ASML raises annual guidance third time on AI demand, Nvidia to invest in four French startups, AMD, Google, Nvidia - Big Tech Report

ASML Holding has raised its full-year sales outlook for the third time in 2025, citing demand for chipmaking equipment driven by the AI buildout. The company said it will be unable to meet customer demand for its machines in 2027 and 2028, pointing to a supply gap stretching years out rather than a near-term bottleneck.

ASML shares fell 1.86% to $1,717.76 in the regular session despite the upgraded forecast. The outlook also lifted European tech stocks more broadly, with shares in chip-equipment and semiconductor names tracking the demand signal; TSMC, the industry's largest contract chipmaker and a major buyer of ASML's lithography systems, edged up 0.17% to $445.12.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Tuesday proposed investments in four French startups — Doctolib, Genesis AI, Pigment and Entalpic — as part of a $2 billion funding push across Europe. The move extends Nvidia's strategy of taking stakes in AI-focused companies that build on its hardware and software stack, deepening its ties to the continent's startup ecosystem.

The French investments come alongside a separate $250 million compute donation Nvidia is making in the UK. Nvidia shares were up 0.97% at $228.52 in regular trading.

French cloud provider Scaleway will build an AI supercomputer in Sweden, its first deployment outside France and Europe's first commercial AI supercomputer built on AMD chips. Announced at the company's annual AI conference in Paris, the system will run on AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs, which compete with Nvidia's Blackwell line, and will be open to startups, AI companies and businesses across Europe. Scaleway picked Sweden for its largely low-carbon electricity and developing AI sector, building on a partnership with telecom operator Tele2 that brought its cloud and AI services into the Swedish market in May.

French firm Bull will assemble and maintain the machine, with servers from Giga Computing, networking from HPE, storage from VAST Data and cooling liquid from Motul. AMD's EMEA senior vice president, Stephanie Dismore, said the deployment widens AI infrastructure options in Europe through Instinct GPUs and the open ROCm software ecosystem. AMD shares were up 1.90% at $605.53 in regular trading.

Google DeepMind has demonstrated Gemini 4 Argon converting ordinary video into training material for humanoid and quadruped robots, compressing a process that normally takes weeks of manual simulation work into a few hours. In one demonstration, the model watched a video of a person throwing beanbags at a cornhole board, mapped the motion onto the joints of Apptronik's Apollo humanoid, built a physics simulation to refine the throw, and transferred the result to the physical robot, which then sank seven consecutive shots. In another, Argon directed a Boston Dynamics Spot quadruped to build a digital replica of a pedal bin in the MuJoCo simulator, test its balance on three legs, then step on the pedal and drop a soda can inside after checking its wrist camera.

Google said Argon scored 87% on its Embodied Reasoning benchmark of 3D spatial and physical problems, outperforming other frontier models tested on the same questions despite receiving no robot-specific tuning. From a single photo of a table, the model can generate a simulated version in MuJoCo, devise more than 4,500 task variations, and train a vision-language-action model that lifted a robot's real-world success rate on the task from 56% to 75% while shaving 11 seconds off execution time. Argon can also retro-label footage of a robot in motion, down to finger-level contact with objects, and reproduce published robotics control papers in a browser-based MuJoCo environment from a text prompt. Access is available now through the paid Gemini API and to Google AI Ultra subscribers.

London Stock Exchange Group has partnered with Nvidia to let financial institutions analyse historical market data using GPU acceleration, cutting processing times from hours to seconds. Benchmark tests show years of LSEG's Tick History data — 110 trillion rows spanning 100 million instruments, more than 30 years and over 580 exchanges and venues — can be processed in seconds using Nvidia's cuDF software library, rather than the hours required by conventional methods.

The collaboration brings the data closer to the computing environments used for quantitative research and AI without requiring firms to duplicate the full dataset, preserving existing licences and access controls. LSEG said traffic on its real-time network rose 29% in the first half of 2026 versus a year earlier, peaking at 26 million messages per second in June, while API requests for Tick History data climbed 48%. Expected uses include quantitative strategy testing, order book reconstruction, liquidity analysis and historical market replay. Nvidia shares were up 0.97% at $228.52 in regular trading.