Technology Sector

SpaceX shares surged 6.1% on Thursday to close near $109, overcoming the release of 911.5 million unlocked insider shares that more than doubled its freely tradable public float. The rally reversed a 13.6% plunge on Wednesday after the company reported second-quarter capital expenditures shot up sixfold to $18.4 billion, driven by $15.8 billion spent on artificial intelligence infrastructure. Wall Street feared that opening the floodgates to early investors and employees would drive the stock down further after three weeks below its $135 initial public offering price. Insiders refrained from panic selling because SpaceX ran semiannual internal buybacks for years before its June debut, giving staff opportunities to cash out equity long before the public lockup expired. Option flow turned bullish on Thursday as institutional investors sold $316 million in puts, betting the stock found a bottom near $110. The company faces eight more lockup expiration tranches through December 8, which will expand its public float to 40% of outstanding shares.

Alphabet shares dropped 3.5% after 27-year veteran Jeff Dean quit to launch an independent startup and Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis stepped down from day-to-day management. Dean, the company's 30th employee and primary architect of its early search and neural network systems, is departing alongside top researchers Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals to start Discovery Loop, an AI research entity focused on automating scientific experimentation. Alphabet is backing the new venture as a founding investor and cloud provider, retaining an equity stake and compute relationship while losing its premier technical leads. Simultaneously, Hassabis is relinquishing operational control of DeepMind to become chairman of the unit and chief scientist at Alphabet. CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over daily management of DeepMind and the Gemini model pipeline, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. The structural handoff moves DeepMind toward deploying cost-efficient models as Alphabet faces massive spending demands, having posted $44.92 billion in second-quarter capital expenditures alongside full-year capex guidance of $175 billion to $185 billion. The leadership shuffle adds operational friction at a tense moment for the tech giant. Gemini 3.5 Pro remains months behind its original June launch target, and the departures follow earlier talent defections to key rivals, including Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic.

SpaceX and Tesla are investing an initial $16.8 billion to build Terafab, a 100-million-square-foot advanced semiconductor complex in Grimes County, Texas. The joint project aims to produce proprietary logic and memory chips for Tesla’s Optimus robots and Cybercabs, as well as space-based data centers operated by SpaceX and its xAI subsidiary. Total investment across multi-phase construction could eventually reach $119 billion. Rather than drawing from the local grid or relying on solar, SpaceX will construct dedicated natural gas power plants alongside large battery arrays, backed by $2.8 billion in planned gas turbine purchases over the next three years. Grimes County awarded the project a 100% tax abatement in exchange for $5 billion in capital spending by 2030 and 1,800 full-time jobs by 2035, while the state of Texas added $30 million in incentives. The massive capital outlay follows a 300% year-over-year surge in SpaceX’s first-half 2026 spending to $28.5 billion. Though the company’s stock jumped 11% on the news, it remains 20% below its June IPO price.