AI Markets: Tesla and SpaceX rattled, AMD seals $5 billion pact with Anthropic

Blockbuster earnings from Tesla and Alphabet, a new mega-deal between AMD and Anthropic, SpaceX retrying its Starship launch while its stock is under pressure: tech earnings week is running at full throttle. Here’s what really matters behind the headlines, and what it means for a European investor with AI exposure.

Tesla Q2 2026: record deliveries, slumping profits and a $25 billion AI bet

Tesla reported mixed results after the close on July 22: a quarter of unprecedented deliveries, but lower profits and a ballooning investment bill to fund its pivot to robotaxis and robotics.

Key points:

  • Record deliveries of 480,126 vehicles (+25% year over year); record revenue of $28.24 billion (+26%), but net income down 5% to $1.11 billion and operating margin down to 1.4%, from 4.1% a year earlier.
  • Negative free cash flow of $1.09 billion for the quarter (versus +$1.44 billion in Q1); 2026 capex guidance climbs to more than $25 billion, compared with $8.5 billion in 2025.
  • Robotaxi: 380,000 unsupervised miles driven “with no notable incident,” according to Tesla’s head of AI, with the service live in seven US metro areas — meanwhile, NHTSA is stepping up its FSD probe, which covers about 3.2 million vehicles.
  • Two accounting effects propped up the bottom line: a $1.005 billion unrealized gain on its SpaceX stake, and holding on to its 11,509 bitcoins despite a $112 million unrealized loss.

The AI bet is expensive, and Musk owns it

Tesla no longer just sells cars: it’s bankrolling robotaxis, FSD and Optimus at breakneck pace. 2026 capex guidance tops $25 billion, versus $8.5 billion last year — nearly triple. Musk acknowledged he’s willing to be “a bit less capital efficient,” and reiterated his belief that Optimus will be “the biggest product” Tesla has ever launched, while admitting it’s “the hardest product to industrialize” the company has ever attempted. Verified fact: Tesla has indeed ended production of the Model S and Model X (announced in January, final units rolled off the line in early May), with the Fremont line being converted to build Optimus. Musk also mentioned a “growing overlap” between Tesla and SpaceX, reviving speculation about a combination of the two groups — a story to follow separately.

NHTSA on the prowl, market cautious

The US road safety regulator has stepped up its FSD investigation, with a July 21 information request covering about 3.2 million vehicles and nine crashes in reduced-visibility conditions. The stock fell about 4% in after-hours trading, with investors apparently more focused on shrinking margins and rising capex than on record deliveries. A useful reminder for European investors: Tesla is a US stock, not eligible for the PEA (reserved for EU/EEA companies). It remains available through a regular brokerage account, or indirectly through UCITS ETFs tracking US or global indices that hold it. There’s no telling whether this AI bet will pay off: it’s a major business model shift, and the market will take time to judge its profitability.

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SpaceX: Starship 13 tries again, Musk revives talk of a Tesla merger

SpaceX is retrying a previously delayed Starship launch today, one article claims $1 trillion has been wiped out since the June peak, and Musk reopened the door to a merger with Tesla on the July 22 call.

Key points:

  • Starship 13, pushed back after 4 Raptor engines failed to ignite on July 16, is making another liftoff attempt today, July 23, with a launch window late in the day from Starbase; at the time of writing, the outcome is not known.
  • The $1 trillion wiped-out figure, put forward by 24/7 Wall St., measures a theoretical total market cap (float + locked-up shares), not an actual stock market loss.
  • On the Tesla call, Musk mentioned a growing overlap between the two groups, reviving merger speculation without announcing any concrete plan.
  • Tesla booked a $1.01 billion unrealized gain on its SpaceX stake in Q2, which accounted for most of its net income.

Starship 13: second attempt, Artemis milestone at stake

On July 16, the countdown stopped at T-0: 4 of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines failed to light, triggering an automatic abort. With two engines replaced, SpaceX is trying again this Thursday from Starbase, aiming to put 20 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit for the first time and to relight an engine in flight, a step seen as necessary before any return to the Moon via Artemis. According to Wikipedia and Space.com, the result had not been confirmed at the time of writing.

