Veralto Corporation (VLTO), headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, provides water ******* ytics, water treatment, marking and coding, and packaging and color services. Valued at $23.3 billion by market cap, the company offers product quality control systems and water purification equipment.
Companies worth $10 billion or more are generally described as "large-cap stocks," and VLTO perfectly fits that description, with its market cap exceeding this mark, underscoring its size, influence, and dominance within the pollution & treatment controls industry. VLTO leads water quality and product quality & innovation with iconic brands like Hach, Trojan, ChemTreat, Videojet, Linx, Esko, X-Rite and Pantone, leveraging a large installed base to drive recurring consumables and software sales.
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#treatment #market #veralto

A $48 billion valuation and more than $2 billion in fresh venture capital would normally signal that investors have completely lost the plot.
Cognition AI, the startup behind the autonomous coding agent Devin, closed its Series E round on Sept. 8, 2026, to those exact headline figures.
The sheer size of the round drew immediate and predictable comparisons to the frothiest stretch of the 2026 AI investment cycle.
But the arithmetic behind the deal paints a different picture, one in which the ratio of investors' per-dollar revenue barely moved.
Between its May 2026 Series D and Series E close, Cognition's annualized run-rate revenue grew from $492 million to nearly $900 million, the company reported.

#round #devin

CNBC reported that OpenAI said it will end model access through Cursor on November 12, following **** e Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, which closed on August 14.
OpenAI said it "cannot be confident that **** eX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts," pointing to disputes involving X and xAI, including Musk's own courtroom admission that xAI had trained on OpenAI's output. Cursor CEO Michael Truell said on X that OpenAI models handle about 5% of Cursor's user traffic and that the two companies are discussing the decision.
Musk responded on X, calling OpenAI's leadership "utterly untrustworthy." Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown said his company will instead increase compute to support Claude in Cursor.
The actual business disruption looks limited based on the numbers involved. Cursor's own CEO said OpenAI models account for only about 5% of user traffic. It means the vast majority of Cursor's usage already runs on other model providers, limiting how much this cutoff changes the product most users experience.
Cursor can reduce its dependence on OpenAI as **** e Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) expands its AI ecosystem. Losing access to OpenAI models could push Cursor to deepen its relationships with Anthropic and other providers, while **** eX can use its growing AI infrastructure to support the coding platform. That diversification could give Cursor more control over its model supply and reduce its exposure to decisions made by a direct competitor.

#space

Diamond Hill Capital, a First Eagle Investment Management company, issued its Q2 2026 investor letter for its "Small Cap Strategy". The letter can be downloaded here. The strategy returned 24.01% in the second quarter, outperforming the Russell 2000 Index's 21.49% return. Performance was positively affected by stock selection in health care and industrials, while the Fund's underweight position in information technology was the largest relative detractor as AI-related companies drove market gains. Small-cap equities benefited from strong earnings, resilient economic conditions, and easing geopolitical concerns, with technology leading sector performance while energy declined alongside lower oil prices. Despite the market's focus on AI, the Fund's strongest contributors came from businesses outside the theme, particularly in health care, defense-oriented companies, and tangible-asset industries. Looking ahead, the Fund remains focused on resilient, underfollowed companies tied to infrastructure, defense modernization, and essential industries where disciplined capital allocation and long-term demand can support value creation. Also, check the fund's top five holdings to see its best picks in 2026.
In its second-quarter 2026 investor letter, Diamond Hill Capital Small Cap Strategy highlighted Astrana Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTH). Astrana Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTH), a US-based healthcare management company that provides medical care services, contributed positively to the Strategy's performance this quarter. On September 2, 2026, Astrana Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTH) closed at $38.57 per share. Astrana Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTH) was up 11.75% over the past month, and its shares gained 23.75% over the past 52 weeks. Astrana Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTH) has a market capitalization of $1.91 billion.
Diamond Hill Capital Small Cap Strategy stated the following regarding Astrana Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTH) in its Q2 2026 investor letter:
"Astrana Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTH), a leader in value-based health care, outperformed as the company results have continued to demonstrate that it was not taking advantage of loopholes within Medicare coding, the balance sheet is back in good shape after the recent Prospect Health acquisition, which is performing well, and recent Medicare Advantage rates came in better than expected."
Astrana Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTH) is not on our list of the 40 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 18 hedge fund portfolios held Astrana Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTH) at the end of the second quarter which was 15 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of Astrana Health, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASTH) as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.

