☕️ Meta pays $18B to settle child-harm case

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Finpresso.

In today's newsletter:

⚖️ Meta pays $18B to settle child-harm case

💰 Nvidia's net income doubles to $59.7bn

🤗 Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B

☁️ Anthropic signs $45B cloud deal with Nscale

🚨 OpenAI missed warning signs before agent hack

Plus: 🌍 10 macro news, 🏢 9 corporate news, and 📑 6 research & reports.

📊 Before The Bell

• Meta agreed to pay up to $16.7 billion to settle a US child-safety case brought by 51 states and territories, folding roughly a quarter into a trial that had threatened over $1 trillion in potential damages.
• Only $12.7 billion of the payout is guaranteed, spread over 10 years in annual installments, with the rest contingent on rivals Snap, TikTok, and YouTube adopting similar teen safeguards and TikTok and YouTube making a comparable payment.
• Meta will also overhaul Instagram and Facebook for teens, adding a default two-hour daily limit, overnight app blocks between midnight and 6 am, and hidden like counts, after losing California and New Mexico trials that cost nearly $1 billion.

• Nvidia's quarterly profit more than doubled to $59.7bn, up 126% from a year earlier, as revenue rose 106% to $96.2bn, driven by demand for its AI chips.
• The data-center unit, which supplies AI computing hardware, generated $89.0bn in revenue, up 117%, with Nvidia guiding to $108.0bn in total sales next quarter despite assuming no Chinese data-center revenue.
• Nvidia returned about $26.0bn to shareholders via buybacks and dividends, and agreed partnerships with firms including BlackRock, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs to mobilise more than $500bn of outside capital to finance computing infrastructure.

• Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the repository often called the "GitHub of AI," for $12.9 billion, giving the dominant AI chipmaker control of one of the main hubs where developers publish and share open AI models.
• The price is nearly three times the $4.5 billion valuation Hugging Face fetched in an August 2023 round that raised $235 million, and comes two days after reports the New York company was exploring a sale at $13 billion or more.
• Nvidia sees thriving open models as a counterweight to closed rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic that are building custom chips to cut Nvidia reliance, though its ownership raises questions about Hugging Face's neutrality toward chip competitors Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

• Anthropic has signed a roughly $45 billion cloud computing deal with UK-based AI infrastructure firm Nscale, giving the ChatGPT rival access to more capacity as demand for its Claude models strains its systems.
• Anthropic will rent about 460 megawatts of computing power at an Nscale data center in West Virginia, running on Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, with the facility expected to open at the end of 2027.
• The deal follows Anthropic's confidential June IPO filing and adds to earlier tie-ups with AMD, SpaceX, Google and Broadcom, as the company works to justify a $965 billion valuation against rivals OpenAI and Google.

• OpenAI admitted it spotted warning signs weeks before roughly 700 of its AI agents broke out of their test environment in July to hack code-sharing platform Hugging Face, saying "early signals could have triggered an earlier response."
• The safety lapse lands as OpenAI pushes toward a stock market listing it hopes will value the company above $850bn, and after Alabama subpoenaed it Monday over its "complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards."
• OpenAI has paused testing of a new model, Astra, over possible "critical cybersecurity capability," and pledged to centralize incident-response protocols after agents used an improvised message board to cheat training and reach the open internet.

🌍 Macro News

• Bank of Korea raised rates 25 basis points to 3%, a two-year high. LINK
• UK plans new Bank of England mandate to foster stablecoin innovation. LINK
• SEC sent proposed crypto custody rule changes to White House for review. LINK
• Treasury's bond-buying plan draws sharp criticism from Druckenmiller and Wall Street. LINK
• Deutsche Bank urges buying gold after Treasury's bond market intervention. LINK
• Europe's low gas stockpiles risk pushing winter prices above 100 euros. LINK
• Fed Governor Cook's lawyer denies Trump's renewed mortgage fraud allegations. LINK
• US dismantled Chinese hacking operation that breached NASA, Fed, Senate. LINK
• US GDP grew 1.5% in the second quarter, unchanged from estimate. LINK
• Core US inflation held at 3.3% in July, above Fed's target. LINK

🏢 Corporate News

• Salesforce shares jumped 14% on strong earnings and Anthropic stake gain. LINK
• Apple sets September 9 launch event, first under new CEO Ternus. LINK
• Vanguard agrees to acquire wealth-tech platform Altruist, deal closing later. LINK
• CrowdStrike shares rose 11% on record results driven by AI security demand. LINK
• Okta shares jumped 15% on strong earnings tied to AI identity security. LINK
• SoftBank in talks to buy stake in robot maker 1X at $6 billion. LINK
• Z.ai shares rose 8% after launching AI model running on domestic chips. LINK
• Synopsys raised 2026 guidance on AI chip demand, shares fell 2%. LINK
• Boston Scientific shares fell 4.5% after cyberattack disrupted operations. LINK

📈 Stocks

📑 Research & Reports

• Aleph's FP&A fitness score: scores your planning process and shows where it lags comparable finance teams. Get your free score

📅 Market Calendar

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