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Welcome back to a new edition,
The World in a Week: How Major Markets Moved
U.S. | A blowout April jobs print (+115K vs +65K expected, unemployment 4.3%) and continued earnings strength drove the S&P 500 to 7,398.93 (+2.3% week) and the Nasdaq to 26,247.08 (+4.5%) – fresh records and a sixth straight winning week, the longest since 2024.
Europe | The STOXX 600 added 0.8%, and STOXX 50 added 1.5%, with strong earnings (UniCredit’s record quarter) offset by a fresh tariff threat as Trump warned of “much higher” tariffs on the EU by July 4 unless the bloc cuts US-good tariffs to zero. The FTSE 100 lagged the bloc with a ~1.3% decline as UK defensives sold off.
Japan | The Nikkei surged 5%+ on Wednesday alone to a record 62,833.84 as AI supply-chain names exploded – SoftBank +18%, Ibiden +22%, Sumco +19.7%; the Topix also closed at a record 3,840.49. But the move felt tactical, not structural — yen volatility and intervention risk kept allocators wary, and Friday’s close at 62,713 already trimmed midweek gains.
China | A holiday-shortened week saw mainland equities firm modestly (the SSEC up ~1.6%), while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.85% on Friday as Asia-Pacific risk appetite softened on renewed US-Iran clashes in the Strait of Hormuz. Mainland strength continues to read as policy-supported rather than organic.
India | The Sensex eked out 0.5% weekly gains to 77,328 despite a sharp Friday fall as banking heavyweights cracked on SBI’s Q4 miss. The split-tape: the Nifty MidCap 100 still scaled a fresh all-time high of 62,113.85 intraday, even as the Rupee weakened to ₹94.48/USD and Brent hovered near $100 – record breadth coexisting with currency and energy stress.
Stock market closing data for the week of May 4 to May 8, 2026
Index information: STOXX 600 (tracks 600 large, mid- & small-cap EU firms), DAX (top 40 German blue chips), CAC 40 (leading French stocks), Nikkei 225 (225 top Japanese stocks), CSI 300 & SSEC (mainland China A-shares), and Hang Seng (large-cap Hong Kong-listed firms). For these indices, we track 1-week returns to capture how global sentiment is shifting.
News Summaries
Intel +25% This Week as Apple Manufacturing Deal Caps Stunning Comeback
The week’s most surprising story was Intel’s full-blown rehabilitation as an AI infrastructure name.
Shares climbed 13% on Tuesday after it was reported that Apple was in talks with Intel and Samsung to produce main processors for its US devices, then jumped another 14% on Friday after the report that Intel and Apple had reached an agreement for the chipmaker to manufacture some processors for Apple devices. Both Intel and Apple declined to comment.
The numbers around Intel’s comeback are genuinely staggering.
Intel had its best month on record in April, more than doubling, and continued notching massive gains, rising 33% in the early days of May. The stock is now up well over 200% in 2026.
The thesis: Intel’s Xeon CPUs are being repositioned as essential for AI inference workloads, where cost efficiency and power consumption matter more than raw training performance and the foundry business is finally landing marquee customers after years of execution doubts.
Why it matters: Apple’s choosing Intel for any meaningful share of its US silicon manufacturing is a structural validation of the foundry pivot the company has bet its future on. Combined with the inference-CPU narrative gaining traction, Intel has gone from broken legacy semi name to one of 2026’s defining comeback trades and the read-through to the broader US chip-manufacturing thesis (CHIPS Act, onshoring, sovereign AI) is now too big for allocators to ignore.
AMD +25% on Q1 Blowout: Meta to Deploy 6 GW of AMD Instinct GPUs
AMD delivered the cleanest single print of the week.
Q1 revenue of $10.3 billion was up 38% YoY (vs $9.9B consensus); non-GAAP gross margin was 55%, EPS came in at $1.37 (up 43% YoY), and Data Center revenue alone was $5.8 billion, up 57% YoY. CEO Lisa Su called Data Center “the primary driver of our revenue and earnings growth,” with inferencing and agentic AI driving demand for both CPUs and accelerators.
The deal flow underneath the print is what really moved the stock. Meta announced plans to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs, with the first 1-GW deployment powered by a custom AMD Instinct MI450-based GPU. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Tencent all announced new and expanded 5th Gen EPYC-powered cloud instances. AMD and Samsung are collaborating on HBM4 supply for AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs. AMD is now up 247% over the past year and 60% in 2026, trading at 130x earnings but with a PEG ratio of 0.79.
Why it matters: A 6 GW Meta commitment is a generational order. It signals that hyperscaler diversification away from Nvidia-only stacks is now a real procurement strategy, not a research project. With AMD’s MI450 series and Helios platform attracting customer forecasts that “exceed our initial expectations” per Lisa Su, the second-supplier thesis in AI accelerators has shifted from possible to bankable.
Micron +37% on AI Memory Frenzy as Stock Hits All-Time High
Memory was the week’s hottest sub-sector.
Micron jumped 14% on Friday alone, hitting a fresh all-time high of $748.70 with volumes spiking to 63.5M shares versus an average of 44.8M. For the week, the stock gained more than 37%.
Three catalysts converged. Micron started shipments of the world’s largest commercially available data-center SSD, which it claims requires 82% fewer racks for the same raw storage capacity. Fitch Ratings simultaneously upgraded Micron’s credit rating to BBB+, citing AI demand from hyperscalers. DRAM prices soared 57% in April vs Q1 averages, with NAND prices up 65–70%. Micron is one of only three global HBM suppliers alongside SK Hynix and Samsung — and reportedly sold out of HBM for the next several quarters. The stock is now up about 70% YTD in 2026.
Why it matters: Memory has emerged as the single most under-appreciated bottleneck in the AI buildout. With HBM oversold and DRAM/NAND pricing accelerating, Micron is monetizing scarcity precisely when hyperscaler capex is ramping — translating directly into operating margin expansion. The cyclical-discount valuation hasn’t yet caught up to the structural shift in memory’s role from commodity input to AI gating factor.
Private Markets Pulse | Stripe’s Radar Blocks $4.4M in AI Trial Fraud as Abuse Surges 6.2x
In a May 7 disclosure, Stripe revealed that abusive free trials on its network jumped 6.2x between November 2025 and February 2026, with Radar’s new prediction tool blocking 550,000+ high-risk trials in two months, preventing an estimated $4.4M in downstream compute costs at 90% accuracy. The shift: legitimate users are now systematically abusing policies: multiple accounts, free-trial cycling, refund exploitation and AI startups can’t absorb the cost the way SaaS could, since compute meters from the first prompt.
The nuance is that the same fraud wave damaging AI startups is structurally accretive for Stripe. Every new attack vector deepens Radar’s data advantage, a new payments foundation model trained on the entire Stripe transaction graph already boosts card-testing detection by 64% – a moat built on data only Stripe has at this scale.
The strategic stack is now visible end-to-end. Payments: Stripe powers ~86% of the Forbes AI 500 (up from 78%), 80 of the Nasdaq 100, and 90% of the Dow Jones, with $1.9T in 2025 volume, which is roughly 1.6% of global GDP. Fraud prevention: Radar’s ROI is now measurable in dollars saved, not just blocks executed. Blockchain: on May 8, the $4B+ USD1 stablecoin went native on Tempo, the Stripe-incubated Layer 1, as the first top-five fiat-backed stablecoin to issue natively on the chain.
For a private company at a $159B valuation, that’s moat-stacking and explains why the Collisons publicly say an IPO is “not in our top 5–10–20 priorities.”
For investors closely tracking Stripe, Vested provides access to invest in Stripe through a Private Markets offering.
