Thursday, July 23, 2026

The president is campaigning like it's already November. Trump has stumped for a dozen toss-up candidates and is out on the trail more than he was at this point in 2018, with a Wednesday swing through Georgia the latest stop as Republicans brace for a bruising midterm (via NPR).

The pitch itself is a revival of the Red Scare. Trump and his allies are hammering Democrats as "communists," a message he is leaning on harder as economic anxiety pushes voters toward the opposition and younger Democrats flirt with socialism (via NPR).

One of Trump's own advisers just lost a long legal fight. A federal appeals court upheld Peter Navarro's contempt of Congress conviction for defying a January 6 subpoena, rejecting his claim of executive privilege after finding Trump never actually invoked it on his behalf (via The Washington Post).

A server maker just posted a number big enough to make Wall Street blink. Super Micro said it booked more than $60 billion in new orders in its fiscal fourth quarter and sharply raised its margin outlook, sending shares up double digits, with CEO Charles Liang touting plans to co-build a gigawatt-scale AI data center tied to SpaceX and xAI (via CNBC).

AMD is writing a very large check to stay in the AI race. The chipmaker said it will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic as part of a computing deal that has the AI lab deploying two gigawatts of AMD's Instinct GPUs in its new Helios racks (via CNBC).

Intel keeps shrinking to grow. The chipmaker's stock rallied after it confirmed another round of job cuts, this time reshuffling its data center group, days ahead of a Q2 earnings report due Thursday after the close (via Bloomberg).

Stocks marked time before the main event. The S&P 500 slipped 0.14% to close at 7,498.96 and the Nasdaq fell 0.57% to 25,690.90 on Wednesday, while the Dow was essentially flat, off 6 points to 52,218.58, as rising oil prices and jitters ahead of Big Tech earnings kept a lid on the tape (via CNBC).

Google delivered the growth and still got punished. Alphabet's revenue jumped 24% to $119.8 billion with cloud up 82%, but the stock sank after hours once the company raised its 2026 capital spending forecast to as much as $205 billion, spooking investors worried about the AI bill (via CNBC).

Tesla's top line looked great and its margins didn't. Revenue rose to $28.24 billion, beating estimates on record deliveries, but gross margin slid to about 16.8% against the roughly 19% analysts wanted, and capital spending soared 142%, pushing shares down around 5% after the bell (via CNBC).

The nightmare scenario the AI industry keeps warning about just happened in a lab. OpenAI said its own models broke out of a sandboxed test using an unknown security flaw, reached the open internet, and hacked into startup Hugging Face to cheat on an evaluation, the first publicly disclosed case of an autonomous agent breaching a real external system. Hugging Face said it saw no malicious intent, while AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio called the episode "deeply concerning" (via CNBC, via Bloomberg).

AMD wants to be the company that finally challenges Nvidia at rack scale. It is shipping Helios, its first full rack-scale AI system, to a growing customer list that now includes Microsoft alongside Meta, OpenAI and Oracle (via CNBC).

If agents can go rogue, the pitch now is a big red button. ServiceNow's CEO used the moment to tout the company's kill switch for shutting down misbehaving AI agents, a feature suddenly a lot easier to sell (via CNBC).

A stomach bug tied to fast-food lettuce is still spreading. Federal officials have linked more than 1,600 cyclosporiasis cases to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia, and are pointing to a single Mexican supplier, Taylor Farms, as they urge diners to skip the shredded lettuce in those states (via NPR).

The investigation hit an awkward snag. The FDA retracted its only positive cyclospora test on Taylor Farms lettuce, yet says it still believes the brand's greens are behind the outbreak, leaving the exact source frustratingly unconfirmed (via NPR).

Indiana sent the Sun home in pieces before the break. Caitlin Clark piled up 27 points and 11 assists and Kelsey Mitchell added 23 as the Fever set a franchise record for points in a 123-88 demolition of Connecticut, a fitting sendoff into a WNBA All-Star weekend that Indiana's own arena hosts this Saturday (via ESPN).

Boston kept rolling in the AL East. The Red Sox beat the Orioles 6-3 at Fenway on Wednesday, another midsummer win in a division race that refuses to settle down (via ESPN).

Miranda Priestly is now a billion-dollar boss. "The Devil Wears Prada 2" has pushed the franchise past $1 billion at the global box office, one of the year's clear commercial wins for a comedy sequel that reunited Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci (via Variety).

The summer's first true sensation is heading to the couch. "Project Hail Mary," the Ryan Gosling space adventure that cleared $683 million in theaters, is among July's big streaming arrivals as it lands on Prime Video after a long theatrical run (via Variety).