🌇 Meta's got city-sized ambitions

What’s going on here?

Meta’s cranking up its AI game, building data centers the size of small cities.

What does this mean?

Mark Zuckerberg has gone from poking his Facebook friends to poking… the future. Meta is set to spend $72 billion this year alone on “titan clusters”: data centers the size of Manhattan. These massive, power-hungry facilities will need consistent rivers of electricity, stacks of high-end chips, and miles of internal copper wiring. The first one – nicknamed Prometheus – will go live next year, all going to plan. And when it does, that’ll jumpstart a push toward so-called superintelligence: the next (somewhat terrifying) level of AI, where machines could actually outsmart us all.

Why should I care?

For markets: Red-hot metal.

Meta’s mega-build is just one piece of the broader AI race. Tech giants are all scrambling to erect enormous server farms – each one packed with copper. See, the red metal is needed in huge quantities for wiring, cooling, and power management within these facilities. And that’s where the job gets tricky. Copper prices in the US have been, err, surging: they’re up 38% this year, fueled by tariffs and all of that demand. That’s squeezing margins across the board – from AI labs to EVs – which could put a serious drag on Big Tech’s stateside spending plans.

Zooming out: Copper’s a showstopper.

The US is racing to build domestic supply chains, and copper is at the center of the action. With China dominating global smelting and almost half of US imports coming in already refined, investors might soon turn away from fancy silicon chips and toward the more rudimentary red metal. In this new kind of industrial era, the companies that mine, refine, or reroute copper will be the ones holding the power – literally.

What’s going on here?

JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup both delivered better-than-expected results on Tuesday, thanks mostly to their trading desks.

What does this mean?

Hectic trading floors were the MVPs for both banks last quarter, raking in cash with every buy and sell during all the tariff-driven volatility. JPMorgan posted nearly $15 billion in profit, topping analysts’ forecasts, with trading revenue jumping 15% to hit $8.9 billion. The big bank’s investment banking income also climbed, rising 7% to $2.5 billion despite expectations of a double-digit slip.

Citigroup, meanwhile, logged its best second quarter in five years. The heavy-hitting trading division pulled in $5.9 billion of revenue – 16% more than the same time last year – which helped the bank, ahem, bank $4 billion in profit. Citi’s investment banking income rose too, lifting 18%. Still, both banks’ CEOs struck a cautious tone about the future, highlighting risks from trade tensions, rising government debt, and unsettled markets.

Why should I care?

Zooming in: Welcome to the big Citi.

Citi’s stock has been crushing it. The shares have risen 39% since the bank’s last earnings update – probably because Citi’s been expanding its wealth unit, managing blockbuster IPOs, and landing big merger deals. And it gets better: the bank just hiked its dividend and announced that it’ll hit its $84 billion revenue target for the year. Just remember that this is Wall Street, not Easy Street. Citi’s credit losses have started to pile up, suggesting that the US economy is facing some challenges beneath the surface.

The bigger picture: Banks are back (sort of).

Financial stocks weren’t expected to impress this earnings season. Their average profit growth was forecast at a paltry 2.4%, ranking them fifth among the market’s 11 sectors. Thing is, that figure is skewed by some seriously glittery results from this time last year, when JPMorgan sold off an asset for a one-time gain of $8 billion. Strip that boost out of the equation, and expected earnings for the sector would be bumped up to a more respectable 9% – third among the 11.