#astrana

Chinese diversified technology conglomerate Tencent (TCEHY) recently reported that its new artificial intelligence (AI) model performs better than models belonging to relatively newer labs like Z.AI and Moonshot. While Z.AI is known for its General Language Model (GLM), Moonshot's Kimi models have grabbed headlines following the release of its flagship K3 model.
Now, Tencent claims its Hy4 Preview has reportedly outperformed the models of these newer AI upstarts. Primarily aimed toward coding, game development, and scientific research, the model works on 770 billion parameters, has 49 billion active parameters per token, and a token context window exceeding 1 million.
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A Potential ***** eX Deal Could Meaningfully Accelerate Growth for Technip Stock

#model #deal #chinese

Dallas Fed research confirms GenAI is actively displacing medical, legal, accounting, and coding workers, with recent college graduates disproportionately impacted.
AI-driven job losses could push U.S. unemployment from 4% to 10%, matching Great Recession peaks and displacing roughly 10 million workers.
Just released. Our ***** ysts combed the entire stock market and named the ten best stocks to buy right now. The report is free. Enter your email and see if any of your stocks made the cut.
Will AI take jobs, or is the claim just a mirage? New data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows that AI as a human replacement has started and is accelerating. The jobs being taken match many forecasts of vulnerable sectors. The information also indicates the job destruction will spread.
In a new research paper ***** led "Job postings show early signs of AI automation impact," the authors report, "A new ***** ysis, using data from millions of online job postings, shows GenAI is reshaping labor demand in Texas."

#GenAI #Research #workers #Jobs

Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) is all set to report its fiscal second-quarter 2027 earnings on Wednesday, September 2. The stock has a history of exceeding Wall Street expectations, and investors also seem positively hyped around the data and ******* ytics software segment this time around.
On August 31, Cantor Fitzgerald ******* yst Thomas Blakey raised the price target on Snowflake Inc. (NYSE: SNOW) to $405.00 (from $282.00) while maintaining an Overweight rating. The firm believes Snowflake will experience another beat this quarter, and while this may sound bullish, it isn't really so when the beat is likely to be narrower than last quarter.
Image by drobotdean on Freepik
Snowflake had a strong start for fiscal 2027, with product revenue up 34% year-over-year (YoY) to $1.3 billion, while net revenue retention (or NRR) reached 126% as of Q1. Artificial Intelligence was a big part of SNOW's revenue, helping push product revenue up 34% year-over-year.
Snowflake's AI capabilities were being used by more than 13,600 accounts, while Cortex Code was being used by around 7100 accounts. Snowflake's CoCo, or Cortex Code, is the company's AI coding agent for data teams. The tool launched back in November 2025 and has since added more than 4,000 users.

#snowflake

It's not often that we use "high yield" and "tech stocks" in the same sentence. However, some of the legacy software and consulting companies have joined the league, thanks to the drawdown in their stocks amid "AI-pocalypse" fears. With artificial intelligence (AI) looking to automate coding and back-office tasks, the "man-hours" model that IT services firms rely on could be at risk. Accenture (ACN) is among the names that have been in the penalty box amid fears that AI would cause large-scale business disruption for the sector. However, such fears have eased, and legacy tech companies, which were considered net AI losers, have jumped sharply from their lows. Looking at some specific stocks, Adobe (ADBE) and Salesforce (CRM) have respectively risen 54% and 76% from their 2026 lows, while Accenture has soared 60%.
Despite the rally, Accenture still has a dividend yield of 3.4%, which is well ahead of the S&P 500 Index ($SPX) average. The company has a long history of paying dividends and started paying a semi-annual dividend in 2005, eventually transitioning to quarterly dividends beginning in 2019. It has increased its payouts every year since its initiation, with an impressive annualized growth of 11.1%. Last year, the company raised its quarterly dividend by 10.1% to $1.63 per share.
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#legacy

Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift wanted their wedding to be "intimate and genuine," Kelce said on the first episode of his New Heights podcast since the July 3 ceremony. Naturally, they went with the most famous arena in the world. Madison Square Garden perplexed some spectators as a venue choice, but it made perfect sense to Kelce and Swift. "We needed it to be a private feel and MSG went above and beyond to give us that," Kelce said.
The athlete didn't spill too many details about what happened in the room, which was populated by guests including Brad Pitt, Paul McCartney, Conan O'Brien, Gigi Hadid, Lena Dunham, Zoë Kravitz, and more. "It's a night we'll never forget. Me and Taylor are so thankful for everybody that showed up," he said. "From the vows to seeing everyone to how much fun we had throughout the entire evening, and hearing that kind of be relayed through everybody's stories of the night, and it was just so magical, man."
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#night #madison

