Pre-Market News Roundup for US Stocks: AI Duo Accelerate Fundraising, Storage Chip Supply Tightens

According to BIT (bit.com) market data, US stocks opened with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 0.39%, the S&P 500 Index gaining 0.47%, and the Nasdaq rising 0.58%. AI chip stocks rallied broadly: AMD (AMD.O) climbed 2.5%, while Nvidia (NVDA.O), Broadcom (AVGO.O), and Microsoft (MSFT.O) all advanced more than 1%. Constellation Energy rose roughly 10% following the company’s signing of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Google.

Beating AI News: McDonald’s AI Pricing System Faces Antitrust Lawsuit An Illinois customer named Michael Thomas has sued McDonald’s in Chicago federal court, seeking to file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of potentially millions of U.S. consumers. The complaint alleges the fast-food giant used AI to coordinate menu prices between its franchise and company-owned locations, violating U.S. antitrust laws. The suit claims McDonald’s aggregated non-public transaction data from all its stores into a single machine learning “pricing engine” to provide price recommendations to each location. The plaintiff argues franchisees are independent competitors that should set their own prices, adding that pooling rival data and issuing recommendations via a single system could reduce existing price competition between stores. The complaint also directly cites a prior Reuters investigation into the system. McDonald’s denied the allegations, calling the claims “speculative and based on a misunderstanding of the facts.” The company emphasized the AI does not directly set prices for Big Macs or other menu items, noting franchisees retain final pricing authority. McDonald’s previously also published a statement clarifying that price recommendations are merely advisory, and franchisees may choose not to adopt them.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), the S&P 500 index rose 0.6%, breaking through the previous high set in August to reach a new intraday all-time high.

According to an official announcement, Coinbase has added PONS and WHUF to its token listing roadmap.

ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone stated that the digital euro will help enhance the competitiveness of European banks. Cipollone said on Tuesday that the digital euro project is not merely intended to fill current gaps in Europe’s payment system. “It is also an opportunity to look ahead and provide an innovative platform. New opportunities are emerging constantly, and we want to ensure European payment service providers have full capability to seize these opportunities and build strong competitive advantages,” he noted. The European Central Bank plans to officially launch the digital euro in 2029, with a pilot phase set to begin next year. The project aims to safeguard Europe’s monetary sovereignty. At present, Europe remains highly dependent on U.S. payment companies like Visa and Mastercard, and the growing development of dollar-pegged stablecoins has further intensified concerns among European policymakers.

Beating AI Insight News: TechCrunch reported yesterday on an AI startup called Ghost. Founded by 19-year-old Zain Javaid, the company just emerged from stealth mode and secured an $11 million seed round led by a16z. A typo marred the report shortly after its release: TechCrunch initially wrote $110 billion instead of $11 million, a 1000-fold overstatement, before correcting the error. What’s more notable is that the figure didn’t immediately strike the AI community as absurd at first glance. Over the past two years, it has become increasingly common for AI startups to reach valuations in the billions or even tens of billions of dollars before generating meaningful revenue. A $110 billion seed round is certainly exaggerated, but it almost seemed plausible for the industry at the time. Ghost’s story fits Silicon Valley’s favorite startup narrative: the 19-year-old founder began investing at 7, learned to code at 9, raised his first small fund at 12, interned at a quant fund at 14, and later dropped out of Yale. Its flagship product, Core, is a local AI server priced at $3,499. It is equipped with an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF, Ryzen 5 7600, 64GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, paired with Ghost’s proprietary agent, long-term memory, and local model software. While these components can certainly form a solid product, there are no independent reviews yet, and it remains unclear what unique value it brings. The first batch of units will start shipping at the end of the month. Some Reddit users have criticized that assembling off-the-shelf PC hardware and adding an AI software layer is enough to frame a new AI startup these days. Ghost may well succeed in the end. But before its product is proven, investors and the media have already cast the 19-year-old founder as the next Silicon Valley legend.