Stock Market News: Inflation cools, Tesla shares jump, Nvidia tops $1 trillion

The consumer price index showed inflation rose by 4% in May, nearly half of what it was during its recent peak. This as the Federal Reserve kicks off its two day meeting Tuesday.

U.S. stocks saw a broad rally led by materials and industrials with 10 of the 11 large S&P sectors rising led by materials and industrials. The Nasdaq Composite got a hand from Nvidia, which closed at a record and Tesla, which logged its 13th straight week of gains.The Federal Reserve is expected to pause its rate hike cycle at Wednesday’s meeting. 

Michigan State University’s $3.9 billion endowment fund has become the majority investor in the Fisher Building, an iconic art deco style tower near downtown Detroit.

The school announced the deal Tuesday. The fund is investing $21 million in the building, two parking lots and a parking structure for a 79% ownership stake. The other owners are real estate developer
and property manager The Platform and the MSU Federal Credit Union.

The 30-story Fisher Building is considered by many to be Detroit’s largest work of art for its marble exterior, three-story arcade with hand-painted barrel-vaulted ceiling, mosaics, and brass detailing. It is noted for the green terra cotta tiles on its tower that typically are illuminated gold at night.

It was designed in 1928 by architect Albert Kahn and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Amazon is kicking off
its annual security-focused cloud computing conference on Tuesday amid a slowdown in its profitable cloud business Amazon Web Services, or AWS.

This year’s conference, held in Anaheim, California, comes as many businesses are looking to trim their expenses amid concerns about high inflation and fears a recession might be around the corner. Amazon executives have said businesses were being cautious about their spending and cutting back on AWS features they don’t need.

Despite the pullback, AWS is still expected to be a long-term revenue driver for Amazon. One analyst says companies need a place to store their data and a shared cloud model is preferable for many because it allows them to share resources.

The Federal Reserve is widely expected to pause on Wednesday after 10 straight rate hikes. However, the move will do little to ease sky-high borrowing costs for consumers.

General Motors and Samsung SDI have selected New Carlisle as the site of a new electric vehicle battery cell plant in Indiana.

The plant will create 1,700 manufacturing jobs, Governor Eric Holcomb said in a statement on Tuesday.

The project is GM’s fourth joint venture battery cell factory. It has announced three others with South Korea’s LG Energy Solution. A 900-worker factory near Warren, Ohio, is starting to build cells, while plants in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and Lansing, Michigan, are in the works.

The facility will have more than 30 GWh of capacity once finished. Construction on the new plant is expected to start within the next year, supporting more than 1,000 jobs during the build. The companies plan to start production in New Carlisle in 2026.

Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence
has been used to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up.

McCartney told the BBC on Tuesday that the technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back.”

He said the new song is set to be released later this year. McCartney told BBC radio that Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano.” He said: “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record.”

Shares of Larry Ellison’s Oracle touched a fresh record Tuesday after revenue of $13.8 billion and earnings of $1.67 per share beat expectations. Ellison hinted about the power of the AI business in terms of driving future growth.

“Oracle’s Gen2 Cloud has quickly become the number 1 choice for running Generative AI workloads,” said Oracle Chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison. “Why? Because Oracle has the highest performance, lowest cost GPU cluster technology in the world. NVIDIA themselves are using our clusters, including one with more than 4,000 GPUs, for their AI infrastructure. Our GPU clusters are built using the highest-bandwidth and lowest-latency RDMA network—and scale up to 32,000 GPUs. As a result, cutting edge companies doing LLM development such as Mosaic ML, Adept AI, Cohere plus 30 other AI development companies have recently signed contracts to purchase more than $2 billion of capacity in Oracle’s Gen2 Cloud.”

The major mall in San Francisco
becomes the latest to pull the plug in the crime ridden city.

Target shares are just shy of a 52-week low and have lost over $15 billion in market cap since mid-May.