance, and economics.

In fact, this announcement dates back to February 2026, marking a structural shift for the protocol amid an ongoing bear market. With pessimistic wider market sentiment, a bullish turnaround has been hard to enforce so far.

A potential rebound for NEAR ahead? In the last 24 hours, the altcoin has posted losses of almost 3%, with its Open Interest sliding by 4.1% too. The daily trading volume saw a marginal uptick of 5.5%, but the short-term NEAR trend has been bearish.

Since forming a local high at $2.06 on Tuesday, 21st July, the token’s price has declined by 13.5%.

Source: Ali Charts on X Analyst Ali Martinez noted that the TD Sequential indicator gave a buy signal for NEAR on the 4-hour chart. A sell signal on 21st July has been vindicated. Hence, the question – Will this buy signal be correct too?

Traders’ call to action – Wait to sell Source: NEAR/USDT on TradingView The Fibonacci retracement levels (yellow) highlighted the NEAR rejection from $2.80-$3.00 as coming from the 78.6% retracement zone. This was in line with the higher timeframe bearish trend. The rally in May was only a retracement that has since begun to reverse itself.

For nearly two months, the bulls have defiantly held on to the $1.80-support zone. However, the CMF flashed signs of significant selling pressure, with the MACD underlining downward momentum too.

It could be a make-or-break moment for the buyers. A drop below $1.80 would signal a bearish trend continuation and could offer swing traders a chance to go short.

A price bounce beyond $2.10 is needed to instill temporary bullish confidence in NEAR.

Final Summary NEAR Protocol’s quantum-safe signing has gone live, with the TD Sequential offering up a buy signal. Bulls have been clinging to the $1.80-support zone, but the higher timeframe trend has been bearish. 

Solana has recorded the highest number of weekly active addresses among major blockchains, according to an announcement by Solana Hub. This development coincides with the network’s native token, SOL, maintaining stability near a critical support level following weeks of sideways trading.

Network activity drives industry attentionSolana Hub reported that Solana registered 18 million active addresses over the past week, surpassing networks such as BNB Chain, TRON, Bitcoin, and Ethereum during this period. These metrics were featured in a ranking titled “Top chain rankings by Active Addresses last 7D,” highlighting Solana’s prominent position in on-chain activity.

Active addresses indicate the number of unique wallets participating in transactions on a blockchain. A growing user base is generally seen as a sign of increasing demand for applications, higher transaction throughput, and stronger participation across the network’s ecosystem.

Active addresses remain one of the most dependable indicators of blockchain network health, underlining adoption trends and user engagement.

Significant growth in this metric suggests a vibrant ecosystem, potentially reinforcing confidence in Solana among developers and the broader community.

Mini dictionary: Solana Hub, an analytics and information platform focused on the Solana blockchain, provides real-time data and ecosystem research for developers, traders, and users interested in Solana network activity.

SOL price action remains subdued despite strong on-chain metricsAt publication time, SOL trades at $74.33, up 0.50% over the last 24 hours. The price is attempting to stabilize near the $73 support level, following a recovery from June lows. Technical analysis places immediate resistance at $78, a level associated with the midpoint of the Bollinger Bands. Stronger support is identified near $68.

Trading volume has decreased in recent sessions, suggesting that neither bulls nor bears are currently dominating price action. As a result, Solana may continue experiencing range-bound trading until a clear breakout or breakdown emerges.

Support LevelResistance LevelCurrent Price$73$78$74.33$68 (stronger)——Despite strong network data, traders remain cautious, awaiting confirmation of renewed buying pressure before becoming more bullish on SOL’s outlook.

Market outlook and key levels to watchThe robust growth in Solana’s network activity has not yet translated into a significant price movement. Analysts suggest this pattern is consistent across the broader cryptocurrency sector, where high on-chain participation has not always triggered immediate price rallies.

Data from DefiLlama shows that Solana’s total value locked (TVL) has remained stable near $5 billion, supporting the view that, while price consolidation continues, general ecosystem engagement is strong.

While increased network activity bodes well for Solana’s long-term fundamentals, traders are looking for a breach of the $78 resistance to shift short-term sentiment in a more positive direction.

Should SOL fall below the $73 support, the $68 zone is likely to serve as the next downside target. As market volatility persists, investors are closely monitoring external catalysts and market sentiment for signals about Solana’s next major move.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

Quantum computing may not be at the top of every investor's mind right now due to the prominence of artificial intelligence (AI) investing. However, I think it's something investors should keep in mind. By 2030, there could be commercially viable quantum computing available, and that could shake up tech even more than AI has. If quantum computing is all that it has been hyped up to be, then maintaining some exposure to stocks in this field is just as important as AI investing.

Fortunately, several stocks cross over into both categories, making investing in both trends at the same time easy. Three stocks that I'm bullish on in the quantum field are Alphabet (GOOG +0.24%) (GOOGL +0.58%), Nvidia (NVDA -1.01%), and IonQ (IONQ -3.61%). Two of these are also major AI players as well. By maintaining solid exposure to this trio, you'll be able to capture the upside of AI while also hedging your bets on a quantum computing future.

Image source: Getty Images.

1. Alphabet Alphabet is a major player in computing, and as new computing technologies emerge, it wants to control its own destiny with in-house quantum computing. That will keep it from having to pay exorbitant prices for computing units, as it does now for Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs). As a result, Alphabet is plowing a ton of resources into its quantum computing division, and its Willow quantum computing chip has had some incredible breakthroughs.

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Alphabet ran one of its quantum algorithms on its Willow chip and demonstrated a verifiable advantage over traditional computing. This algorithm is similar to the one used to process MRIs and could have significant applications in drug discovery and materials design. Alphabet has also unearthed several other quantum algorithms, such as one that could break cryptocurrency encryptions.

Alphabet is a major player in the quantum space and has major resources that few can compete against. As a result, it's an odds-on favorite to reach viable quantum computing before anyone else.

2. Nvidia Nvidia may seem like an odd pick here because it's explicitly not developing a quantum processing unit. Instead, it's focusing on its traditional accelerating methods, as it sees incredible demand right now from AI hyperscalers. However, it's not ignoring quantum computing either. What it's doing is launching a range of tools to help the quantum industry succeed on Nvidia hardware. Nvidia sees a future where quantum and traditional accelerated computing work side by side. Ensuring that its peers' quantum computing units plug into existing infrastructure is key.

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So, Nvidia has launched several key products, like its NVQLink, a generative AI model for improving error correction, and updated its CUDA software to include quantum operations. That's a solid strategy and will allow Nvidia to profit from the rise of quantum computing.

3. IonQ Last is IonQ (IONQ -3.61%), a pure play in the quantum computing space. It has no other business units funding the company. It's only funding sources are the money it can raise from potential clients and any systems it can sell at an early stage. This makes it an incredibly risky investment option, but it also means huge upside if this stock pans out.

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IonQ is currently the world record holder for two-qubit gate fidelity, a common accuracy measure used by quantum computers to assess their products. With IonQ leading the way in the one area where quantum computing is lacking, it's a no-brainer horse to back in the race.

Still, there's no guarantee that IonQ's solution will pan out, so investors should keep their exposure limited on IonQ's stock, while Nvidia and Alphabet will be just fine if quantum computing doesn't pan out. However, I think a decade from now, investors will look back and see this trio absolutely crushing the market from both quantum computing success and AI proliferation.

VRRM Deadline: VRRM Investors Have Opportunity to Lead Verra Mobility Corporation Securities Fraud Lawsuit PR Newswire

Rosen Law Firm Encourages PennyMac Financial Services, Inc. Investors to Inquire About Securities Class Action Investigation - PFSI

New York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - July 25, 2026) - WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of securities of Futu Holdings Limited (NASDAQ: FUTU) between May 24, 2023 and May 27, 2026, inclusive (the "Class Period"), of the important August 25, 2026 lead plaintiff deadline.

SO WHAT: If you purchased Futu securities during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement.

WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Futu class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/cases/futu-holdings-limited/join or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than August 25, 2026. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation.

WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources, or any meaningful peer recognition. Many of these firms do not actually handle securities class actions, but are merely middlemen that refer clients or partner with law firms that actually litigate the cases. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered billions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers.

DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, throughout the Class Period, defendants made materially false and misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Futu was not in compliance with the requirements of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (the "CSRC"), including because Futu continued to conduct securities business, public fund sales business and futures business in mainland China without obtaining the requisite licenses or approval; (2) as a result, Futu was reasonably likely to face regulatory penalties, including the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and other penalties; (3) as a result of the foregoing, Futu's financial results were overstated; and (4) as a result of the foregoing, defendants' positive statements about Futu's business, operations, and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.

To join the Futu class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/cases/futu-holdings-limited/join or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action.

No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff.

Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/.

Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

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To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/306480

Source: The Rosen Law Firm PA

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The choice between Vanguard S&P 500 Growth ETF (VOOG -0.58%) and State Street SPDR S&P 600 Small Cap Growth ETF (SLYG -0.19%) hinges on whether an investor prefers large-cap stability and tech dominance or the potential higher volatility of small-cap growth.

These two funds target opposite ends of the market capitalization spectrum. While both prioritize growth factors, they operate in different universes: one captures the titan companies of the U.S. economy, and the other focuses on smaller firms with high expansion potential. This analysis compares their costs, risk profiles, and portfolios.

Snapshot (cost & size)MetricSLYGVOOGIssuerSPDRVanguardShare price$114.58 (as of 2026-07-23)$80.29 (as of 2026-07-23)Expense ratio0.15%0.07%1-yr return (as of 2026-07-23)26.2%18.8%Dividend yield0.7%0.4%Beta1.041.17AUM$5.1B$26.4BBeta measures price volatility relative to the S&P 500; beta is calculated from monthly returns over the available fund history (up to five years). The 1-yr return represents total return over the trailing 12 months. Dividend yield is the trailing-12-month distribution yield.

The Vanguard S&P 500 Growth ETF is the more affordable option with an expense ratio of 0.07%, which is less than half of the 0.15% charged by the State Street fund. While both offer modest income, the yield gap reflects their primary focus on capital appreciation.

Performance & risk comparisonMetricSLYGVOOGMax drawdown (5 yr)(29.2%)(32.7%)Growth of $1,000 over 5 years (total return)$1,396$1,816What's insideThe Vanguard S&P 500 Growth ETF holds 212 stocks and is heavily tilted toward technology at 52%, communication services at 16%, and consumer cyclical at 9%. Its largest positions include NVIDIA Corp (NVDA -1.01%) at 13.64%, Microsoft Corp (MSFT +0.02%) at 7.80%, and Apple Inc (AAPL +3.52%) at 5.98%. The fund was launched in 2010. It has paid $0.37 per share over the trailing 12 months, which, at its recent ~$80.29 share price, yields 0.4%.

In contrast, the State Street SPDR S&P 600 Small Cap Growth ETF targets smaller firms with top holdings including Viasat Inc (VSAT -3.46%) at 1.15%, Corcept Therapeutics Inc (CORT -1.46%) at 1.06%, and Alkermes Plc (ALKS -0.15%) at 1.01%. This fund holds 350 positions, with a more balanced sector mix: industrials at 19%, technology at 18%, and healthcare at 17%. It was launched in 2000. It has paid $0.76 per share over the trailing 12 months, which, at its recent ~$114.58 share price, yields 0.7%.

For more guidance on ETF investing, check out the full guide at this link.

Which is the better buyThe Vanguard S&P 500 Growth ETF (VOOG) and the State Street SPDR S&P 600 Small Cap Growth ETF (SLYG) are both growth-oriented exchange-traded funds (ETFs), they employ very different strategies to deliver returns for investors. Let’s look at each fund individually.

First, there’s VOOG. This fund is loaded with tech megacap stocks. Indeed, just three stocks — Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia — account for about 27% of the fund’s holdings. As for sectors, technology (67% of total holdings) is the largest, followed by financials (9%) and consumer durables (2%). Overall, the fund is almost entirely focused on the U.S. stock market, with more than 98% of all holdings in U.S. stocks. As for performance, VOOG has generated a total return of 385% over the last 10 years, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.1%. Both figures are outstanding and surpass the benchmark S&P 500, which has delivered a total return of 300%, equating to a CAGR of 14.9% over the same period. As for fees, VOOG has a low expense ratio of 0.07%.

Then, there’s SLYG. Unlike its counterpart, SLYG focuses on the small and mid cap growth sector. Rather than targeting tech giants, SLY invests in much smaller companies with market caps under $10 billion. For context, Microsoft has a market cap of $2.8 trillion, meaning SLYG’s holdings are very different from those in the VOOG portfolio. For example, SLYG's top sector holdings are technology (22%), followed by financials (21%) and manufacturing (9%). Turning to performance, the fund has delivered a total return of 182% over the last 10 years, with a CAGR of 10.9%. While this isn’t terrible by any means, the fund has underperformed the benchmark, the S&P 500, and fallen well short of VOOG’s returns. SLYG also has a slightly higher expense ratio at 0.15%.

In summary, these two funds are both acceptable choices for investors seeking exposure to the growth sector of the stock market. However, VOOG beats SLYG on both performance and fees. Yet, for investors seeking diversification away from the tech megacaps, SLYG offers a viable alternative.

Stable exempts USDT transfers from gas. Plasma ships zero-fee sends. Sui made stablecoin transfers free at the protocol level. Every coverage of every launch asks the same question in passing, someone still pays for blockspace, and then moves on. This guide stops and answers it: five funding models, their failure modes, and how to tell which one your free lunch runs on.

Summary

A wave of chains and wallets now offer gasless stablecoin transfers: Stable’s protocol-level exemption for USDT sends, Plasma’s zero-fee transfers, Sui’s free stablecoin operations, fee delegation on BNB Chain, and wallet-level subsidies on Tron. Free is a price, not a cost: validators still expend hardware, bandwidth, and stake to process every transaction, so gasless designs are answers to one question, who pays instead of the user, and there are exactly five answers. The five models: token-holder dilution through emissions, foundation treasuries burning finite war chests, cross-subsidy from paid transaction tiers, patron sponsorship funded by an adjacent business, and application-level paymasters passing costs to merchants and apps. Each model has a signature failure mode, from inflation death spirals to subsidy cliffs, and each embeds a priority structure: on Sui, paid transactions outrank free ones under congestion, which is what a free tier actually is. The stablechain era’s real answer is the patron model: Tether’s float income makes Stable’s free tier a marketing expense against a $100-billion-scale reserve business, which is why the free lunch is real, and why it has an owner. Crypto has finally built the thing it spent a decade promising: sending digital dollars with no fee, no gas token, no friction, just an amount and an address, like a message. Stable exempts simple USDT transfers from gas at the protocol level. Plasma launched zero-fee USDT sends as its headline feature. Sui made stablecoin transfers free network-wide this spring. BNB Chain and its wallet partners rolled out fee delegation; Tron wallets hand out daily transfer subsidies by the thousand. And every article covering every launch contains the same sentence, worded almost identically each time: the important question is how this is funded, because someone still pays for blockspace.

The sentence is correct, and it is always the last sentence on the subject. This guide is what happens when it is the first. Free transfers are not a technological discovery; they are an accounting decision. Blockspace has real costs, validators run real hardware behind real stake, and a gasless design simply moves the bill from the person clicking send to someone else, chosen by the chain’s designers. There are exactly five candidates for that someone. Learning to identify which one is holding your chain’s bill, and what happens to each under stress, is the actual literacy the gasless era requires.

The cost that does not go away Before the five models, fix the invariant, because every gasless pitch is engineered to blur it.

Processing a transaction costs resources regardless of what the user pays. Validators execute the computation, store the state change, propagate the data, and bear the capital cost of the stake or hardware that earned them the right to do so. On a fee-market chain like Ethereum, the user’s gas payment compensates exactly this work, and the fee’s second job is just as load-bearing: it rations blockspace, pricing out spam by making every transaction cost something.

A chain that sets the user’s price to zero has not abolished either function. It has committed to compensating validators from another source, and to rationing blockspace by another mechanism, and the entire integrity of a gasless design lives in how honestly those two replacements are engineered.