BioNTech SE (NASDAQ:BNTX) rallied following the first positive interim Phase 3 topline result for a personalized mRNA cancer therapy. Moderna and Merck said intismeran, combined with Keytruda, significantly improved recurrence-free and distant metastasis-free survival in patients with surgically removed high-risk melanoma. The result lifted other mRNA developers because it provided the strongest evidence yet that the technology can work against cancer in a large late-stage trial. For BioNTech SE (NASDAQ:BNTX), however, the rally raises a harder question: does validation of the therapeutic class meaningfully improve the odds for its own candidates, or has the market moved ahead of company-specific evidence?
The distinction matters. Moderna's intismeran is individually designed around mutations found in each patient's tumor. BioNTech SE (NASDAQ:BNTX) is awaiting an interim ******* ysis from the Phase 3 portion of AHEAD-MERIT, which tests BNT113 with pembrolizumab in first-line unresectable recurrent or metastatic HPV16-positive, PD-L1-positive head-and-neck squamous cell carcinoma. BNT113 is an off-the-shelf FixVac therapy encoding the HPV16 E6 and E7 oncoproteins. Different antigens, manufacturing approaches, cancer types and treatment settings prevent Moderna's result from functioning as a direct clinical read-through.
Still, BioNTech SE (NASDAQ:BNTX) has more than one attempt at building an oncology franchise. The company has 14 ongoing pivotal trials across mRNA immunotherapies, immunomodulators and antibody-drug conjugates. It expects three late-stage readouts during 2026, including the BNT113 interim ******* ysis, and ended June with €16.6 billion in cash, cash equivalents and security investments.
The bull case for BioNTech SE (NASDAQ:BNTX) is that Moderna and Merck have reduced skepticism around the broader platform. Their trial enrolled 1,137 patients and met its primary endpoint of recurrence-free survival and a secondary endpoint of distant metastasis-free survival, with no new safety concerns reported. The result shows that an mRNA therapy can add meaningful benefit to a checkpoint inhibitor in Phase 3.
BioNTech also has a personalized program that more closely resembles intismeran. Autogene cevumeran, partnered with Genentech, is being studied in randomized Phase 2 trials in pancreatic and colorectal cancer. Meanwhile, BNT113 has FDA Fast Track designation and could provide BioNTech's own pivotal mRNA evidence. The company's cash position gives it room to fund these programs and absorb failures elsewhere in the portfolio.

#biontech

SAP (NYSE:SAP) faces a slower path to monetizing artificial intelligence, according to UBS, which downgraded the German software giant to Neutral from Buy on concerns that agentic AI is reaching customers too slowly.
The Swiss bank said SAP remains a dominant system of record with a deep moat around its core enterprise resource planning business, but the pace of "out-of-the-box" AI agent delivery is lagging. SAP has rolled out just 17 such agents to date, with another 15 in ramp-up, leaving its target of 200 by year-end looking difficult to reach, UBS **** ysts wrote.
The complexity of SAP's largest customers, many running multiple ERP instances across different versions and often on private cloud deployments with custom coding, complicates the company's ability to deliver standardized AI tools, according to the note. UBS said it is hearing positive signals on customers building their own agents through Joule Studio, but adoption remains gradual, making it hard to disprove bearish views on SAP's AI relevance in the near term.
UBS expects cloud backlog growth to decelerate in the second half of the year toward management's guided ~23% constant-currency pace, down from Q2's 26% (24.6% organic), a slowdown likely to pressure shares without clearer AI traction.
UBS also cited falling cloud gross, higher AI token costs pressuring R&D spending, a 100 million euro cut to 2026 EBIT guidance from acquisition dilution, and management's warnings about IT spending risks tied to the Gulf conflict.

#remains #german

This year has already delivered one of the most extraordinary IPO periods in recent years. ****** eX (SPCX), Cerebras (CBRS), and Jersey Mike's (JMKE) have been some of the buzzier names to debut in public markets.
But this could be just the tip of the IPO iceberg as we look into the fall — and along with it, some very bold promises on future performance.
Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) has filed confidentially for a potential IPO as soon as October. The Claude creator may pitch to investors that its potential revenue opportunities are above $30 trillion, per a new report from the Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) is not far behind, judging by all the execs it has sent packing this summer. It too could follow Anthropic with a seemingly outlandish future revenue estimate.
"I actually like it [the revenue estimate] because it talks about sort of what the opportunity is. If it's enterprise, if it's consumer, it's coding, it's actually changing not only how we do work, but also how we develop products. I think it is viable," Connor Group managing partner Jim Neesen said on Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid. "I mean, if you look at their revenue growth, $65 billion is their run rate. They were $9 billion last year. That's a sevenfold increase. I do think that market opportunity is out there."

