SpaceX buys spectrum for wireless network, rattling stocks, ASML's Hyper NA leap a decade away, Nvidia, ARM, Qualcomm - Big Tech Report

SpaceX is acquiring spectrum licenses to build a mobile network capable of competing directly with established US wireless carriers, extending its Starlink satellite business into direct-to-phone cellular service. The move positions Elon Musk's company as a potential new entrant in a market long dominated by AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

News of the deal pressured shares of those carriers, while SpaceX itself rose 3.25% to $165.79 in pre-market trading. Apple, whose iPhone business is closely tied to carrier partnerships, fell 2.49% to $331.93 in the same session.

ASML and optics partner Carl Zeiss have outlined a roughly 10-year development project for Hyper NA, a successor to the company's current high-NA EUV lithography systems, according to a Reuters report. The new tool could print circuits around 5nm in size, more than a third smaller than what today's high-NA EUV machines can achieve, while reusing much of the existing ASML-Zeiss technology stack, including elements of the light source. Zeiss has reportedly already begun producing mirrors precise enough for the system.

ASML has not committed to actually bringing Hyper NA to market, with the outcome likely to hinge on internal priorities, partner capacity and competitive pressure in the lithography market. Lithography remains the central bottleneck as chipmakers push for smaller, faster and more power-efficient designs, and rival approaches in development are also leaning on shorter wavelengths of light to get there. ASML shares were indicated up 2.86% at $1,820.42 in pre-market trading.

Firmus Grid Ltd. has abandoned what would have been one of Australia's biggest-ever initial public offerings, pulling a planned listing valued at roughly $5 billion. The Nvidia-backed data center operator cited market conditions, with Reuters reporting that investors have stepped up scrutiny of AI-related valuations.

The collapse is among the most visible casualties yet of growing investor wariness toward richly valued AI infrastructure plays. Nvidia shares were up 1.47% at $233.86 in pre-market trading.

A jury is set to deliver a verdict on Friday in the contract dispute between Qualcomm and Arm Holdings, which centres on whether Arm breached its licensing agreement with the chipmaker. The case has wound through the courts as the two companies, longtime partners in chip architecture licensing, have clashed over the terms governing Qualcomm's use of Arm's technology.

In pre-market trading, Arm shares were up 1.51% at $279.44 and Qualcomm shares were up 0.35% at $176.62. The outcome carries weight for both companies' licensing relationship, which underpins chip designs across the mobile and PC industries.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff used his company's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco to draw a parallel between the early harms of social media and the risks of generative AI, urging developers to treat safety as an obligation rather than an afterthought. "A lot of companies got hurt, a lot of individuals got hurt through social media. We don't want that to happen in AI," he said, adding that "the heart of ethics is responsibility." Benioff was a vocal critic of social platforms during the previous decade, once describing Facebook as "the new cigarettes" while pushing for federal oversight.

Benioff stopped short of backing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent call for an industrywide slowdown in frontier model deployment, instead calling on developers to weigh the societal impact of their products as they build. Amodei joined Benioff on stage during the keynote, saying the approach was "the way to lead the industry forward, to set an example." Salesforce shares were up 0.36% at $228.62 in pre-market trading; Meta, the target of Benioff's earlier criticism, was up 0.59% at $725.14.