The rationing replacement is worth understanding first because it is universal. At a price of zero, demand for anything is infinite, so every gasless system imposes non-price limits: allowlists restricting the free tier to specific operations, simple stablecoin transfers but not contract calls, per-account rate limits, wallet-level daily quotas like Tron’s subsidy counts, or, most elegantly and most revealingly, priority markets.

Sui’s design states it plainly: free stablecoin transfers process normally in calm conditions, but under congestion, paid transactions take precedence, free riders queue behind them. That ordering is not a bug; it is the honest shape of every free tier ever built, in cloud computing, in banking, in telecoms: free means lowest quality of service, and the moment the network is worth congesting, the free lane discovers what it actually bought.

A payments product whose settlement time degrades exactly when activity spikes has a property merchants notice, which is why the rationing design deserves as much scrutiny as the funding design in any gasless chain’s documentation.

The five models Now the funding side: who compensates the validators. Every gasless system in production runs on one of five sources, or a blend.

Model one: holder dilution. The chain pays validators in newly issued native tokens, emissions, and the free tier is funded by inflating the token supply, which means the cost lands on everyone holding the token, silently, pro rata. This is the workhorse of the category; it is how Stable’s validator set is compensated in STABLE while users transact in USDT, and how most new chains bootstrap. Its virtue is that it requires no ongoing treasury decisions; its failure mode is the oldest in crypto: if the token’s price cannot bear the emission schedule, security spend collapses with the price, and the free tier is revealed to have been funded by selling the chain’s future to subsidize its present. The diagnostic question: what is annual issuance worth in dollars, versus the free tier’s resource consumption, and what happens to both if the token halves.

Model two: the foundation war chest. A treasury, raised from investors or a token sale, pays the bills directly, covering validator costs or reimbursing gas. This is the cleanest to verify and the most obviously finite: war chests burn, and the model’s signature failure is the subsidy cliff, the scheduled or unscheduled morning when the program ends and the chain discovers what organic demand at true cost looks like.

Every subsidy this publication has covered, from Robinhood Chain’s 90-day gas holiday to exchange fee promotions, belongs to this family, and the diagnostic question is always the same: what is the burn rate, what is the runway, and what is the announced end state.

Model three: cross-subsidy. The free tier is funded by paid activity on the same chain, priority fees under congestion, contract-call gas from DeFi, sequencer margins on complex transactions, the way free checking is funded by overdraft fees.

This is the only self-sustaining model that requires no external money, and its honest precondition is scale: the paid economy must be large relative to the free one, which inverts the usual pitch. A chain marketing free transfers as its main product while hoping paid activity funds them has the subsidy pointing the wrong way; a chain where free transfers are the loss-leading on-ramp to a large fee-paying economy has a business. The diagnostic: what fraction of validator revenue comes from users versus emissions, today, on the explorer.

Model four: the patron. An adjacent business with its own profit pool sponsors the chain as strategy: the free rail exists to grow the patron’s real product. This is the stablechain era’s defining model, and its clearest example is arithmetic.

Tether earns yield on the reserves backing USDT, a float measured against $100-billion-scale holdings of Treasury bills, which at prevailing rates generates income in the billions annually. Every new USDT holder, every merchant integration, every remittance corridor that a free-transfer chain onboards grows that float, which means Stable’s gas-exempt tier is not charity and not unsustainable: it is customer acquisition, priced as a marketing expense against one of the most profitable businesses per employee on earth.

The same logic runs through every patron chain, payment giants incubating their own rails included, and it cuts both ways: the free tier is as durable as the patron’s strategic interest, and its terms can change when the strategy does. The diagnostic question is not can they afford it, patrons can, but what does the patron get, and what happens when it has it.

Model five: the paymaster. Costs are moved up the application stack: the merchant, the app, the wallet, or the employer sponsors the user’s gas through account-abstraction machinery, the way merchants pay card interchange so shoppers do not. BNB Chain’s fee delegation and app-sponsored transactions across EVM chains are this family. It is the model most like mature payments economics: the party with the business interest in the transaction pays for it, and its limit is adoption friction: someone must integrate, budget, and monitor the sponsorship, which is why paymaster gasless arrives app by app rather than chain-wide.

Before the card detour, one more distinction sharpens the taxonomy: protocol-level gasless versus application-level gasless, because the two feel identical in a wallet and fail completely differently. Protocol-level exemption, Stable’s and Sui’s approach, writes the free tier into consensus rules: every user of the chain gets it, no integration required, and it can only be changed by the chain’s own governance process, which makes it durable, transparent, and slow to modify in either direction.

Application-level sponsorship, the paymaster and wallet-subsidy family, is a private arrangement: this wallet, this app, this merchant covers gas for its own users, funded from its own budget, changeable by a product decision on a Tuesday. The practical difference surfaces at the edges: protocol-level free tiers survive the failure of any single company in the ecosystem, while an app-level subsidy dies with its sponsor’s budget line, and users who learned free on one surface discover, moving to another wallet on the same chain, that the free was never the chain’s at all.

The diagnostic is one question: does the exemption appear in the protocol’s documentation or the app’s marketing? The answer assigns the free tier its durability class before any economics are examined.

The card-network precedent, taken seriously The five models have a common ancestor outside crypto, and studying it repays the detour, because the payments industry already ran a fifty-year experiment on making transactions feel free, and its results predict where gasless rails are heading with uncomfortable precision.

Card payments feel free to the shopper: no per-swipe fee, rewards paid for using the card, frictionless authorization in two seconds. The economics underneath are the paymaster model at civilizational scale: merchants pay interchange, roughly two to three percent of every transaction in the US, to fund the shopper’s free experience, the rewards, the fraud protection, and the networks’ margins, and the cost re-enters prices invisibly, spread across all shoppers including the ones paying cash.

The structure’s genius, and its lesson for crypto, is that free to the user was never a subsidy phase; it was the permanent product architecture, sustained by moving the bill to the party with the least ability to refuse, the merchant who cannot decline the cards their customers carry, and the least visibility to the person nominally benefiting.

Two further properties followed. The rails became phenomenally profitable precisely because the payer and the chooser were different parties, a separation that blunts price competition. And the fee’s invisibility became politically load-bearing: interchange wars are fought between merchants, networks, and regulators, decade after decade, while shoppers, the beneficiaries of record, remain spectators to the pricing of their own payments.

Now overlay the crypto trajectory. Gasless stablecoin transfers are converging on the same separation: users choose the rail, but patrons, apps, merchants, and tokenholders pay for it, through float, sponsorship budgets, and dilution. If the pattern completes, the endgame is not free payments in any economic sense; it is payments whose price is set in negotiations the user never sees, between chains, patrons, and integrators, exactly as interchange is set today. That is not a condemnation; the card model delivered the most reliable consumer payments in history, but it is the honest destination, and it clarifies what the current gasless land-grab is actually competing for: the position of the network that gets to set the invisible price later.

Every free tier is a bid for that seat, funded accordingly, and users evaluating today’s genuinely free transfers should enjoy them with the card precedent in mind: in payments, free has always been the most carefully engineered price there is.

Reading a chain’s answer The five models compress into a practical method, because real systems blend them and the blend is the disclosure that matters.

Take the reader’s own test case, Stable, and run it. Users pay nothing for simple USDT transfers: the free tier. Validators stake and earn STABLE: model one, dilution, funds security. Complex transactions and future priority markets pay fees in USDT: model three, cross-subsidy, in its infancy. And behind the whole structure stands the patron whose dollar the chain exists to distribute: model four, the deep pocket that makes the first two sustainable as long as the strategy holds.

The composite answer to who pays on Stable is therefore: STABLE holders via emissions, sophisticated users via paid tiers, and Tether’s float via the strategic umbrella, in proportions that will shift as the chain matures, and that ordering, patron-backed dilution transitioning toward cross-subsidy, is the healthiest available shape for a young payments chain.

The unhealthy shapes are equally recognizable now: a war-chest chain with no patron and no paid economy is a countdown; a dilution chain whose token has no demand story is a slow leak; and any chain that cannot answer the question at all has answered it.