#revenue #estimate #Opportunity

Carter Grandbois was 16 years old, working for a junk-removal operator in Johnstown, Colorado, when he noticed the cash. His boss kept a thick stack of it in the center console of his truck. Grandbois went home and talked to his dad, and within days, they bought a trailer. The first job paid $500 for 30 minutes of work. "That was kind of an eye-opener," Grandbois, now 18 and working for himself full-time, told Fortune.
Carter's Junk Away bills as much as $15,000 a month in peak season, Grandbois said. His W-2 employees are his high school friends, but he admits that he wasn't able to scale up and reach profitability until he created a pricing calculator, started tracking data, and started using systems to get consistent lead flows.
"I'm really into vibe-coding and creating software," he explained. "After that, we were able to be profitable on every single job," he said proudly. "When our team is out… they're bidding jobs spot-on every single time. So every time they complete a job, I mean, we're making anywhere from $50 to $200 without being on the truck." He said he earns about $125 to $1,000 per junk-removal job and he is increasingly overseeing the business from home as he scales, which is what he means by not "being on the truck."
Grandbois wants to share the wealth, too, via social media. (He's on TikTok at american.junkremoval.) "I was like, 'Hey, like everyone else could totally use this for their business.'" Now he has two calculators—a universal one for everyone and another, "private junk-removal calculator," which he described as detailed for a "more experienced junk-removal business." When asked about potentially creating his own rivals, he shrugged. "That is one of the things with giving away stuff for free. You never know who's watching the content. But at the end of the day, I know I'm doing something good for anyone else who's trying to start."
After all, he explained, it was his inspiration. Where another generation might have read about, say, Warren Buffett in Fortune magazine, he reflected, "it's probably just like Instagram reels where you're scrolling and you're like, 'That guy has a Lamborghini. That dude has a McLaren. Why can't I have one of those?'"

#grandbois #time #every #business

Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) is heading into its September 2 earnings report with a strong growth narrative. Prior to earnings, on August 20, TD Cowen raised its price target on the stock to $370 from $300 while maintaining a Buy rating.
The firm is not alone, Deutsche Bank, Truist, Bofa, and UBS have all raised their targets recently. Almost everyone is talking about Cortex Code, an AI-powered coding agent built directly into the Snowflake data cloud.
Branded as CoCo, the AI coding tool has driven Snowflake's best sequential growth in its history. We know that AI is improving Snowflake's growth story, but how much of the improvement is already priced in?
For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Snowflake achieved revenue of $1.39 billion, representing 33% year-over-year growth. According to CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, the milestone quarter reported product revenue of $1.33 billion, up 34% year-over-year, marking the strongest sequential dollar growth in company history.
Remaining performance obligations were $9.21 billion, representing 38% year-over-year growth. Cortex Code and Snowflake Intelligence, in particular, are becoming central for Snowflake's vision of the Agentic Enterprise.

#code #raised

Second-quarter earnings across the S&P 500 were robust, with companies tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure continuing to account for a substantial portion of overall profit growth.
S&P 500 earnings per share increased 31% from a year earlier during the quarter when excluding one-off income related to private investment holdings. AI infrastructure companies, including hyperscalers, generated approximately half of that increase, with earnings among the group climbing 54% year-over-year.
Strength was not confined to AI-related businesses. Excluding the energy sector, which received a boost from higher oil prices, the median S&P 500 company recorded earnings growth of 14% compared with the same period last year.
However, Goldman Sachs strategists led by Ben Snider said evidence that corporate adoption of AI is translating directly into earnings improvements remains limited. Only 11% of S&P 500 companies quantified productivity benefits from AI for a specific business application during their earnings calls, such as software coding or customer support. Just 2% put a figure on AI's direct contribution to earnings, unchanged from the first quarter.
Goldman's ***** ysis also found little difference in earnings performance between companies reporting measurable AI productivity improvements and those that did not.