The “$1 trillion wiped out,” the merger rumor and Tesla’s accounting bonus

SpaceX closed at $115.26 on July 22, down about 25% over a month according to 24/7 Wall St., below its $135 IPO price. Extrapolating that price to all shares, not just the listed float (about 4% of the capital), the implied total valuation falls to around $1.6 trillion, versus a peak of $2.64 trillion on June 16. Hence the “$1 trillion wiped out”: a correct calculation on paper, but based on a theoretical market cap that isn’t very representative, since 96% of the shares can’t be traded.

Asked about a Tesla-SpaceX merger, Musk replied, according to Electrek and Forbes: “there’s more and more overlap” between the two groups, citing the joint Terafab chip project, but “you can’t talk about merging companies on an earnings call, you have to follow the proper process.” No announcement, no timeline: speculation revived by Musk himself, to be taken as such.

On the books, Tesla recorded a $1.01 billion unrealized gain on its SpaceX stake in Q2, more than double its operating income ($398 million) and most of its GAAP net income ($1.11 billion) — an unrealized accounting gain already eroded by SpaceX’s decline since late June.

For a European investor, SpaceX stays outside the PEA, available only through a regular brokerage account, with a very small float that amplifies every move. Neither today’s flight, nor the merger rumor, nor Tesla’s accounting gain makes it possible to predict where the stock is headed.

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Alphabet breaks its quarterly profit record — thanks (mostly) to Anthropic and SpaceX

Alphabet posted extraordinary results on July 22, 2026: a sharply accelerating cloud business, but above all a historic net profit boosted by the accounting revaluation of its stakes in Anthropic and SpaceX, far more than by its sales.

Key points:

  • Quarterly revenue: $119.8 billion (+24% year over year), driven by Google Cloud at $24.8 billion (+82%), whose operating income more than tripled to $8.8 billion.
  • Net income: $112.1 billion (+298% year over year), an all-time record for the company — about $99 billion of it coming from accounting gains (realized and unrealized) on Alphabet’s minority stakes, notably in Anthropic and SpaceX.
  • Excluding this effect, “adjusted” earnings per share come in around $2.90, close to consensus, versus $9.11 including these portfolio gains.
  • Alphabet raised its 2026 capex forecast to $195-205 billion (from the $180-190 billion previously announced), a signal that weighed on the stock, which fell as much as about 5% after hours despite the record profit.

How a private stake can inflate profits with no link to sales

A US accounting rule (ASU 2016-01) requires companies to remeasure, every quarter, their stakes in other companies at market value — and to run the change through their own net income, even without selling a single share. This also applies to private holdings, as soon as an event sets a new reference price. That’s what happened this quarter: Anthropic’s valuation jumped in a funding round in May, and SpaceX went public in early June. Alphabet, a minority shareholder in both, booked these surges as profit — on paper, as Fortune put it, since no cash came in. Some observers also point to a circularity: Alphabet invests in Anthropic, which spends part of that money on Google’s cloud, fueling its growth and valuation, which Alphabet then books as a financial gain.

What it means for a European investor

Alphabet isn’t eligible for the PEA — it’s a US stock — but it carries heavy weight in most global or US equity ETFs (MSCI World, S&P 500) held in a PEA through eligible trackers or in a regular brokerage account. The thing to watch: a “record net profit” says nothing, on its own, about a company’s real operating performance. It’s better to separate earnings tied to the business (advertising, cloud, subscriptions) from accounting lines such as gains or losses on financial stakes, which can inflate or deflate a GAAP result from one quarter to the next with no connection to sales. The market seems to have done that sorting itself: despite nearly quadrupled profit, the stock fell, as investors focused on rising capital spending and adjusted earnings close to expectations rather than on the spectacular GAAP figure.

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AMD and Anthropic seal a giant deal: up to 2 gigawatts of chips in exchange for a $5 billion investment

Barely two days after unveiling its Helios system, AMD announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic, the company behind the Claude assistant: tens of billions of dollars of AI servers sold on one side, up to $5 billion injected into Anthropic’s capital on the other.

Key points:

  • On July 22, 2026, AMD and Anthropic announced that Anthropic will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 chips (the generation used in Helios racks), for a total value of “tens of billions of dollars” according to Reuters and CNBC; the first gigawatt is due to arrive as early as the first half of 2027.
  • In return, AMD commits to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, as an equity investment paid out in tranches and contingent on hitting compute deployment milestones — not an immediate check.
  • AMD stock jumped more than 10% in premarket trading according to several US outlets, before falling back to around +1.5% to +2.4% during the session, on a choppy day for semiconductors.
  • The two companies also announced a technical collaboration: Claude will be used to optimize AMD’s ROCm software (its in-house equivalent of Nvidia’s CUDA), while AMD rolls out Claude across the company internally.