One last reframe earns its place at the end. The question who pays has a companion the gasless era keeps forgetting: what did the payer buy? Card networks made payments feel free to shoppers and built the most profitable toll infrastructure in financial history on the merchant side.

Free checking built the overdraft industry. When crypto’s free transfers are funded by a patron, the purchase is distribution for the patron’s dollar; when funded by dilution, it is growth bought from holders; when funded by paymasters, it is customer experience bought by apps.

None of these is sinister, and all of them are terms, and the entire adult literacy of using gasless rails is knowing that a free transfer is not a gift. It is a price of zero, attached to a bill with someone else’s name on it, and the name is always findable, usually in the tokenomics.

One closing test makes the whole framework portable: the next time any chain, wallet, or app announces free transfers, run the four-question audit this guide has assembled. Who funds it: emissions, treasury, paid tiers, patron, or sponsors, and is the answer documented or inferred? What rations it: allowlists, quotas, or priority queues, and what happens to the free lane under congestion? How long is it promised: a scheduled program with an end date, an open-ended strategy, or silence? And who can change it: a governance vote, a foundation decision, or a patron’s strategy review? Ten minutes with a chain’s documentation and explorer answers all four, and the answers sort every gasless offer into one of three honest categories: a durable product feature backed by a patron or a paying economy, a bootstrap subsidy with a visible cliff, or an unfunded promise.

All three can be worth using; only the first is worth building on, and the difference between using and building is the entire practical stake of the question. A remittance sender exploiting a bootstrap subsidy is arbitraging someone else’s marketing budget, rationally. A merchant integrating settlement on the same subsidy is building a business on a countdown, less rationally.

The gasless era’s genuine achievement, and it is genuine, is that the first category now exists at all: rails where free transfers are the permanent architecture, funded by float economics that outlast any promotion. Its genuine hazard is that the three categories are marketed identically, in the same words, with the same zero, and the only party with an incentive to tell them apart is the reader.

Frequently Asked Questions Are gasless crypto transfers really free? Free to the user, never free in cost. Validators still expend computation, storage, bandwidth, and staked capital on every transaction, so gasless designs relocate the bill rather than eliminating it. The funding comes from token emissions diluting holders, foundation treasuries, paid transaction tiers, a strategic patron’s adjacent business, or application-level sponsors, and identifying which is the key question about any gasless chain.

Which chains offer gasless stablecoin transfers today? A growing set. Stable exempts simple USDT transfers from gas at the protocol level, with USDT0 as its native fee asset for everything else. Plasma launched with zero-fee USDT sends. Sui enabled free transfers for allowlisted stablecoin operations network-wide. BNB Chain supports fee delegation through wallet partners, and Tron wallets like TokenPocket distribute daily transfer subsidies covering network fees.

What stops spam if transactions cost nothing? Non-price rationing. Gasless systems restrict the free tier to specific operations, impose per-account rate limits or daily quotas, and use priority ordering; on Sui, paid transactions explicitly take precedence over free ones during congestion. Free tiers are lowest-priority service by construction, which is the practical meaning of free: full speed in calm conditions, back of the queue when blockspace is contested.

What is the most sustainable funding model? Cross-subsidy, where paid activity on the chain funds the free tier, is the only self-contained one, but it requires a large fee-paying economy first. The patron model, a profitable adjacent business sponsoring the rail strategically, is the most durable in practice: Tether’s reserve float income makes Stable’s free tier a customer-acquisition expense, sustainable indefinitely, though on the patron’s terms. Pure war-chest subsidies are finite by definition, and emission funding depends on the token’s price bearing the schedule.

How does Tether’s float pay for free transfers? Indirectly but decisively. Tether earns interest on the reserves backing USDT, predominantly short-term US government debt, generating billions annually at scale. Growth in USDT usage grows that float, so a chain that removes friction from USDT transfers grows Tether’s revenue without charging users anything. The free tier functions as marketing spend for the reserve business, which is why the model is neither charity nor a countdown.

What are the warning signs of an unsustainable free tier? A finite treasury with no announced end state or successor model; emissions funding whose dollar value depends on a token with no independent demand; free-transfer marketing with no paid economy developing behind it; and no disclosed answer to the funding question at all. The Robinhood Chain pattern is instructive: activity metrics inflated by a scheduled subsidy face a measurable cliff when it ends, and honest chains pre-frame that cliff.

Do free tiers degrade under congestion? By design, usually. Where priority markets exist, paid transactions outrank free ones, so free-tier settlement times lengthen exactly when networks are busiest. For casual transfers this rarely matters; for merchant settlement and time-sensitive payments it can, which is why serious payment integrations often pay for priority even on chains with free tiers, and why the congestion behavior belongs in any evaluation of a gasless rail.

What should users check before relying on a gasless chain? Four items: the funding source, emissions, treasury, cross-subsidy, patron, or paymaster, and its visible runway; the rationing rules, what operations qualify and what limits apply; the congestion policy, whether free transactions queue behind paid ones; and the terms’ changeability, who can end or alter the free tier and with what notice. A price of zero is a term of service, not a property of the network. This is educational information, not financial advice.

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Fee policies, subsidy programs, and network designs change frequently and vary by chain. Always verify current terms in official documentation. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of July 24, 2026.

Shares of RingCentral (RNG +25.09%) surged this past week after the cloud communications software provider announced strong gains in free cash flow and boosted its dividend.

Image source: Getty Images.

AI-fueled growth RingCentral's revenue rose 5.9% year over year to $657 million in the second quarter.

The business messaging specialist has positioned itself to be a leader in artificial intelligence (AI)–powered customer engagement solutions. It offers phone, text, and video messaging tools, as well as contact center support. RingCentral's AI agents can automate calls, provide real-time assistance, and deliver a more personalized customer experience.

Sales of these AI tools doubled over the past year and now account for 13% of RingCentral's annual recurring revenue.

"Powered by our global voice network, rich customer interaction data, and ability to orchestrate AI and human agents, RingCentral is uniquely positioned to lead the future of customer engagement," CEO Vlad Shmunis said.

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Better still, RingCentral is growing more profitable as it integrates AI throughout its organization. Its adjusted operating margin improved to 23.4% from 22.5% in the year-ago quarter. That contributed to a 15% jump in adjusted earnings per share to $1.22.

RingCentral, in turn, is becoming a cash-generating machine. The company's operating and free cash flow climbed 23.3% and 24.8%, respectively, to $206 million and $180 million. That amounted to an impressive free cash flow margin of 27.4%.

This robust cash generation enabled RingCentral to boost its recently initiated quarterly dividend by 67% to $0.125 per share.

Raised guidance These encouraging results also prompted RingCentral to lift its full-year financial forecast. Management now expects adjusted earnings per share of $4.96 to $5.10 and free cash flow of $615 million to $625 million in 2026.

"RingCentral is in a unique position, with a strong recurring core business, a widening moat, increasing momentum from AI-led products, and a financial profile that continues to strengthen," chief financial officer Vaibhav Agarwal said.

The supply of SpaceX (SPCX -2.68%) stock is set to soar after the company's quarterly financial update.

*Stock prices used were the afternoon prices of July 22, 2026. The video was published on July 24, 2026.

Parkev Tatevosian, CFA has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Parkev Tatevosian is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through his link, he will earn some extra money that supports his channel. His opinions remain his own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.

Alphabet's (GOOGL +0.58%) (GOOG +0.21%) share price fell after providing an investor update.

*Stock prices used were the afternoon prices of July 23, 2026. The video was published on July 25, 2026.

Parkev Tatevosian, CFA has positions in Alphabet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Parkev Tatevosian is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through his link, he will earn some extra money that supports his channel. His opinions remain his own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.

Nvidia (NVDA -1.01%) investors will appreciate these developments.

*Stock prices used were the afternoon prices of July 22, 2026. The video was published on July 24, 2026.

Parkev Tatevosian, CFA has positions in Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Parkev Tatevosian is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through his link, he will earn some extra money that supports his channel. His opinions remain his own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.

Intel's (INTC -8.02%) stock initially soared after it reported quarterly financial results.

*Stock prices used were the afternoon prices of July 23, 2026. The video was published on July 25, 2026.