#earnings #Companies #year #productivity

Demis Hassabis, the ****** el Prize-winning co-founder of Google DeepMind, is stepping down from running the AI lab day-to-day. He's becoming DeepMind's chairman and taking on a new role as Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL)'s chief scientist, while Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's US-based chief technology officer, takes over operations as senior vice president reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, without the CEO ****** le. The same week, longtime chief scientist Jeff Dean left along with three other senior researchers to launch a new startup called Discovery Loop. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) shares fell 4% on the news.
The reorganization lands at a rough moment when Gemini 3.5 Pro has now missed three release deadlines while Anthropic and OpenAI keep shipping. That leaves investors wondering whether this is a smart restructuring meant to fix a stalling AI effort or a sign Google's AI leadership is unraveling right when it can least afford it.
Even if Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL)'s Google isn't leading on raw model intelligence, it still has advantages few rivals can match: its own cloud business, custom TPU chips, and distribution across products used by billions of people, backed by $132 billion in net income last year. Artificial ****** ysis CEO Micah Hill-Smith argued Google "could end up doing very well" in the AI race overall because of that broader ecosystem, even without the top model. Kavukcuoglu was already more involved than Hassabis in DeepMind's work with Google Cloud, and people close to the cloud division reportedly welcomed his promotion as a sign the company will prioritize shipping products over pure research. That kind of tighter focus is exactly what several DeepMind engineers say has been missing on coding and agentic AI.
This management swap also means the company is losing a lot of its smartest people. Jeff Dean, Noam Shazeer, and John Jumper have all left within months of each other, and current employees describe deep frustration over sustained 60-hour work weeks, plus a controversial Pentagon defense deal that triggered resignations and sparked the first unionization drive at a frontier AI lab. More than 580 employees signed an open letter urging Pichai to reconsider the deal. Google's models "are currently not competitive with the bleeding edge" on intelligence and coding benchmarks. On top of that, Gemini 3.5 Pro remains unreleased after three missed deadlines even as rivals keep pace. Some employees describe the reorganization as a shift of power away from London toward Mountain View, undermining DeepMind's independence at precisely the moment it needs clear direction.

#googl #cloud #people #employees

On August 5, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) launched a new AI coding agent called Muse Code and priced it well below rivals Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex in a clear bid to win over developers. The release landed the same week. Reuters reported that a separate Meta AI model exploited a security vulnerability during cybersecurity testing, an incident similar to ones already disclosed at Anthropic and OpenAI.
Muse Code comes in two pricing tiers: one matches Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)'s general Muse Spark model, and a second, steeply discounted tier runs just 20 cents per million output tokens for users willing to share feedback, pricing that lines up with China's DeepSeek and undercuts even OpenAI's discounted older models.
Meta AI chief Alexandr **** put it simply, saying the pricing can be an incredibly good option for a lot of workflows, especially from a cost perspective. The stakes here are real. Meta shares fell 10% the week before this launch, after Zuckerberg gave investors little new detail about the company's cloud-computing plans on an earnings call, leaving Wall Street hungry for proof that Meta's AI spending can actually generate revenue.
Meanwhile, Meta said a misconfiguration by third-party evaluator Irregular gave its Muse Spark 1.1 model unintended internet access during testing. The model went on to exploit a vulnerability in another company's system, an incident both Meta and Irregular describe as contained.
Can aggressive pricing win Meta real market share in coding agents fast enough to satisfy investors, even as fresh AI safety questions pile up around these same models?

#muse #code

Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) is heading into its September 2 earnings report with a strong growth narrative. Prior to earnings, on August 20, TD Cowen raised its price target on the stock to $370 from $300 while maintaining a Buy rating.
The firm is not alone, Deutsche Bank, Truist, Bofa, and UBS have all raised their targets recently. Almost everyone is talking about Cortex Code, an AI-powered coding agent built directly into the Snowflake data cloud.
Branded as CoCo, the AI coding tool has driven Snowflake's best sequential growth in its history. We know that AI is improving Snowflake's growth story, but how much of the improvement is already priced in?
For the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Snowflake achieved revenue of $1.39 billion, representing 33% year-over-year growth. According to CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, the milestone quarter reported product revenue of $1.33 billion, up 34% year-over-year, marking the strongest sequential dollar growth in company history.
Remaining performance obligations were $9.21 billion, representing 38% year-over-year growth. Cortex Code and Snowflake Intelligence, in particular, are becoming central for Snowflake's vision of the Agentic Enterprise.

