Stocks Nudge Higher at the Open as AWS–OpenAI Pact Underscores AI Infrastructure Drive

At the opening bell, U.S. equities leaned higher: the Dow added about 15 points (0.03%) to roughly 47,578, the S&P 500 rose 32 points (0.47%) to around 6,873, and the Nasdaq climbed 239 points (1.0%) to about 23,964, while the Russell 2000 slipped ~.3 points (0.54%) to ~244.9. In commodities, crude hovered near $61.02 (up 0.07%) and COMEX gold firmed to about $4,028 (up 0.79%).

Amazon Web Services and OpenAI announced a multi-year, $38 billion partnership that gives OpenAI immediate and expanding access to AWS’s world-class infrastructure to run core AI workloads. Under the agreement, AWS will deliver Amazon EC2 UltraServers equipped with hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art NVIDIA GPUs—clustered across GB200s and GB300s on the same network—and the capacity to scale to tens of millions of CPUs, with deployment targeted before the end of 2026 and room to expand into 2027 and beyond. The collaboration builds on earlier availability of OpenAI’s open-weight foundation models in Amazon Bedrock, where thousands of customers—including Bystreet, Comscore, Peloton, Thomson Reuters, Triomics, and Verana Health—are already using them for agentic workflows, coding, scientific analysis, and more.

Meanwhile, the AI “picks-and-shovels” story is getting a fresh protagonist. Cipher Mining announced a $5.5 billion, 15-year agreement with Amazon Web Services to deliver 300MW of AI-ready capacity beginning in 2026, following an up to $3 billion Google/Fluidstack pact that included a Google equity stake and backstops. Shares jumped ~15% Monday as investors embraced the company’s rapid repurposing of crypto infrastructure for high-performance computing. CEO Tyler Page called the quarter “truly transformative,” citing two milestone transactions and an expanding pipeline, while a 1-GW “Colchis” campus tied to ERCOT points to further scale.

Berkshire’s latest quarter underscored the conglomerate’s earning power and caution. Operating earnings rose to $13.5 billion, up 34% from a year earlier, propelled by a surge in insurance profits, steadier rail results, and resilient manufacturing, while net earnings reached $30.8 billion. The headline, however, is a $381.7 billion cash stockpile—now roughly 30% of assets and parked largely in short-term Treasurys—alongside a fifth straight quarter without buybacks, a sign Warren Buffett doesn’t see his own shares as cheap. “The opportunities for deploying capital on the scale we prefer remain limited,” said Mr. Buffett, who added Berkshire can “act decisively when markets present value.”

That restraint meets a separate source of nerves in credit. Verdad Advisers founder Dan Rasmussen argues that private credit’s eye-catching yields mask old-fashioned risk. “Debt that yields 10 to 12 percent is going to default a lot more… probably 25 to 30 percent whenever any sort of crisis comes,” he said, likening today’s AI spending boom to past capex waves that transformed the economy but didn’t always reward the biggest spenders. Rasmussen favors international developed markets such as Japan, short-term cash over long-duration Treasurys, and some gold as a hedge.

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