Parkev Tatevosian, CFA has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Parkev Tatevosian is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through his link, he will earn some extra money that supports his channel. His opinions remain his own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.

Hot headlines around AI models disrupting chip design just hit Synopsys (SNPS -0.01%) and Cadence Design Systems (CDNS -1.31%), but the real story runs deeper than orchestration hype. Watch the video below to see what this could mean for long-term investors.

*This video was published on Jul. 23, 2026.

Andy Cross has positions in Cadence Design Systems and Datadog. Asit Sharma, CPA has positions in Synopsys. Jason Hall has positions in Datadog. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Cadence Design Systems, Datadog, and Synopsys. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

The tech bull market over the past few years has largely been driven by artificial intelligence (AI) growth stocks, particularly in the infrastructure space. Despite the strong gains in this sector, there are several AI growth stocks trading at bargain valuations.

Let's look at three cheap AI stocks to buy today.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

1. Nvidia As the poster child of the AI infrastructure boom and one of the stock market's biggest drivers over the past five years, it's hard to imagine that Nvidia (NVDA -1.01%) would be in the bargain bin, but that certainly appears to be the case. The stock carries a forward P/E ratio of just 16 times the analyst earnings consensus for fiscal 2028 (ending January 2028), while continuing to grow rapidly.

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While the AI infrastructure market is admittedly shifting, Nvidia's place in it and its prospects look bright. The company is the dominant semiconductor stock when it comes to AI model training, and with most foundational AI code written on its CUDA software platform for its graphics processing units (GPUs), that position looks secure. Meanwhile, it is also well positioned as inference and agentic AI become more important.

Nvidia made a smart move "acquiring" Groq for $20 billion earlier this year. Groq's language processing units (LPUs) are ideal for the decode phase of inference to speed up response times when answering queries. Nvidia incorporated them into its CUDA ecosystem, so it can now offer complete systems that combine its GPUs, LPUs, central processing units (CPUs), and networking gear into servers designed specifically for inference. At the same time, it also offers systems for training, agentic AI, and AI storage. This should position the company for continued strong growth in the years ahead.

2. Micron Micron Technology (MU -7.24%) has been one of the best growth stories over the past year, but its stock trades at a forward P/E of just above 6 times analyst estimates for fiscal 2027 (which ends August 2027). This is for a company that saw its revenue more than quadruple and its gross margin explode higher from 37.7% to 84.6%.

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The reason for Micron's low P/E is that the memory market has historically been very cyclical. However, there are good reasons to believe the current DRAM supercycle has legs.

The volume growth in the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) market is largely being powered by a special form called high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which gets packaged with GPUs and other AI chips. With demand soaring, the big three DRAM makers are scrambling to increase capacity, but there are limitations. The biggest reason is that HBM, GPUs, and other advanced chips are all manufactured using EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) machines, and there is only one company in the world, ASML, that has this technology, so supply is limited. On top of that, HBM requires upward of 3 times the wafer capacity of regular DRAM. As HBM demand continues to surge and supply remains constrained, this should keep DRAM prices high.

With Micron also locking in long-term agreements, adding more predictability to its business, the stock should have plenty of room to continue to run given its low valuation and growth potential.

3. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM -2.98%) is at the heart of the AI infrastructure boom, as it has proven to be the only foundry capable of manufacturing advanced logic chips, like GPUs, with few defects at scale.

As competitors have struggled with yields, TSMC has been an integral part of the semiconductor ecosystem and established a virtual monopoly on advanced chip manufacturing. This also made it a close partner with its customers and given it strong pricing power.

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TSMC is benefiting from the surge in demand for all kinds of logic chips, including GPUs, AI ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits), and CPUs. Meanwhile, the company is also aggressively increasing its own capex to boost capacity to meet the future demand coming from both its own customers and its customers' customers.

Despite its strong position within the semiconductor industry and growth prospects, TSMC trades at a forward P/E of below 20 times 2027 analyst estimates. That makes it another great bargain buy in the space.

Hyperliquid has cumulatively burned 47.27 million HYPE tokens, accounting for 4.73% of its maximum supply.

According to monitoring by Onchain Lens, Hyperliquid generated approximately $1.4 million in fees over the past 24 hours, burning 20,640 HYPE tokens valued at around $1.2 million. To date, Hyperliquid has cumulatively burned 47.27 million HYPE tokens, worth roughly $2.76 billion, accounting for 4.73% of its maximum total supply of 1 billion HYPE.

19 minutes ago

Chairman of SK Group: South Korea Needs to Transform into an "AI-Native" Country

SK Group Chairman Choi Tae-won stated that South Korea must become an "AI-native country," adding, "The goal is to ensure every person has at least one AI agent." He noted that if this goal is achieved, South Korea will become a global AI testbed where various AI technologies can be tested and deployed. Choi added that SK Group will provide more opportunities for AI development through continuous R&D investment. He also emphasized that reducing AI costs is critical, saying, "Currently, AI costs are too high. We must cut costs through various means so that more people around the world can benefit from AI." Choi further stated that South Korea can lower AI costs by expanding its memory chip production capacity and building more AI data centers, while establishing a global AI data center hub connecting the U.S., Europe, and Asia. (Source: Jinshi)

19 minutes ago

Prominent Trader: Bitcoin’s supply held by long-term holders in loss has exceeded levels recorded during the FTX collapse

Renowned trader Killa posted that roughly 80% of cycle top indicators never triggered during the last Bitcoin bull run, and a similar situation could occur with bottom indicators in the future, meaning market bottoms cannot be judged by mechanically relying on historical signals. He noted that the supply of long-term holders currently in a loss state has exceeded levels seen during the FTX collapse and is approaching those of the 2018 bear market. Bitcoin’s realized price is currently around $50,000; in every past cycle, the price has tested the realized price of long-term holders, so a return to this region remains possible. However, Killa said it should not be assumed that Bitcoin will definitely drop back to this level. Many top indicators failed to trigger in the last cycle, and some bottom indicators may also become invalid in the future. Regardless, the current level of market loss is already comparable to that during the FTX incident and the 2018 bear market.

19 minutes ago

Poll: Democrats have a chance to flip the House, Republicans face pressure.

The latest Emerson College poll shows that Democrats hold an 11-point lead over Republicans in midterm election preferences, with 53% to 42%—marking the Democrats’ largest lead in the poll series. Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump’s approval rating stands at 39%, while his disapproval rating is 57%. The poll indicates that the Democrats’ advantage stems largely from female voters, among whom they lead Republicans by 27 points. Newsweek, analyzing via its Uniform Swing Model, stated that if this national advantage translates evenly to House districts, roughly 36 Republican-held seats could flip to Democrats, resulting in a hypothetical 251-184 seat split favoring the Democrats. However, the article emphasizes that this is only a model stress test based on national polls, not an election prediction, and the actual outcome will still be influenced by factors such as candidate performance, local issues, voter turnout, and district mapping. (Jinshi)

19 minutes ago

CZ: Long-term investors can adopt the dollar-cost averaging strategy to buy in batches.

In a post addressing the question of when the best entry point is for long-term holders during bull or bear markets, CZ stated that investors should adopt the dollar-cost averaging (DCA) strategy. DCA is a strategy of continuously buying the same asset at fixed intervals with a fixed amount each time, which smooths costs by diversifying entry timings and reduces the risk of buying at a high point in a single transaction, though it does not guarantee profits.

19 minutes ago

Lee Jae-myung strongly invites U.S. capital to invest in South Korea's tech sector.

According to Yonhap News Agency, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung stated that South Korea and the U.S. should expand their cooperation beyond their long-standing security alliance, covering also sectors of technology, innovation, and startups. He emphasized that combining the U.S.’s world-class venture capital capabilities and global networks with South Korea’s advanced technological strength and manufacturing competitiveness will foster a new batch of global innovative enterprises. Lee also called on U.S. venture capital firms to step up cooperation and expand investments in South Korea, while pledging to build one of the world’s most attractive investment and startup ecosystems. He noted that South Korea will reform its visa system to better attract overseas entrepreneurial talent, and lay the groundwork for establishing a cooperation framework between domestic and foreign enterprises, research institutions, and investors. He also committed to helping South Korean startups grow into globally competitive firms by connecting privately and publicly managed funds.