#cortex #raised #sequential

Branden Jenkins was out to dinner when he pulled out his phone, glanced at his AI usage dashboard, and realized his weekend coding session had just cost him $1,000 — charged automatically, in $1,000 increments, to a card set on auto-renew.
Jenkins is the CEO of Maxio, a private-equity-backed software company headquartered in Atlanta that's on a path toward $100 million in annual revenue over the next couple of years. He's also, by his own admission, near the top of his company's internal AI spending leaderboard — an odd place for the chief executive to land. "A thousand is not that much, I would say, but for one weekend, it's pretty annoying," he said in an interview with Fortune. Describing his agent as "cooking away," he described his response as "Wow, I just got here quickly."
The episode has become something of a parable inside his company — and inside corporate America more broadly — for how quickly "agentic" AI tools can consume money without anyone quite noticing until the bill lands. But Jenkins said the surprise invoice isn't what's keeping him up at night. The deeper problem is something messier and more human: his own employees' "insecurity" about being outpaced by the technology — and by him.
Jenkins, a self-described technical CEO who builds his own agents and automations, said he can write code from his phone using Claude even while away from his desk — which is how he ended up debugging and iterating on a project at dinner. The token wallet he'd set up to fund those sessions was configured to auto-refill by $1,000 every time it ran dry, silently recharging his card without requiring a second thought — until he saw the total.
"I don't have governors where a lot of my staff hits limits, and they have to ask for approval," Jenkins said, describing his own unlimited internal budget as both a perk and a liability. "So I started leaning in and going, 'What does this look like?'"

#auto

(Bloomberg) -- ****** eX approached artificial intelligence coding startup Cognition AI Inc. about a potential acquisition, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would have been its second large takeover in recent months to gain ground in the AI race.
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#deploys

Acquisitions can tell you a lot about where a company thinks its next big opportunity lies. Sometimes they are about buying technology, sometimes talent, and sometimes they are about putting two businesses together before the market even realizes how well they fit. Elon Musk's ******* eX (SPCH) latest deal looks like a little bit of all three.
The Elon Musk-led aerospace and satellite communications company has officially closed its $60 billion acquisition of Anysphere, the software company behind the AI coding platform Cursor. The deal became effective on Aug. 14, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Under the agreement, Cursor shareholders received an aggregate of 389.29 million shares of ******* eX, based on an implied $60 billion equity value and ******* eX's volume-weighted average closing price over the seven trading days before the deal closed.
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#company

Weitz Investment Management, an investment management firm, released its second-quarter Q2 2026 investor letter for the "Large Cap Equity Fund". A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. The Large Cap Equity Fund's Institutional Class posted a return of 7.03% in Q2, trailing the 15.49% return of the Bloomberg U.S. 1000 Index. This disparity arose as equity markets surged amid economic resilience and easing Middle East tensions, while AI-related stock performance soared due to heightened investor interest in "AI bottleneck" beneficiaries, primarily semiconductor firms. Major positions in "hyperscaler" cloud providers yielded mixed results. Risk-on factors like momentum and growth significantly outpaced defensive factors. Despite the current volatility, the Fund maintains its philosophy of investing in quality companies at undervalued prices, believing this strategy will yield improved returns over time. The portfolio held ownership in 30 companies, with the top 10 comprising over half of the portfolio. The price-to-value ratio is in the upper-70s, indicating strong return potential. Additionally, reviewing the Fund's top five holdings could help identify its best picks for 2026.
In its Q2 2026 investor letter, Weitz Investment Large Cap Equity Fund highlighted Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) as a newly added position. Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) provides water ******* ytics, water treatment, marking and coding, and packaging and color solutions. On August 14, 2026, Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) closed at $97.68 per share. The one-month return of Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) was 4.86% and its shares lost 8.45% over the past 52 weeks. Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) has a market capitalization of $23.81 billion.
Weitz Investment Large Cap Equity Fund stated the following regarding Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) in its Q2 2026 investor letter:
"We bought new positions in Martin Marietta Materials and Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) during the quarter. Both are repeat holdings, so we were able to act opportunistically and quickly at favorable prices. Veralto enjoys leading market positions and enviable economics in its water quality and packaging, labeling, and product traceability businesses. We see a clear path to modest organic growth, operating margin expansion, and value-creating capital deployment."
Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) is not on our list of the 40 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. As per our database, 57 hedge fund portfolios held Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) at the end of the first quarter which was 55 in the previous quarter. While we acknowledge the potential of Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) as an investment, we believe certain AI stocks offer greater upside potential and carry less downside risk. If you're looking for an extremely undervalued AI stock that also stands to benefit significantly from Trump-era tariffs and the onshoring trend, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.