Anthropic adds compute suppliers, moving away from “all Nvidia”

Until now, Anthropic relied on a mix of Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs and Amazon’s Trainium chips (via “Project Rainier”). AMD’s arrival as a major new compute supplier reinforces that diversification: the less Anthropic depends on a single supplier, the more bargaining power it gains on chip prices and delivery times, a vital issue as demand for compute to train and run Claude explodes. For AMD, the deal validates its “open standards” strategy (UALink, Ultra Ethernet) against Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink, and broadens its base of “gigawatt-scale AI” customers: Anthropic becomes, according to the US press, its third customer of that caliber after OpenAI and Meta.

A deal that lands just before Anthropic’s IPO

The timing is no accident. Anthropic is preparing a Nasdaq IPO targeted for fall 2026, with a confidential S-1 already filed. Locking in multiyear infrastructure commitments before going before public investors helps reassure them about the company’s ability to meet demand for Claude without relying on a single partner — an argument that could carry weight in the prospectus expected in August or September.

For a European investor, there are two angles here. AMD is listed on the Nasdaq: it’s not a PEA-eligible stock, and you buy it through a regular brokerage account or, indirectly, through a UCITS semiconductor or tech equity ETF. Anthropic isn’t listed yet: its IPO, if confirmed, isn’t expected before late 2026, and neither its timing nor its IPO price is guaranteed at this stage.

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OpenAI raises its AI infrastructure spending to $750 billion — and is already testing its environmental promises

Within a few days, OpenAI announced an infrastructure spending target raised to $750 billion and a data center megacampus in Georgia worth more than $30 billion. At the same time, a Reuters investigation reveals that one of its data centers in Australia has quietly dropped its water-saving plan.

Key points:

  • According to the Wall Street Journal (July 22), OpenAI raised its compute/infrastructure spending target to about $750 billion by 2030, up from about $600 billion mentioned earlier this year; that amount covers its cloud contracts (Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, CoreWeave) and its first self-built data center.
  • That site, dubbed Project Camellia, will be built in Effingham County, Georgia: an announced investment of more than $30 billion (including $20 billion committed initially) for 3.2 GW of electrical capacity, supplied by Georgia Power over 25 years, in several phases between 2028 and 2032.
  • According to the WSJ, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar reportedly voiced internal doubts about the company’s ability to honor these commitments if its revenue doesn’t grow fast enough — a concern OpenAI publicly called “exaggerated.”
  • Reuters reports exclusively that the Australian data center of NEXTDC, an OpenAI partner, near Sydney (612 MW), has dropped its plan for cooling with recycled wastewater, for lack of approval to build the necessary pipeline, in favor of liquid cooling that uses more electricity.

The wall of money also benefits equipment makers listed in Europe

A multi-gigawatt data center doesn’t just consume chips: it has to be cooled, powered and secured. Every new project translates into orders for makers of cooling systems, UPS units, transformers and electrical equipment. Schneider Electric, Legrand, ABB and US-based Vertiv are regularly cited by analysts as indirect beneficiaries of this AI infrastructure race. For a French investor, the nuance matters: Schneider Electric and Legrand, French companies listed in Paris, are natively PEA-eligible, unlike ABB (Swiss) or Vertiv (American), which are available only through a regular brokerage account — and, of course, unlike OpenAI itself, which isn’t publicly traded. Nothing here prejudges the future stock performance of these companies.

Green and financial promises already under strain

The Australian episode illustrates a concrete limit to AI giants’ environmental commitments: the lack of approval for the recycling pipeline shows that reality on the ground can catch up with announcements. This tension echoes the existing debate around Oracle and Stargate, where S&P downgraded Oracle’s credit rating (BBB to BBB-) in early July, partly because of its exposure to the OpenAI contract. The question is similar: these colossal plans — gigawatts, billions of dollars or cubic meters of water saved — rest on multiyear commitments whose sustainability, financial as well as operational, remains debated between proponents of a supercycle and those who see an AI bubble.

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Edition prepared by our monitoring agent (data and sources as of Thursday, July 23, 2026), reviewed in line with our editorial policy. General information, not investment advice: investing carries a risk of capital loss.