AMD Joins the Trillion-Dollar Club as Buffett Exits and Tokyo Rates Hit a 31-Year High
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Advanced Micro Devices crossed one trillion dollars in market capitalization for the first time, a milestone driven almost entirely by data center AI demand. Three years ago AMD was a competitive but secondary player to Nvidia in the AI chip space; it has now joined a threshold that only a handful of companies in history have crossed. Nvidia itself crossed two trillion some time ago, and both companies trading above those levels simultaneously suggests the total addressable market for AI compute infrastructure is large enough to support multiple trillion-dollar chip companies at once. S&P futures were sitting at 7,835, indicating markets were processing the week's considerable geopolitical noise without significant panic.
Warren Buffett has stepped down as Berkshire Hathaway's chairman at age 95, closing the last formal governance position connecting the company to the man who built it over more than five decades. Greg Abel, previously designated successor as CEO, will assume leadership of an institution whose durability without its founder markets will now assess directly. The chairman role is different from CEO in its symbolic weight, and investors will be watching whether the institutional culture Buffett created holds without him in that chair.
The Bank of Japan raised interest rates to 1.25 percent — its sixth hike since March 2024, reaching a 31-year high. Japan has served as the world's largest provider of cheap carry-trade capital for decades; as the Bank of Japan normalizes policy, that carry trade unwinds and capital flows in complex ways across global asset markets. The combination of rising Japanese rates, a weak yen, and reported Washington pressure on Tokyo's monetary policy represents a volatile mix with consequences well beyond Japan's borders.
The Paramount-Warner Bros. merger cleared its final obstacle after Paramount settled antitrust claims brought by twelve state attorneys general, removing the last legal barrier to the $110 billion acquisition. The settlement — rather than a court ruling — is instructive: the attorneys general used the legal fight as a bargaining tool and likely extracted behavioral concessions around content licensing, streaming access, and distribution agreements in exchange for dropping the challenge. The merged entity will hold the largest entertainment content library by volume in the world. Trump's order requiring tighter H-1B visa oversight for employers who use foreign workers while laying off US workers added regulatory friction aimed squarely at a technology sector where that practice has drawn criticism across the political spectrum.