19 minutes ago

The Trade Desk (TTD +2.98%) stock is down significantly from its all-time high.

*Stock prices used were the afternoon prices of July 23, 2026. The video was published on July 25, 2026.

Parkev Tatevosian, CFA has positions in The Trade Desk. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends The Trade Desk. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Parkev Tatevosian is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through his link, he will earn some extra money that supports his channel. His opinions remain his own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.

Oil is on the rise again amid flaring tensions in the Middle East. That's not remotely shocking, given the Strait of Hormuz's importance. The Strait is effectively closed right now. Roughly 20% of the world's oil moves through that single sea passage, so the raging geopolitical conflict has upended the energy market.

While the conflict has been active for only a relatively short time, a trend appears to be emerging. When oil prices rise sharply, U.S. President Donald Trump de-escalates the conflict. There's no way to know if that will happen again, however, which is why long-term investors need to take a big-picture view of the energy sector with stocks like Chevron (CVX +0.12%) and ExxonMobil (XOM +0.03%).

Image source: The White House.

Predicting a geopolitical conflict is a risky investment approach Donald Trump is well aware that mid-term elections are coming up later in 2026. He is also aware that the geopolitical conflict in the Middle East is affecting U.S. citizens economically and emotionally. The hotter the conflict rages, the worse the mood is likely to get in the United States. The worse the mood, the more likely that elections don't go well for the President.

With oil spiking again, recently breaking over $100 per barrel, consumers start to worry about rising costs. That feeds into fears around inflation, which is running hotter than the Federal Reserve would like right now. That could lead to a rate hike, which would fuel concerns about a recession. And all of that comes as voters will be heading to the polls in a few months, with control of the Senate and the House up for grabs.

Brent Crude Oil Wholesale Spot Petroleum Price data by YCharts

It makes sense that Donald Trump would consider de-escalating the conflict to lower oil prices. Which appears to be something he's done before. However, as an investor, you should probably look at the bigger picture when considering investing in the energy sector. Historically, geopolitical events have gotten out of control before. There's no way to know what will actually happen this time around.

The energy sector is volatile The unfortunate truth is that Wall Street is so focused on the short-term impact of the current geopolitical conflict that investors have lost sight of the long term. Wall Street tends to be myopic, so this isn't surprising, but the long-term truth is that the energy sector is inherently volatile. This is just another episode of volatility. It is headline-grabbing, but it isn't really unusual.

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You could try to play the news-driven ups and downs in oil prices by buying and selling an upstream oil company like Devon Energy (DVN -0.55%). It operates in the U.S. market, so its production isn't impacted by the conflict. And its revenues and earnings will still benefit materially from higher energy prices. But it will also see revenues and earnings fall when energy prices fall. The stock is likely to trend along with energy prices if you believe you can predict the future of energy prices.

Most investors will be better off with a larger, more diversified energy investment, such as the integrated giants Exxon and Chevron. These companies are two of the world's largest energy businesses. While some of their production is directly impacted by the Middle East conflict, they have assets in other regions that are not. And they will benefit from rising oil prices, just as an upstream energy producer would. However, they also have midstream (pipeline) and downstream (chemical and refining) assets to help soften the blow when oil prices fall.

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In addition, Exxon and Chevron have two of the strongest balance sheets in the integrated energy peer group. Exxon's debt-to-equity ratio is roughly 0.2x, while Chevron's is 0.25x. That gives each of these energy giants the wherewithal to take on debt during downturns to support their businesses and dividends.

Bet on reliable dividends, not energy prices Chevron's dividend has been increased annually for 38 years. Exxon's dividend has been increased annually for 43 years. Those are incredible dividend records given the inherent volatility of the energy sector. It is a testament to the resilience of the two businesses across the entire energy cycle, not just the upside. That is a pattern worth following.

Most long-term investors should have some energy exposure given the important of oil and natural gas to the global economy. However, trying to time the political and geopolitical decisions of President Trump probably isn't the best investment approach when deciding on an energy stock. Most investors will be better off sticking with industry giants like Exxon and Chevron, focusing on their reliable dividend checks instead of oil prices. Right now, Chevron offers a 3.6% yield, with Exxon's 2.6% still well above the S&P 500 index's (^GSPC +0.05%) roughly 1% yield.

Monday.com, the Tel Aviv-based work management software company known for its colorful, customizable project-tracking boards, this week became the latest tech company to cite AI as a factor in job cuts. On Wednesday, the company said in an SEC filing that it will lay off about 20% of its workforce, or just over 600 employees, as part of a “restructuring plan” tied to its “ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy” in support of “a leaner, more focused operating model” as it continues investing in its “AI-driven growth strategy.”

Co-founder Eran Zinman told employees in a LinkedIn memo that the move “was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI,” positioning it instead as adapting the organization to a new AI-first vision the company laid out roughly a year ago when it rebranded around a platform-wide AI push. Monday.com, which has two offices in the U.S., expects $45 million to $55 million in net restructuring charges but still projects up to 20% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026.

So far, according to new Financial Times analysis, U.S. tech companies have slashed nearly 140,000 jobs since the start of this year, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone accounting for almost 50,000 of those cuts as they funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data center buildouts. Interestingly, the FT also found that companies citing AI as a factor in job cuts have underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days following their announcements, suggesting the market doesn’t entirely buy the stories that the companies are telling.

Still, the picture isn’t uniformly bleak. The FT notes that AI-focused companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring rapidly, absorbing some of the talent shed elsewhere in the industry. And within some of the very companies making cuts, headcount is shifting rather than disappearing entirely. Meta, for instance, earlier this year moved roughly 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles even as it laid off 8,000 others, and IBM says it’s tripling entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles alongside recent cuts.

Below is a running look — in reverse chronological order — at the bigger tech companies that have announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor.

Microsoft — July 9, 2026. Microsoft cut about 4,800 roles, or 2.1% of its global workforce, most of them in its Xbox gaming unit, resetting the business only three years after acquiring Activision Blizzard for $75 billion, per the FT. Separately, it offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees these would impact. The company said the role eliminations were “not being replaced by AI” but acknowledged “AI is changing how work gets done.” CFO Amy Hood said total headcount declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3, and was expected to keep declining as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility” amid rising AI investment.

Oracle — June 22, 2026. Oracle disclosed in late June that it had reduced its workforce by 21,000 employees over the past 12 months, a decline of 13%, which means more cuts than was previously known, including because of AI. “The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” the company said in an annual financial regulatory filing.

GitLab — June 3, 2026. GitLab laid off roughly 350 workers, about 14% of its staff, to fund AI infrastructure investment and handle surging traffic from AI workflows. CEO Bill Staples said agentic workloads are “pushing competitors to the brink” and that the company had begun a “generational rebuild” of its core infrastructure to support what he called 100x growth requirements. GitLab is exiting 22 countries, flattening management layers, and partnering with an unspecified AI lab to rebuild its platform for agent-scale workloads. The company reported first-quarter revenue of $264 million, up 23% year-over-year, and expects to incur $30 to $35 million in restructuring costs.

Google — ongoing through May. Alphabet’s Google has quietly cut employees across its Cloud division, including its Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant-linked cybersecurity staff, even as Cloud revenue grew 63% to exceed $20 billion for the first time and its backlog nearly doubled to over $460 billion. Over the past year, Google has cut more than a third of the managers overseeing small teams — 35% fewer managers with fewer direct reports. Unlike most companies on this list, Google has never announced a single overall number — the cuts have come through a rolling performance review process, a voluntary buyout program, and structural reorganizations, with outside estimates putting the 2026 total at between 1,500 and 3,000+ engineers.

Intuit — May 20, 2026. Intuit announced plans to eliminate roughly 3,000 jobs — about 17% of its total workforce — in a restructuring centered on reducing complexity and reallocating resources toward AI. CEO Sasan Goodarzi reportedly told staff the company is reducing complexity and simplifying the structure so it can deliver better products.

