Markets Antitrust Trillion
AMD Joins the Trillion-Dollar Club as Buffett Exits and Tokyo Rates Hit a 31-Year High
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.
AMD Hits a Trillion, Media Giants Merge, and Farm-State Republicans Revolt
AMD crossed one trillion dollars in market capitalization for the first time this week, with shares hitting a record high as investors bet on the chipmaker's expanding role in AI computing. The specific driver is CPU-heavy agent workloads — the distributed processing architecture that agentic AI systems require — which is distinct from the GPU-heavy training workloads that drove Nvidia's earlier surge. The valuation puts AMD roughly equivalent in market cap to the entire GDP of the Netherlands, and it arrives at the same moment Anthropic is barred from government work, illustrating how regulatory headwinds for one AI-adjacent company can coexist with record valuations for another.
The Paramount-Warner Bros. merger cleared its final hurdle this week, with the deal valued at one hundred and ten billion dollars — one of the largest media consolidations since the AT&T-Time Warner combination that was itself the subject of years of antitrust litigation. Paramount settled with state attorneys general who had been investigating the competitive implications, clearing the path for a combined company controlling a substantial portion of U.S. television production, film libraries, and streaming infrastructure. Whether the settlement adequately protects competition in those markets is a question the next several years will answer.
The White House beef import story is a leading indicator of the midterm pressure the administration is under. Internal discussions are reportedly pitting the Domestic Policy Council against the U.S. Trade Representative over whether to scale back beef imports expanded under prior trade deals — and farm-state Republicans are publicly breaking with Trump over the issue. When agricultural constituencies, among the most reliable Republican voting blocs, are fracturing six weeks before a midterm at 32% approval, the political calculus for any policy decision becomes extremely compressed. Separately, the administration's use of a disputed 'pocket rescission' mechanism to cancel $810 million in congressionally appropriated spending is drawing legal scrutiny; courts have been inconsistent on whether the practice is constitutional, and a challenge appears likely.