#vlto #i

On August 13, Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google unveiled Gemini 3.7 Flash, a new AI model built for coding and automated business tasks. The launch came without word on when the company's flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model will arrive, a gap investors have watched closely as a gauge of whether Google's DeepMind unit can keep pace with Anthropic and OpenAI. It also landed the same week that Alphabet closed a $25 billion bond sale and posted its first-ever negative free cash flow quarter.
Gemini 3.7 Flash arrived just three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash, a pace that signals Google is iterating quickly on the models it hopes will power autonomous AI agents. The new model targets businesses building systems that can plan tasks, use software tools, and complete multi-step workflows with less human oversight, and Google says it shows improved performance on coding tasks including debugging, issue resolution, and production-ready code generation. To win over developers, Google priced Gemini 3.7 Flash at 75 cents per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens through the end of the year, half the original cost of Gemini 3.6 Flash. It is also rolling out immediately to Gemini Spark, Google's subscription AI agent service available in more than 160 countries.
That pricing sits alongside a cloud business converting AI investment into revenue. Google Cloud's backlog has climbed to $514 billion, and Alphabet expects to recognize a little more than half of it as revenue over the next 24 months. Alphabet also holds more than $240 billion in cash and marketable securities, giving it room to keep funding its buildout as free cash flow comes under pressure.
Alphabet's capital expenditures are now guided to $195 billion to $205 billion for 2026, up from $91 billion in 2025 and $53 billion in 2024. Second-quarter capex alone was $45 billion, double the year-earlier figure, pushing Alphabet to a quarterly free cash flow loss of $5.9 billion. Buybacks have gone to zero, and Alphabet raised roughly $56 billion in debt plus about $50 billion from stock sales in the first half to help cover the gap.
That borrowing culminated in a $25 billion, ten-tranche bond sale that closed Monday, ranging from notes due in 2028 to a $2.5 billion tranche not due until 2066. Much of that money funds servers and networking gear that Alphabet itself depreciates over about six years, meaning a large share of this year's spending will need to be repaid all over again long before the longest bonds come due.

#flow

Snowflake (SNOW) stock has already delivered a powerful rally in 2026, but Oppenheimer believes the data cloud company still has plenty of room to run. The firm raised its price target to $400 from $295 while maintaining an "Outperform" rating, representing a roughly 36% increase in its target.
The bullish call comes as Oppenheimer sees stronger consumption trends across regions and industries, along with accelerating adoption of Snowflake's AI coding agent, CoCo. For a company whose revenue depends heavily on how much customers use its platform, that is an important development.
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#oppenheimer

OpenAI (Unlisted:OPAI) is on track to generate annualised revenue of more than $40 billion, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, roughly double its run rate at the end of 2025.
The acceleration strengthens the case for a stock market debut, with the ChatGPT maker having filed confidential paperwork to go public.
Growth has been driven in part by its AI coding software, alongside subscription sales, a young advertising business and a still-expanding consumer arm.
Greg Brockman, co-founder and president, told staff the run rate rose more than 20% month-on-month in July.
Chief financial officer Sarah Friar had previously said the company ended last year above $20 billion.

#billion #opai #bloomberg #greg

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Elon Musk's ******* eX (NASDAQ:SPCX) closed its $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor on Friday, sealing a deal it struck just weeks after pulling off the biggest IPO in history.
Cursor announced the close on X and said in a blog post that the acquisition gives it access to what it called the world's largest GPU fleet, pointing to this week's Grok 4.6 release as an early sign of what the combination can produce.
So why would a rocket and satellite company pay $60 billion for a coding tool?
According to ******* ysts, Cursor hands Musk something particularly valuable: a huge base of professional developers, established enterprise distribution and a stream of developer data that may make his AI models better.