Meta — May 20-21, 2026. Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce, while moving about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles (that they reportedly hate). CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff the cuts were necessary because “success isn’t a given” in AI.

Cisco — May 14, 2026. Cisco announced it’s cutting nearly 4,000 jobs, about 5% of its workforce, despite reporting better-than-expected profit and revenue. CFO Mark Patterson said: “This was really not a savings-driven restructure… this is more [about] realigning … resources around silicon, optics, security and AI.”

Cloudflare — May 7-8, 2026. Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce (1,100 people), reporting quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, up 34% year-over-year and the highest single quarter in company history. CEO Matthew Prince wrote that “the vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers” — middle management, finance, legal, internal auditing, and revenue recognition.

General Motors — May 12, 2026. GM eliminated 500 to 600 jobs, largely in IT roles in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan, saying it was reevaluating its workforce needs amid uncertain market conditions. A person familiar with the cuts told CNBC that AI played a role in the decision but that it wasn’t the only reason. GM’s statement said it was “transforming its Information Technology organization to better position the company for the future.” Despite the cuts, the company still had roughly 80 open IT positions, including roles in AI, motorsports, and autonomous vehicles.

Coinbase — May 5, 2026. The crypto exchange said it was cutting about 700 employees, or 14% of its staff, as part of a restructuring aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing AI efficiency. The company flattened its organizational structure to five layers below the CEO and COO, and said it would experiment with “one-person teams” combining engineering, design, and product roles. CEO Brian Armstrong wrote that AI had changed the pace of work dramatically — “engineers use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks” — and that the company needed to “leverage AI across every facet of our jobs.”

PayPal — May 5, 2026. PayPal announced plans to cut around 20% of its workforce over the next two to three years — north of 4,500 jobs — as part of a turnaround strategy centered on AI adoption and organizational simplification. CEO Enrique Lores told investors the company would “aggressively adopt AI” in its development processes and formed a new “AI transformation and simplification” team reporting directly to him, tasked with redesigning the company’s processes “function by function.” Lores framed the cuts as removing organizational layers, and said AI would extend well beyond coding into customer service, support operations, and risk management.

Microsoft — April-May 2026. Microsoft offered buyouts structured as voluntary separations, without disclosing how many employees these would impact. CFO Amy Hood said total headcount declined year-over-year in fiscal Q3, and is expected to keep declining as the company focuses on “building high-performing teams that operate with pace and agility” amid rising AI investment.

Snap — April 16, 2026. Snap cut roughly 16% of its global workforce — about 1,000 full-time employees — and closed more than 300 open roles, with CEO Evan Spiegel citing AI advancements as a key driver. “Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers,” Spiegel wrote in a memo filed with the SEC. The company said it had already seen small squads using AI tools to drive progress across Snapchat+, ad platform performance, and infrastructure efficiency.

IBM — rolling through 2026. Between Q4 2025 cuts and April 2026 Red Hat engineering reductions, estimates range from 3,000 to 9,000 U.S. positions eliminated, bringing IBM’s cumulative total since September 2024 above 15,000. Bloomberg reported IBM plans to triple its U.S. entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles, even as roughly 200 HR positions were replaced by AI agents. An IBM spokesperson described the Q4 2025 round as a routine rebalancing affecting “a low single-digit percentage” of its global workforce.

Atlassian — March 11, 2026. Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs (10% of its workforce) to “rebalance” toward AI and enterprise sales, even as shares rose nearly 2% on the news. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said: “Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people.’ But it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills we need or the number of roles required in certain areas. It does.”

Dell — January 30 (though disclosed in March 2026). Dell’s total workforce fell about 10% in fiscal 2026 — roughly 11,000 jobs — to about 97,000 employees from 108,000 a year earlier, with $569 million spent on severance. The cuts came as Dell projected its AI-optimized server revenue could double in fiscal 2027.

Oracle — March 5-31, 2026. As noted above, Oracle began telling employees it would be cutting thousands of jobs via terminal emails. The cuts came even as Oracle posted $3.7 billion in quarterly net income, up 27% year-over-year, with remaining performance obligations up 325% to $553 billion — savings redirected toward AI data centers. The cuts that would later total 21,000 over 12 months, as Oracle disclosed in its June 22 annual filing.

Block — February 26-27, 2026. Jack Dorsey’s Block cut 4,000 jobs — nearly half its workforce, down to under 6,000 from over 10,000. Dorsey wrote on X: “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.” He added: “I think most companies are late. Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”

Salesforce — February 10, 2026. Salesforce laid off fewer than 1,000 employees across marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit. The company told Fortune, “Because of the benefits and efficiencies of Agentforce, we’ve seen the number of support cases we handle decline and we no longer need to actively backfill support engineer roles.” This followed an earlier cut of about 4,000 customer-support roles, shrinking that team from roughly 9,000 to 5,000, with CEO Marc Benioff saying the company needed “less heads” because AI agents handle the work.

Amazon — January 28, 2026. Amazon cut 16,000 corporate jobs, following 14,000 cuts in October 2025 — about 9% of its corporate workforce in three months. The company said it was part of “strengthen[ing] our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.” CEO Andy Jassy had said in June 2025 that, “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today… in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

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, /PRNewswire/ --

Why: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of common stock of Verra Mobility Corporation (NASDAQ: VRRM) between February 24, 2026 and May 26, 2026, inclusive (the "Class Period"), of the important August 4, 2026 lead plaintiff deadline.

So what: If you purchased Verra Mobility common stock during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement.

What to do next: To join the Verra Mobility class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/cases/verra-mobility-corporation-2026/join or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than August 4, 2026. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation.

Why Rosen Law: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources, or any meaningful peer recognition. Many of these firms do not actually handle securities class actions, but are merely middlemen that refer clients or partner with law firms that actually litigate the cases. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved, the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered billions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers.

Details of the case: According to the complaint, defendants provided overwhelmingly positive statements to investors while, at the same time, disseminating materially false and misleading statements and/or concealing material adverse facts concerning the true state of Verra's relationship with Avis Budget Group ("Avis"), and in particular obtaining a contract extension with Avis. Further, the Company minimized concerns that major rent-a-cars could replace Verra with in-house solutions or outsourced alternatives. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages. 

To join the Verra Mobility class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/cases/verra-mobility-corporation-2026/join or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action.

No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff.

Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/.

Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Contact Information:

     Laurence Rosen, Esq.
     Phillip Kim, Esq.
     The Rosen Law Firm, P.A.
     275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor
     New York, NY 10016
     Tel: (212) 686-1060
     Toll Free: (866) 767-3653
     Fax: (212) 202-3827
     [email protected]
     www.rosenlegal.com

SOURCE THE ROSEN LAW FIRM, P. A.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 25, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A securities class action lawsuit has been filed against Primoris Services Corporation (NYSE: PRIM) and certain current and former executives who are alleged to have misled investors about the company’s project management capabilities. It seeks to represent investors who purchased or otherwise acquired shares of Primoris common stock between August 5, 2025 and June 22, 2026.

The lawsuit follows a second massive selloff in Primoris shares in six weeks – this time on June 23, 2026, when shares cratered another $23.29 (-21%). The first occurred on May 6, 2026, when Primoris shares crashed $101.69 (-50%). Both were triggered by surprise revelations of Primoris’ project management problems.

The disclosures’ toll was to erase well over $6 billion from Primoris’ market capitalization between May 5, 2026 and June 23, 2026.

National shareholders rights firm Hagens Berman continues its investigation into claims that Primoris and the other Defendants violated the federal securities laws and encourages investors who suffered substantial losses to submit your losses now. The firm also encourages persons with knowledge who may be able to assist the investigation to contact its attorneys.

Class Period: Aug. 5, 2025 – June 22, 2026
Lead Plaintiff Deadline: Sept. 21, 2026
Visit: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/prim
Contact the Firm Now: [email protected]
844-916-0895

Primoris Services Corporation (PRIM) Securities Class Action:

During the Class Period, defendants repeatedly assured investors that Primoris maintained “disciplined bidding,” “well-developed estimating processes,” effective project controls, and reliable forecasting that enabled it to accurately price and execute fixed-price renewable energy projects, “manage risk,” and reliably forecast revenues, margins, and earnings.

