Sunday Money: Nebius Group shares surge caps a blistering week

Welcome back to Sunday Money, ABC Money’s lean-back look at the week that was. And what a week: the single loudest story on Wall Street belonged to Nebius Group N.V. (NASDAQ: NBIS), whose shares put on a genuinely startling run. If you fancy a coffee and a scroll through the numbers that mattered, this is your five minutes.

The splash: Nebius Group shares surge on AI power ambitions

Nebius Group shares surge is the phrase of the week, and for good reason. The Amsterdam-based company – born out of the wreckage of Yandex’s international assets and now building data centres and graphics-chip clusters to rent out to artificial intelligence firms – jumped 46.6% over the week to close at $277.35. That is one of the biggest weekly moves any large-cap stock has managed all year. The rally follows the company’s decision to lift its contracted power guidance to 5 gigawatts, a scale that puts it in the same conversation as far larger infrastructure players, as this site reported. In an industry where the bottleneck for AI expansion is increasingly electricity rather than chips, investors appear to have decided Nebius has secured more of the scarce resource than they had priced in.

Four more movers: chips, handbags and lasers

Sandisk Corp (NASDAQ: SNDK), the memory-chip maker, rode a similar AI-infrastructure wave, climbing 36.12% to $1,656.00 in the wake of an investor day that, as ABC Money covered, gave the market fresh confidence in its pricing power.

Not everyone had a good week. Tapestry, Inc. (NYSE: TPR), owner of Coach and Kate Spade, was the market’s biggest faller, dropping 19.51% to $128.98 on consolidated exchange data – a sharp reminder that even well-loved consumer brands are not immune to a rough patch.

Coherent Corp (NYSE: COHR), which makes the optical components and lasers that keep data centres and telecoms networks talking to each other, fell 13.40% to $336.50, giving back some of its recent gains as investors rotated out of parts of the AI supply chain.

On the brighter side, Marathon Petroleum Corp (NYSE: MPC), the US refiner, added 18.38% to close at $356.54, benefiting from firmer crude prices and refining margins that widened as the summer driving season wound down.

Crypto corner

Digital assets had a quieter, gently negative week. Bitcoin (BTC) slipped 2.32% to $63,458.06, ether (ETH) eased 1.08% to $1,895.61, and solana (SOL) dipped 1.32% to $75.56, according to Binance spot market data. None of the moves were dramatic, but the drift lower sat awkwardly against the enthusiasm in AI-linked equities – a reminder that the two markets do not always move to the same beat.

The week in numbers

Three figures from the official data stood out. The gap between the 10-year and 2-year US Treasury yields – a gauge investors watch closely for signs of where the economy is heading – widened slightly to 0.51 percentage points from 0.48, as the 10-year yield eased to 4.63% from 4.68% and its shorter-dated cousin slipped to 4.15%, per Federal Reserve data. Separately, the most recent US unemployment rate, covering July, held at 4.1%, down from 4.2% the month before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures published via FRED – a reading that predates this week’s trading but still frames the backdrop investors were working against. And crude oil ticked higher, with West Texas Intermediate settling at $84.77 a barrel versus $83.76 previously, per the same St Louis Fed data series, a move that helps explain why refiners like Marathon had a good week of their own.

Across the broader market, the S&P 500 added a modest 0.40% to close at 777.4 and the Nasdaq 100 rose 1.32% to 735.17, while the Dow lagged with a 0.68% decline to 535.95 – proof that even in a week dominated by one extraordinary stock move, the index-level story was far calmer than the headlines might suggest.

That is your lot for this Sunday. Pour another coffee, and we will see you back here next week for whatever the market throws up next.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Markets move quickly; figures are correct as sourced at the time of writing. Always do your own research before making financial decisions.