Good morning.

The June jobs report lands at 8:30 a.m. Eastern this morning, a day early because the market shuts Friday for the Fourth, and economists are penciling in a modest 115,000 payroll adds with unemployment holding at 4.3%. The early read is already in: private payrolls rose about 98,000 in June, capping the best three-month hiring stretch in more than a year, Bloomberg Intelligence noted on Bloomberg Tech. The catch buried in the data is where the jobs aren't — hiring is going backward in tech and, increasingly, finance, the two sectors leaning hardest into automating away their own routine work.

The economy added jobs everywhere except the industries building the thing that eliminates them. If the robots ever unionize, at least they'll know which sectors to organize first.

Artificial Intelligence

Sam Altman just proposed letting the government buy into the house — and hinted every other table should ante up too.

OpenAI has discussed handing the US government a roughly 5% equity stake in the company, part of a bid to defuse mounting political pressure in Washington, the Financial Times reported and CNBC confirmed Thursday. On OpenAI's $852 billion post-money valuation from its record March raise, 5% works out to about $42.6 billion — a donation with more zeroes than most federal line items.

The wrinkle that turns a corporate-finance footnote into a sector story: Altman and other executives floated the idea as a template under which Washington would hold 5% of each of the leading US AI developers, not just OpenAI. He has discussed the arrangement directly with President Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. No deal is final, and terms could still change.

The pitch lands one day after Washington ended its 18-day export-control standoff with Anthropic, and the read-through is hard to miss. Having spent June asserting the right to gate what frontier labs ship, the government is now being offered the right to own a slice of them outright. Altman's framing, per the FT, is that giving the public a direct financial interest is the cleanest way to share AI's upside; the skeptic's framing is that it's cheaper to buy goodwill than to keep fighting for it.

The mechanics are genuinely thorny. A government equity stake raises questions about how a regulator votes its shares, whether a stake in one lab distorts competition against the others, and what happens to that holding across administrations. The White House is separately in advanced talks with AI companies on voluntary release standards and model timelines, expected to be unveiled as soon as next week: the same "Washington in the room" thread that ran through the Anthropic fight, now with a cap table attached.

Ante Up: For a year the AI trade has been about who captures the value; this is the first serious proposal about who shares it, and it points in an unexpected direction. If a 5%-to-Uncle-Sam norm actually sets, it reprices every frontier lab's equity story and hands the state an ownership seat beside the regulatory one it already claimed. The upside pitch is legitimacy and a smoother path through Washington. The downside is a precedent no founder can un-set once the first check clears.

Big Tech

For two years the market paid up for AI scarcity. On Wednesday it got its first whiff of a glut, and the furniture rearranged itself fast.

Meta (META) shares jumped about 9% to $612.91 Wednesday, their biggest one-day gain in a year, after Bloomberg reported the company is building a cloud business, internally dubbed Meta Compute, to rent out spare AI computing capacity and sell hosted access to its own models. In plain terms, the largest buyer of AI infrastructure now wants to sublet the rooms it isn't using.

That is wonderful news for Meta and unnerving news for everyone who sells the picks and shovels. The move flips the market's core AI assumption, that compute is scarce and getting scarcer, into its opposite: there may soon be too much of it.

The reaction was a study in who benefits from a landlord versus who competes with one. Established hyperscalers Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet closed higher; the neoclouds and chipmakers that had led the second quarter's record run got the door.

By the numbers: CoreWeave, which rents GPUs to AI developers and now faces Meta as a would-be rival, fell about 12% for its worst day since February. Memory names led the chip rout: SanDisk dropped 10.62% and Micron 10.57%, while Intel slid 9.03% and AMD 6.89%, per data compiled by Yahoo Finance. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index shed more than 6%, one day after closing out its best quarter on record.

Not everyone reads the pivot as a flex. Meta has told investors for a year it was compute-constrained; announcing it now has capacity to spare invites the obvious question.

Singh's larger point on-air was that a scramble into commodity compute rental (a crowded, low-margin business Meta could have entered two years ago) may signal its higher-value AI agent products are taking longer to scale than hoped.

Vacancy Rates: The tell wasn't Meta up; it was the suppliers down. A market that reprices Micron and CoreWeave this hard on a rumor of new supply is a market quietly worried the AI buildout has front-loaded years of demand. That doesn't mean the spending stops — capex guidance across Big Tech still runs into the hundreds of billions. It means the easy trade, "own anything with a chip in it," just met its first real counter-argument. Yesterday's leaders became today's laggards in a single session, which is how late-cycle rotations usually announce themselves.

International Economics

Some relationships don't end with a breakup. They end with the refusal to renew the lease.

On the pact's mandatory six-year review date, July 1, the US, Mexico and Canada met virtually, and Washington declined to renew the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement in its current form. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the deal is "not renewed," though it stays in force while the three sides move to a schedule of annual reviews, according to his official statement. If no fix is reached, the agreement expires in 2036.

The move swaps a stable, decade-long framework for something closer to a relationship renegotiated every twelve months, and uncertainty is exactly the thing capital-intensive supply chains can't hedge.

Annual Renewal: The practical effect is a permanent negotiating table where there used to be a signed contract. For companies deciding where to build a plant that takes five years to pay off, "we'll review it every July" is not the answer they wanted. Expect capital-allocation decisions in autos and manufacturing to carry a new discount for policy risk that used to be priced at roughly zero.

Android Bill Comes Due: Google lost its long-running appeal Thursday as the EU's top court upheld a €4.1 billion (about $4.7 billion) antitrust fine over how it wielded Android's market power, ending an eight-year fight and cementing the bloc's largest-ever competition penalty against the search giant.

Just Doing It Slower: Nike (NKE) beat a low bar for its fiscal Q4, posting adjusted EPS of $0.20 (versus $0.13 expected) on $10.97 billion in revenue, but the headline leaned on a 52-cent benefit tied to expected tariff refunds while Greater China sales fell 12% to $1.30 billion — a turnaround Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Punam Goyal figures still needs 12 to 18 months to reach China.

Window Still Open: The IPO market kept humming as Bending Spoons — owner of AOL, Vimeo and Evernote — surged about 40% in its Wednesday debut to a $25.7 billion valuation, while Uber-backed scooter operator Lime priced its IPO at $25 and opened at $27 for a roughly $1.73 billion valuation.

Wednesday flipped the script the whole quarter had been writing: the chip and memory names that ran the table in Q2 got sent to the back, Meta walked in offering to rent out the very compute everyone assumed was scarce, and a jobs report lands this morning into a labor market that's quietly automating its own back office. Now OpenAI wants to make Washington a shareholder, and USMCA just became a relationship with no fixed end date. Markets close Friday for the Fourth, so there's one session left to sort out whether Wednesday was a wobble or a turn. Either way, enjoy the fireworks — the scheduled ones.

That's the tape. We'll see you at the open. — AllThingsWallSt