The S&P 500 closed at a record 7,798.99 Thursday, clearing 7,800 for the first time after soft July producer-price data eased fears of a Fed hike, then eased 0.17% Friday to 7,785.76 as July retail sales unexpectedly dropped 0.6% — the sharpest monthly drop in over a year — and the University of Michigan's preliminary August sentiment reading fell to 51 from 55.2, below forecasts, according to Yahoo Finance. The Dow slipped 0.20% to 53,732.41 and the Nasdaq fell 0.28% to 26,729.16, but both still closed out a 3rd straight weekly gain.

Broadcom tumbled 6% Friday after Bank of America flagged that its AI chip-financing vehicle could carry $370 billion of senior debt by 2029, with roughly $150 billion of new issuance in 2027 alone, according to 24/7 Wall St.. It's one thread in a week-long pattern: Jane Street took a roughly $15 billion hit in July after its stake in the AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness collapsed from a $45 billion peak to about $10 billion, according to Bloomberg, and a 30-year Treasury auction this week sold at the highest borrowing cost since 2001 on the same AI-driven bond issuance analysts have flagged as a fresh risk, according to the Financial Times. Even Nvidia trimmed its own exposure, reworking a deal to guarantee only about half of its planned $250 billion backstop for an OpenAI data-center campus in Ohio, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Berkshire Hathaway's second-quarter 13F showed Alphabet shares jumping 83% in size to about $37.9 billion, making it Berkshire's 3rd-largest US equity holding behind only Apple and American Express, according to CNBC. Berkshire also added 17.5 million Delta Air Lines shares, deepened a housing-market bet, and trimmed Bank of America and Kroger — the clearest look yet at how Abel is deploying the record cash pile Buffett built up before stepping back.

Brent crude sat near $87 a barrel, up roughly 5% on the week, after a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz was struck by an uncrewed aerial vehicle Friday while trying to exit the waterway, according to Investing.com. President Trump said Friday he will declare the Hormuz Strait a US "territory" once the war with Iran concludes, a claim with no clear legal path but one that underscores how unresolved the blockade — in effect since the war's February start — remains, according to Al Jazeera.

South Korea's Kospi rose 2.41% to 6,977.34 Friday, capping an 11.5% weekly gain that broke a 7-week losing streak, with SK Hynix up 3.26% and Samsung Electronics up 2.43% on the same memory-pricing optimism lifting Tokyo, according to TradingKey. Roughly $2 billion of foreign capital flowed in over the week, confirming this rally spans the entire DRAM and NAND supply chain rather than any single stock.

Talks for Stripe and private-equity firm Advent to acquire PayPal at $60.50 a share — a roughly $53 billion deal with about $50 billion of committed bank financing already lined up — are heating up, with the two sides pushing to move forward over the coming weeks, according to TechCrunch. PayPal has not formally responded to the offer, and a combined Stripe-PayPal would face significant antitrust scrutiny in both the US and Europe.

Nigel Farage won the Clacton byelection he himself triggered, a contest boycotted by Labour and the Conservatives, underscoring how much political space Reform UK has opened heading into the next general election cycle, according to the New York Times. It's a dynamic sterling and gilt markets are increasingly having to price alongside the usual growth and inflation data.

A magnitude-7.7 earthquake struck off Indonesia's Flores region early Saturday, prompting Indonesian authorities to issue a tsunami warning for several provinces and damaging buildings near the epicenter, according to NBC News. Japan's Meteorological Agency confirmed the quake poses no tsunami risk to Japan, according to NHK.

Nvidia reworked its planned $250 billion backstop for OpenAI's Ohio data-center campus to guarantee only about half that amount initially, according to the Wall Street Journal. Separately, a filing showed Nvidia holds a nearly $21 billion stake in SpaceX and a $30 billion stake in Intel, on top of a $2 billion investment in xAI and $5 billion in Intel made in 2025, according to Bloomberg via Techmeme — a reminder of how much of the AI buildout's capital is now circulating between the same handful of companies.