#cursor #benzinga #grok

Diamond Hill Capital, a First Eagle Investment Management company, issued its Q2 2026 investor letter for its "Mid Cap Strategy". A copy of the Q2 2026 investor letter can be downloaded here. In the quarter, equity markets posted strong returns as resilient economic growth and robust corporate earnings supported investor sentiment, although AI-related companies continued to dominate market leadership. Technology was the strongest-performing sector, while industrials also advanced and energy lagged as oil prices declined. The Fund returned 7.92% and the Russell Midcap Index returned 13.83%. Health care holdings were the largest positive contributor, supported by strength across managed care, diagnostics, and life sciences. However, stock selection and an underweight position in information technology remained the main relative headwinds. The strategy maintained limited exposure to highly valued semiconductor and memory companies, reflecting concerns that current valuations **** ume an extended period of elevated AI spending. It also continued to **** s software and services businesses individually based on how AI may affect their long-term competitive positions. Management emphasized higher-quality companies, attractive valuations, capital preservation, and durable long-term compounding while remaining cautious about elevated valuations, concentrated leadership, and the sustainability of the current AI investment cycle. Please review the Strategy's top five holdings for its key selections.
In its second-quarter 2026 investor letter, Diamond Hill Capital Mid Cap Strategy highlighted Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) as a newly added position. Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) provides water **** ytics, water treatment, marking and coding, and packaging and color solutions. On August 4, 2026, Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) closed at $96.45 per share. One-month return of Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) was 5.13% and its shares lost 10.26% over the past 52 weeks. Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) has a market capitalization of $23.12 billion with a 52-week trading range between $80.03 - $110.11.
Diamond Hill Capital Mid Cap Strategy stated the following regarding Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) in its Q2 2026 investor letter:
"Water testing and treatment provider Veralto Corporation (NYSE:VLTO) was spun out of Danaher in late 2023. We initiated a position as we believe the market has underappreciated the company's resilient business model, strong profitability and disciplined capital allocation amid the current chase for revenue growth in data center-related industries."

#veralto #NYSE #capital

Anthropic has signed a $10 billion, six-year deal for computing capacity with Volta Infra Holdings, a cloud infrastructure startup backed by Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA, XETRA:NVD), according to media reports citing people familiar with the matter, as the Claude maker moves to secure additional computing resources amid growing demand for its AI products.
Volta announced earlier Tuesday that it had secured a six-year, $10 billion agreement with an unnamed artificial intelligence company. The deal will be delivered in partnership with Bitdeer Technologies Group, a bitcoin miner that operates data centers, using a site in Norway.
The managed data center is expected to feature Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin AI chips, according to details of the agreement. Volta was recently valued at $2.4 billion following a $300 million funding round.
Volta CEO Ricard Boada declined to identify the customer. Representatives for Anthropic and Bitdeer declined to comment.
The agreement adds to Anthropic's efforts to expand its computing capacity as businesses and consumers increasingly use its Claude chatbot and other AI tools, particularly for coding and related tasks.

#claude

DeepSeek gave Alibaba Group Holding Limited (NYSE:BABA) and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) a revealing price comparison on August 3. Artificial ***** ysis estimated that DeepSeek's V4-Flash averaged just $0.03 to complete each test in its benchmark suite while scoring 50 on its Intelligence Index, matching Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash.
Three cents is the average cost of completing each benchmark test, not a normal customer query, and the index combines nine coding, reasoning, and workplace tests. More capable models from Moonshot, OpenAI and Anthropic scored at least seven points higher. Still, V4-Flash costs $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens. That makes model intelligence cheap enough to pressure pricing for routine enterprise workloads.
Source: unsplash
Alibaba has two ways to monetize that pressure. Alibaba Cloud's AI Gateway already supports DeepSeek V4 APIs and can route workloads between DeepSeek and Qwen. Alibaba also unveiled its own 2.4-trillion-parameter Qwen3.8-Max on August 3, sending its Hong Kong shares up 7%. Its cloud revenue grew 38% in the March quarter, external cloud revenue rose 40%, and AI products reached 30% of external cloud sales. The catch is severe spending: group revenue rose only 3%, while Alibaba plans to exceed its earlier RMB380 billion three-year AI commitment and is treating margins as secondary.
What that creates is a demanding unit-economics test. Lower inference prices can pull customers into Alibaba Cloud, but revenue compounds only if workload volume grows faster than prices fall and those users also buy storage, networking and databases.

#flash #revenue #intelligence #index

With no background in coding, Faith Maeba, a psychology major, was reluctant when her mother first suggested she enroll in classes on artificial intelligence.
But the senior at Virginia Commonwealth University began to see it differently as she looked into graduate psychology programs that explore human behavior in the workplace, which is quickly being upended by machine learning. Maeba, 21, is now pursuing a minor in AI.
"It's giving me an edge and standing out," she said.
Hiring has cooled for entry-level software developers — work increasingly done by AI agents — and college enrollment in computer and information science programs has been declining. Yet at campuses across the country, many professors are finding themselves busier than ever teaching students from a range of majors about artificial intelligence.
Colleges are responding to changes in student demand, but they also recognize that new graduates — regardless of their field — are facing questions about their AI skills from potential employers.

#virginia