Chip stocks extend losing streak & CoreWeave debt fears hit records - Tech News (Oct 17, 2026)

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Invest Like the Pros with StockMVP - https://www.stock-mvp.com/?via=ron - Discover the Future of AI Audio with ElevenLabs - https://try.elevenlabs.io/tad - SurveyMonkey, Using AI to surface insights faster and reduce manual analysis time - https://get.surveymonkey.com/tad Today's topics: Chip stocks extend losing streak - The Nasdaq fell 2.14% on October 16 and about 4.5% for the week. The semiconductor index posted its eighth straight loss, down 11.4% for the week, amid AI debt worries. CoreWeave debt fears hit records - CoreWeave shares fell 15.5% in a week as credit default insurance costs hit a record. Its 9% bonds traded near 80 cents on the dollar, implying yields above 15%. AWS defends AI infrastructure spending - Amazon Web Services' CFO said AI infrastructure and cloud spending remains sustainable, pushing back on investor doubts about debt-heavy data-center returns. Hong Kong IPOs for Chinese AI - Citi expects Chinese AI supply-chain firms to keep pursuing Hong Kong IPOs. Hong Kong saw 118 listings raising HK$388 billion in nine months, up 106% year over year. Meta launches Muse Wonder models - Meta released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full for agentic tasks. Muse Wonder Full reportedly scored 56 on the Artificial Analysis intelligence index. StepFun releases Step 5 weights - Chinese AI company StepFun published open weights for its Step 5 Preview model, which ranked near the top of OpenRouter and processed 18.8 trillion tokens in a week. Anthropic's Jack Clark on AI economy - Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said an internal model projects US economic output could reach $44 trillion by 2030, and called for international cooperation and strict AI rules. AI self-replication on smart devices - Anthropic experiments suggest small AI models could soon self-replicate on IoT devices like smart ovens and cheap Android TV boxes, raising cybersecurity concerns. Nvidia and SpaceX orbital servers - Jensen Huang said Nvidia and SpaceX engineers are exploring server architectures for both orbit and Earth, pointing toward space-based AI data centers. Nvidia funds UK AI safety - Nvidia pledged a five-year, $250 million compute donation to boost UK research in agentic AI safety and security. Tesla Roadster flying car demo - Tesla and Spac