Amazon shares slipped on the day as takeover talk dominated the coverage. The Wall Street Journal reported Amazon is negotiating to buy Israeli-founded AI startup Decart for roughly $7B, about $3B above its May valuation and among the company's largest-ever deals, though talks could collapse or attract another bidder. Anthropic walked away from a ~$6B Decart deal in September after due diligence, leaving Amazon as the leading suitor for a company whose software helps AI run faster across Nvidia, AWS and Google TPU chips. Democrats holding hearings if they win the House have already sent letters to Amazon and others demanding information on donations to Trump's White House ballroom project, adding a post-midterm scrutiny risk. The CPSC recalled about 12,078 Romorgniz dressers and 2,140 ONTHEWEI baby bath seats sold on the platform, with no injuries reported.

Alphabet shares edged higher on a busy news day. Waymo closed a $5 billion term loan on Oct. 8, its first-ever debt financing, led by PIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street with Goldman Sachs as lead bookrunner, signaling the robotaxi unit's shift toward independent commercial scaling. Alphabet also unveiled the Gemini agent at a Google Cloud event, a universal AI agent that plans and executes tasks autonomously inside Gmail, Docs, Slack and Salesforce. Berkshire Hathaway bought another 36.4M shares in Q1 2026 and increased again in Q2, making Alphabet one of its largest holdings. Google announced an Oct. 12 partnership with Function Health combining wearable signals with more than 160 lab tests, while a class-action reminder sets a Nov. 30, 2026 lead-plaintiff deadline over alleged Gemini 3.5 Pro disclosure failures.

Meta was the portfolio's strongest mover, with shares rising as much as 4.7% before settling slightly lower. Meta's Superintelligence Labs, led by Alexandr Wang, released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, which Zuckerberg said brings Meta 'to the frontier' after a 14-month AI overhaul. Independent benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis scored Wonder Full at 56 on its Intelligence Index, tying Claude Sonnet 5.5 and trailing only Claude Opus 5.5. The launch marks a break from the open-weight Llama strategy, with API pricing of $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens and Muse Code subscriptions reportedly reaching $200 a month. The Muse agent has passed 5 million downloads and 2.182 million daily active users, and arrives against capex of up to $145 billion this year.

Microsoft reclaimed a $4 trillion market cap on the back of its chip announcement. The company introduced the Maia 300, its third-generation custom AI inference chip, at the OCP Global Summit, claiming 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU systems, with production from 2027 and multi-gigawatt deployments planned next year. Execution risk remains, since Maia 200 was delayed and J.P. Morgan flags TSMC packaging tightness through 2027. The Trump administration suspended Microsoft from the Labor Department's PERM green-card program on Oct. 8, halting new and pending applications, though H-1B visas are unaffected. President Brad Smith separately called for mandatory AI safety rules including incident reporting and 'emergency brakes,' going beyond the voluntary standards agreed with the White House.

Nvidia extended its slump with a 1.3% decline, a fourth straight daily drop, as investors looked past its latest open-standard AI announcements. Microsoft's Azure Maia 300 unveiling, which claims better dense FP8 compute than Blackwell B200, sharpened the competitive narrative around data-center dependence. Nvidia is reportedly in early talks to acquire or further invest in Reflection AI, an ex-Google DeepMind startup in which it has already put about $800 million. A report suggests the RTX 5090 flagship could be discontinued to redirect GB202 chips toward higher-margin RTX Pro workstation GPUs, with the card's street price already far above its $1,999 MSRP. Cisco and Nvidia announced a partnership on next-generation optical networking to handle growing AI data-center bandwidth demands.

Tesla shares declined for a second time in three sessions as regulatory news dominated. NHTSA opened a defect petition evaluation on Oct. 9 alleging Tesla's 2026 Model Y and Cybercab robotaxis speed in active school zones, covering an estimated 1,000 vehicles, with 120 days to decide whether to open a formal probe — the third federal action against the driverless fleet in about five weeks. The petition stems from four incidents with no crashes or injuries, and Tesla's Cybercab safety-certification audit response is due Oct. 30. Jefferies raised its price target, projecting Q3 revenue of $29.2bn, automotive gross margin of 16.7% and adjusted EBIT of $781m. Tesla also said its Austin Cybercab fleet surpassed 300 vehicles, an eightfold increase in 30 days, and renamed 'Full Self-Driving' to 'Tesla Assisted Driving' on European websites.