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Wall Street is developing a nervous twitch about corporate investment, and yesterday’s market reactions told two very different stories about what sells and what doesn’t.
DoorDash found itself in an uncomfortable position during its earnings call. The food delivery company—which generates around $2 billion (€1.7 billion) in annual free cash flow—announced it would invest “several hundred million dollars more” in 2026 than it did this year. The stock initially plummeted 9% in after-hours trading.
What’s the money for? CEO Tony Xu outlined plans to make DoorDash’s technology AI-ready and expand delivery methods beyond the standard gig worker in a car. The company has designed its own delivery robot called Dot, and Xu said 2026 is when they’ll “commercialize some of these efforts.” Think multimodal delivery—air, land, and everything in between.
The stock recovered somewhat during the call as Xu explained the specifics, but investors remained jittery. Perhaps they’ve developed PTSD from watching Big Tech companies pour hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure with uncertain returns.
Meanwhile, Snap discovered the magic formula: announce an AI partnership instead of AI investments. The social media company unveiled a deal with Perplexity that will see the AI search startup pay Snap $400 million (€348 million) over one year—in cash and stock—to integrate its answer engine into Snapchat. Snap’s stock jumped 15% on the news, though it did lose some momentum during the earnings call. The company’s revenue grew a tepid 10%, but when you’re getting paid to add AI features rather than paying to build them, investors seem willing to overlook sluggish growth.
The contrast is instructive. DoorDash wants to spend money building the future. Snap found someone willing to pay them for access to their 943 million monthly users. One approach sent investors running; the other had them celebrating.
In Other News
Crypto meets Wall Street: Ripple raised $500 million (€435 million) at a $40 billion (€34.8 billion) valuation from Fortress and Citadel Securities, marking traditional finance’s growing comfort with crypto infrastructure. The company has processed more than $95 billion (€82.6 billion) in blockchain-based payments and recently saw its RLUSD stablecoin cross $1 billion in market cap.
Apple’s AI admission: The iPhone maker is finalizing a deal to pay Google roughly $1 billion (€870 million) annually for access to a custom Gemini AI model to power the long-awaited Siri overhaul. After testing models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, Apple chose Google’s 1.2 trillion parameter model—about eight times more complex than Apple’s current systems. The revamped Siri is expected to launch next spring, though Apple says it’s just a stopgap until its own models catch up.
OpenAI’s cloud bet: The AI company signed a seven-year, $38 billion (€33 billion) cloud computing agreement with AWS—its first major partnership with a leading cloud provider. The deal grants OpenAI extensive access to Nvidia's GPUs, which are necessary for training future models and handling global demand.
Quantum goes public: Canadian quantum computing firm Xanadu is going public through a $3.6 billion (€3.1 billion) SPAC merger, securing a Nasdaq listing. While quantum computing remains early-stage and error-prone, the deal could accelerate North American quantum innovation in 2026.
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