Anthropic told investors it generated more than $11.5 billion in second-quarter revenue, up from $787 million in the same quarter last year and $4.73 billion in the first quarter of 2026, with positive adjusted operating income for the first time, according to Bloomberg. The figures land as the company prepares for a potential IPO and stand in sharp contrast to the financing anxiety rippling through AI-infrastructure names elsewhere this week.

SpaceX formally closed its acquisition of the AI coding-assistant startup Cursor, a deal first agreed in the spring, with Cursor saying the tie-up gives it access to "the largest fleet of GPUs in the world" to build stronger, cheaper models, according to Cursor's own announcement. It's the latest piece of a Musk-orbit consolidation that's also included this week's SpaceX-Tesla chip-plant groundbreaking in Texas.

Nevada regulators approved Tesla's robotaxi application for the Las Vegas Strip but capped the fleet at 10 vehicles, far short of the 5,000 Tesla sought, and barred airport pickups and speeds above 45 miles per hour, according to Axios. Tesla has said it won't meaningfully scale the fleet until its next-generation FSD software ships, expected late this year or early next.

SanDisk's promise to return 100% of excess cash to shareholders and target a roughly 50% adjusted free-cash-flow margin by fiscal 2028-2030 — on top of $4.5 billion already repurchased last quarter and a fresh $14 billion authorization, for $15.5 billion of total remaining buyback capacity — is the proximate cause of gains that showed up simultaneously in Tokyo's Kioxia, Seoul's SK Hynix and Samsung, and the Nikkei and Kospi indices themselves, according to Seoul Economic Daily. It's a useful contrast to Broadcom's debt-financed AI buildout this same week: one chip story running on buybacks, the other on leverage.

A former WPP global executive suing his old employer for retaliation alleges Sony, a major WPP client, launched its own investigation into the ad-holding company's media-buying practices after Chinese authorities detained GroupM China staff over an alleged kickback scheme, according to Business Insider. The suit claims WPP's trading teams struck undisclosed rebate deals worth $3-4 billion with media owners over 5 years, improperly keeping $1.5-2 billion of it.

Alibaba released weights for its Qwen3.8 model family under an Apache 2.0 license, saying the flagship Qwen3.8-27B beats its own Qwen3.7-Plus and excels at real-world coding tasks, according to Techmeme. It follows Chinese AI lab Z.ai's own claim this week that its GLM-5.3 model rivals Anthropic's Mythos on cybersecurity benchmarks, underscoring how competitive China's open-weight AI race has become even as US labs debate how to finance their own buildouts.

Naoya Inoue said he'll wait until February for a Jesse "Bam" Rodriguez fight to materialize, but is otherwise considering a move up to featherweight, according to Fightnews. Former champion Yoko Gushiken, one of Japan's most decorated boxers, voiced concern about the jump, calling it "a bit dangerous," according to Livedoor News — a rare public note of caution about a fighter most of the sport still treats as untouchable.

Wang Hong and Deng Yu became the first Chinese nationals to win a Fields Medal, mathematics' highest honor, for work in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations respectively, according to CNN. Both trained at Peking University before building their careers in the US, and the win has stirred a genuine debate inside China about why its most celebrated mathematical talent still tends to leave, according to China Digital Times.

Disney and Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts franchise is getting its own animated series, a move commentators say is exactly what the property needs after a quarter-century of pairing Disney characters with Square Enix's own cast, according to Polygon. It follows this week's news that Disney now calls the franchise a "billion-dollar" one in its own right.

The Recording Academy is considering revamping its newer Best Asian Pop category after BTS withdrew from participating in Grammy voting, with some artists saying the category doesn't represent the music it's meant to honor, according to Variety. It's a live question for an award still finding its footing barely a year after its creation.

Osaka Wheel, the 123-meter attraction at Suita's Expocity mall that bills itself as the tallest Ferris wheel in the country, has been closed for more than 8 months since a lightning strike knocked out its power system and damaged much of its control programming, and the operator still can't say when it will reopen, according to J-CAST News via Yahoo. No one was hurt in the original incident, which briefly stranded riders in their gondolas before a manual, hours-long rescue — but 8 months later, one of Osaka's biggest landmarks is still frozen mid-spin.