Intel Beats, SpaceX Stumbles, Korea's $950B Chip Deals: July 26

Intel posts a real recovery quarter, SpaceX’s post-IPO shine fades fast, and South Korean memory giants lock in nearly $1 trillion in supply commitments to U.S. tech. Here is what moved the AI investment conversation on July 26.

Key points

• Intel’s Q2 beat was driven by DCAI and AI-related growth with improved margins, but analysts argue the rally has already priced in the recovery, leaving the risk/reward balanced at best.
• Samsung and SK Hynix have agreed to supply U.S. tech companies, including Nvidia, in deals worth $950 billion, underscoring how entrenched the AI memory supply chain has become.
• SpaceX shares have shed roughly $600 billion in market value in a single month after IPO enthusiasm faded, with analysts now debating where a floor exists.
• Verizon signed a dark fiber deal worth more than $1 billion with Alphabet’s Google, one of the largest AI infrastructure contracts in the telecom sector to date.
• Morgan Stanley has reset its Microsoft price target ahead of earnings, with Azure growth trajectory the central question for investors.

Intel’s comeback: real, but already reflected in the price?

Intel’s Q2 results are being read as genuine confirmation that the turnaround is underway. The Data Center and AI (DCAI) segment led growth, and margins came in better than feared. That is the good news. The complication, as Seeking Alpha’s analysis frames it, is that the stock has already moved in anticipation. The rally since the lows appears to have pulled forward a significant portion of the recovery story, which tips the thesis toward a hold rather than a fresh buy.

Foundry remains the outstanding risk. Intel’s ambition to become a credible third-party chipmaker is expensive and slow-moving, and that uncertainty is not fully dissolved by a single strong quarter. A broader comparison of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel in H1 2026 makes the pecking order clear: Nvidia dominated AI chip revenue outright, AMD rewarded shareholders with strong returns, and Intel’s rally was driven by a restructuring and cost story more than pure AI demand capture. Intel is recovering. Whether it is recoverable enough, at this price, is the open question.

Korea’s $950B memory commitment signals AI infrastructure staying power

The scale of the Samsung and SK Hynix supply agreements with U.S. tech firms, totaling $950 billion, is worth sitting with. Memory is the often-overlooked component of the AI buildout. Every large language model inference run and every AI training cluster requires enormous amounts of high-bandwidth memory. These deals suggest that major buyers, including Nvidia, are locking in supply well into the future rather than relying on spot markets.

For investors tracking the AI infrastructure cycle, this is a signal of demand confidence from the buyers themselves. It also reinforces the investment case for memory-adjacent ETFs. The iShares Semiconductor ETF has been flagged as one accessible vehicle for exposure to companies benefiting from rising advanced memory spending, without requiring single-stock concentration.

SpaceX: IPO hangover sets in

SpaceX’s post-IPO arc is following a familiar script. Reports put the decline in Elon Musk’s SpaceX-linked wealth at roughly $600 billion in a single month, as the stock retreated from levels that were always hard to justify on near-term fundamentals alone. The pattern is well-established: limited float, famous founder, and fear of missing out push a newly public name beyond what current earnings can support.

Morgan Stanley has argued publicly that investors focused on the stock price correction are missing the larger story, pointing to Starship’s 13th test flight this week as operationally significant. The flight deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites, completed its cleanest heat-shield reentry yet, and ended with an upright splashdown in the Indian Ocean. That is genuine technical progress. Whether it translates into shareholder value at current valuations is a separate debate, and analysts are openly asking where the floor is.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang pushes back on boom-bust fears, and Microsoft faces its Azure moment

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Fortune this week that the AI chip cycle will not follow the classic semiconductor boom-bust pattern, arguing that “the fundamental technology of computers is changing” and that industrial demand underpins the current wave in a way that consumer cycles do not. That framing matters for investors trying to gauge cycle duration.

Microsoft’s earnings, now imminent, will be the next major stress test for that thesis. Morgan Stanley’s revised forecast is centered on whether Azure’s growth rate holds. Azure is a primary conduit for enterprise AI spending, and any deceleration there would complicate the bull case for the whole sector. On the infrastructure side, Verizon’s $1 billion-plus dark fiber deal with Google shows that the AI capex wave is extending well beyond hyperscalers into the network layer, pulling in telecoms as unexpected beneficiaries of the buildout.

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