The complaint alleges that, in contrast to these assurances (and unknown to investors), the Defendants did not disclose that Primoris’ estimating, cost-to-complete forecasting, and project oversight processes were woefully deficient. As a result, the company systematically underestimated project costs and risks on multiple significant renewable energy projects.

Investors learned the truth through a series of partial disclosures:

First, in February 2026, Primoris management attributed lower gross margins to “unexpectedly higher costs” at certain renewables projects, citing difficult soil and rock conditions that required additional labor and equipment. While management later downplayed the issue as being isolated to a single project—expressing confidence in their remedial measures—they simultaneously touted the company’s ability to “accelerate project timelines” for 2026.

Second, on May 5, 2026, the market’s confidence in Primoris’ remedial measures was shattered when the company released its Q1 2026 financial results and revealed a staggering decline in the core Energy segment, with year-over-year revenues falling by $152.9 million (13.8%) and gross profits plunging by nearly 40%.

CEO Koti Vadlamudi admitted the next day during the May 6 earnings call that Primoris’ financial results were battered by cost pressures across multiple solar projects. Moving beyond the “rock and soil” reason used just months prior, Vadlamudi cited a litany of execution-related factors as the cause of the margin collapse:

Project Redesigns: Costly changes to existing plans.Labor Issues: Inability to manage specific workforce demands.Sequencing Errors: Failures in project management and timing.Weather Disruptions: Further complicating already delayed timelines. Finally, after the markets closed on June 22, 2026, Primoris shocked investors when it announced that “[a]dditional challenges and cost overruns were identified as a result of continued progress on projects in the Company’s Renewables business.” Importantly, as a result of ongoing problems in six projects and additional challenges, Primoris said its 2026 renewables business revenues would decline 30% ($900 million) from the $3 billion revenues reported for 2025.

“We’re focused on when Primoris’ management learned of the full scope of the company’s renewables problems, including the apparent inadequacy of remediation measures,” said Reed Kathrein, the Hagens Berman partner leading the firm’s investigation.

If you invested in Primoris and have substantial losses, or have knowledge that will assist the firm’s investigation, submit your losses now »

If you’d like more information and answers to other frequently asked questions about the firm’s Primoris investigation, read more »

Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding Primoris should consider their options to help in the investigation or take advantage of the SEC Whistleblower program. Under the new program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Reed Kathrein at 844-916-0895 or email [email protected].

About Hagens Berman
Hagens Berman is a global plaintiffs’ rights complex litigation firm focusing on corporate accountability. The firm is home to a robust practice and represents investors as well as whistleblowers, workers, consumers and others in cases achieving real results for those harmed by corporate negligence and other wrongdoings. Hagens Berman’s team has secured more than $2.9 billion in this area of law. More about the firm and its successes can be found at hbsslaw.com. Follow the firm for updates and news at @ClassActionLaw. 

Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome in any future case.

Contact:
Reed Kathrein, 844-916-0895

, /PRNewswire/ --

Why: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, reminds purchasers of securities of Futu Holdings Limited (NASDAQ: FUTU) between May 24, 2023 and May 27, 2026, inclusive (the "Class Period"), of the important August 25, 2026 lead plaintiff deadline.

So what: If you purchased Futu securities during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement.

What to do next: To join the Futu class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/cases/futu-holdings-limited/join or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than August 25, 2026. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation.

Why Rosen Law: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources, or any meaningful peer recognition. Many of these firms do not actually handle securities class actions, but are merely middlemen that refer clients or partner with law firms that actually litigate the cases. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered billions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs' Bar. Many of the firm's attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers.

Details of the case: According to the lawsuit, throughout the Class Period, defendants made materially false and misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Futu was not in compliance with the requirements of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (the "CSRC"), including because Futu continued to conduct securities business, public fund sales business and futures business in mainland China without obtaining the requisite licenses or approval; (2) as a result, Futu was reasonably likely to face regulatory penalties, including the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and other penalties; (3) as a result of the foregoing, Futu's financial results were overstated; and (4) as a result of the foregoing, defendants' positive statements about Futu's business, operations, and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages. 

To join the Futu class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/cases/futu-holdings-limited/join or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] for information on the class action.

No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff.

Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/.

Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

Contact Information:

     Laurence Rosen, Esq.
     Phillip Kim, Esq.
     The Rosen Law Firm, P.A.
     275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor
     New York, NY 10016
     Tel: (212) 686-1060
     Toll Free: (866) 767-3653
     Fax: (212) 202-3827
     [email protected]
     www.rosenlegal.com

SOURCE THE ROSEN LAW FIRM, P. A.

Three companies dominate the conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) chips: Nvidia (NVDA -1.01%), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD -3.54%), and Intel (INTC -8.02%). But dominating the conversation and winning the race are two different things. So which one actually came out ahead in the first half of 2026? The answer depends on how you keep score.

Image source: Getty Images.

Nvidia won the business By the measure that matters most, market dominance, it was not close. Nvidia still controls somewhere between 80% and 90% of the AI data center graphics processing unit (GPU) market. Its data center segment alone generated roughly $194 billion over its most recent fiscal year, more than 11 times AMD's entire data center business, and its new Vera Rubin platform has ramped into full production with demand visibility stretching into the trillions of dollars. When it comes to actually selling the chips that train and run AI, Nvidia is not just winning, it is lapping the field.

The one place Nvidia did not win was the stock chart. Shares rose only modestly in the first half because expectations were already so high that even spectacular results struggled to push the stock higher.

Today's Change

(

-1.01

%) $

-2.10

Current Price

$

206.66

AMD won the momentum If Nvidia won the business, AMD won the hearts of investors. Its stock was a strong performer to competitors by a wide margin, climbing triple digits as Wall Street warmed to its AI story. The results backed it up: record data center revenue, up 57% from a year earlier, and a next-generation MI400 chip lineup with its Helios server racks arriving later this year. Most striking, AMD landed enormous multiyear commitments from OpenAI and Meta Platforms -- deals that give it real revenue visibility.

AMD still holds only a mid-single-digit slice of the AI GPU market, so it is nowhere near dethroning Nvidia. But it is the clear and fast-rising No. 2, and for shareholders, it delivered the best returns of the group.

Today's Change

(

-3.54

%) $

-19.11

Current Price

$

520.58

Intel did not really show up -- but its stock did Then there is Intel, which spent the first half fighting a different battle entirely. Its Gaudi AI accelerators never gained traction, with the company itself conceding they would not generate meaningful revenue, and its release schedule has been anything but steady.

On the AI accelerator front, Intel is essentially absent from the war, and its next-generation data center AI chip is not expected until well into 2027. Yet, remarkably, Intel has been the best-performing stock of the three this year, soaring around 340%. Here is the twist: That surge has almost nothing to do with AI chips.

It reflects investor excitement over its foundry turnaround and a wave of outside backing as Intel tries to become a contract manufacturer for others. Intel is being richly rewarded for a fight taking place well outside the AI silicon race.

Today's Change

(

-8.02

%) $

-8.04

Current Price

$

92.20

So which company actually won? Or which one lost? Here is how I score it. Nvidia won the race -- at least the race that counts because it still owns the AI chip market and prints staggering profits doing it. AMD won one of the battles for investor returns and momentum, cementing itself as the ascendant challenger with a credible product roadmap and marquee customers. Intel lost the AI chip race outright even as it plays a longer game elsewhere.

If "winning" means dominance and cash, the crown stays firmly on Nvidia. If it means which company rewarded shareholders and gained the most ground, AMD took the first half. Either way, the AI chip race has become a two-horse contest, with Intel watching from the sidelines.

For most investors, this reduces to a simple framework. Nvidia remains the king and the lower-risk way to own AI silicon, with dominance that is proving remarkably durable. AMD is the higher-upside challenger that just delivered the best returns of the trio and has genuine momentum, though it trades on big expectations of its own.

Intel requires a completely different thesis built on a foundry turnaround, not AI chips. My honest read is that the smart money in the first half rode AMD's momentum and Nvidia's dominance, and I would keep watching those two rather than waiting on Intel to catch up.