Japan agrees to a trade deal, Elon spends billions on NVIDIA GPUs

Business news update for Thursday, July 24th.

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In today’s episode, we’ll recap the new trade deal with Japan and why it might be the first of many, and then dive into Elon Musk’s plan to spend billions on Nvidia chips. Let’s get into it.

In the backdrop of meme stock madness, we got a surprise trade update. President Trump announced a deal with Japan, cutting tariff rates to 15%, down from the 25% he’d threatened earlier this month. As part of the deal, Japan will invest \$550 billion into the U.S. and open its markets to more American exports like cars, trucks, rice, and other ag products. This is a big win—Japan is one of the U.S.’s largest trading partners, and this likely signals more deals before the high tariffs kick in on August 1.

Next up: crypto and traditional finance are colliding again. Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon are teaming up to bring money market funds to the blockchain. These are super-safe, short-term investments that institutional investors love. Now they’re becoming tokenized—digitized, more flexible, and tradable 24/7. That means no more waiting for market hours to settle trades. BlackRock and Fidelity are also buying into these digital funds, which will live on Goldman’s blockchain. This follows President Trump’s signing of the Genius Act, which gave regulated stablecoins the green light. BlackRock’s Larry Fink even said every stock, bond, and fund could eventually be tokenized. So yeah, this is probably a space to keep your eye on.

Let’s shift gears to Elon Musk and xAI. According to the Wall Street Journal, xAI is raising up to \$12 billion to buy more Nvidia GPUs for their next mega data center, Colossus 2. This comes just weeks after they raised \$10B—and reportedly spent most of it. The first Colossus, built last year in Memphis, houses over 200,000 Nvidia GPUs. Now they want to scale up to 1 million GPUs to power Grok, their AI chatbot. xAI just launched Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, which use AI agents. But all this AI infrastructure is burning serious cash—\$13 billion projected in 2025 alone. Elon is calling in favors, with backing from Valor Equity Partners and other private equity groups. But Grok is going up against giants like Google, Meta, and OpenAI—companies with massive infrastructure and global dominance. So, we’ll see if this gamble pays off.

Now to the meme stock circus. Krispy Kreme and GoPro are the latest names to pop. GoPro is up over 80% today, and Krispy Kreme is up more than 30%. This comes after huge Tuesday gains for both. And to be clear—there’s no news or deals. It’s pure Reddit hype and options trading. Krispy Kreme saw 100,000+ call contracts traded—75x its average. GoPro saw its highest call volume since 2021. Total 2021 vibes. Meanwhile, Opendoor—the stock that kicked off this cycle—has already fallen over 40% from Monday’s highs. So yeah… trade carefully.

On the flip side, Texas Instruments is taking a hit. The chipmaker posted solid Q2 results—revenues up 16%, profits up 15%, both above estimates. But their Q3 outlook disappointed. TI is a major supplier of semiconductors for autos and industrial use, and they’re forecasting a slowdown in both. Shares are down over 10% this morning.