SharespectiveWall Street, before morning tea

Daily newsletterWed 9 Sep 2026

Three Days At Once Plus: Qualcomm handed Amazon warrants over 25 million of its own shares to land a customer.

Good morning. It's Wednesday, and New York is back at its desk. Three days of news had to be priced in one session, and the market did it very unevenly. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 626.72 points, or 1.17%, while the Nasdaq Composite gave up 85.58 points, or 0.32%. Brent crude reached US$98.28 a barrel, Canada's counter-tariffs on American goods came into force, and the US 10-year Treasury yield pushed back above 4.8% — its highest since October 2023.

The one reliably green patch was semiconductors. Qualcomm said it would build custom data centre chips for Amazon and rose more than 3%, which more or less describes the day: anything with artificial intelligence attached to it held up, and anything that burns diesel, borrows money or ships to Canada did not.

Market snapshot

US levels are Tuesday 8 September's official 4​pm New York close. The NZX 50 and ASX 200 are Tuesday's local closes, which happened before New York opened; currencies were taken late in Tuesday's New York session.

Canada's counter-tariffs took effect, and both sides have now priced themselves in

Canada began charging tariffs of 15% to 50% on C$27.6 billion of American goods on Tuesday, across more than 600 product classifications. Steel, aluminium and iron products, furniture and clothing drew the top 50% rate, with dairy, paper, electronics, industrial equipment, appliances and sports gear also caught.

How the talks fell apart. The measures match, dollar for dollar, the 50% tariff Washington placed on the same value of Canadian exports on 22 August. Negotiations collapsed on a Friday night shortly before the American deadline, and Prime Minister Mark Carney said the United States had arrived with late demands over car imports and over Canada's freedom to sign trade agreements with anyone else, which he called unacceptable. He was blunter later: "You're at war when you get attacked. We got attacked."

For a market already nervous about prices, the timing was awkward. Crude climbing on Iranian threats, a bond yield at a three-year high and a new tax on trade between the world's two largest trading partners all landed on the same morning, and every one of them points the same way on inflation. The S&P 500 fell 0.58% to 7,673.65.

Qualcomm gave Amazon warrants over 25 million of its own shares to win a data centre customer

Qualcomm announced on Tuesday that it will supply Amazon Web Services with custom silicon for large-scale AI data centres, together with optical connectivity running up to 1.6 terabits. The two will work together across multiple generations of hardware, with the focus on inference — the business of actually running a trained AI model, as opposed to training it in the first place. Qualcomm shares rose more than 3%.

The unusual part is how it was paid for. Qualcomm issued Amazon warrants over 25 million of its shares at US$161.26 each. A warrant is simply the right to buy shares at a fixed price later, and these ones only become exercisable as Amazon places orders — up to US$60 billion of server chips, networking equipment and manufacturing services through to 2036. An initial 3.75 million shares vest on the opening commitment. Amazon gets a cheap stake if it spends; Qualcomm gets a customer prepared to sign a decade-long number.

Qualcomm needs the diversification badly. In its most recent quarter, handsets and automotive produced US$8.5 billion of US$9.9 billion of revenue — a business that lives or dies on how often people replace their phones. Chief executive Cristiano Amon has spent two years saying Qualcomm is no longer a smartphone company, and this is the first big Western cloud provider willing to say it with him.

GE Aerospace is paying US$11.75 billion for the company that pours its engine parts

GE Aerospace agreed on Tuesday to buy Consolidated Precision Products from Warburg Pincus and Berkshire Partners for US$11.75 billion. CPP is based in Cleveland, runs about 20 plants, employs roughly 6,600 people and has been selling to GE for more than 15 years. GE shares rose 1.36% to US$339.40, which for a deal this size counts as a shrug of approval.

Why a foundry is worth twelve billion dollars. CPP makes castings: molten superalloy, titanium, aluminium and steel poured into moulds to produce the parts that sit in the hottest, most stressed sections of a jet engine. They are slow to make, brutally hard to certify, and have been the most-blamed bottleneck in aircraft production for three years now. Chief executive Larry Culp said capacity in mission-critical castings was what is needed to serve demand across commercial engines, the aftermarket and defence at the same time.

The price is not cheap and GE has not pretended otherwise. About US$7 billion comes from cash and the rest from new borrowing, at roughly 18 times CPP's projected 2027 earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation once expected savings are counted — and about 26 times without them. It is not expected to close until the second half of 2027.

Newsworthy numbers

Worth a read

Wrapping up

The Federal Reserve meets on 15–16 September and futures still put the odds of a rate rise above 60%, so this week's two inflation prints carry a lot of weight. American producer prices land on Thursday and August consumer prices follow on Friday at 8.30​am in New York — 10.30​pm Friday in Sydney, 12.30​am Saturday in Auckland. The European Central Bank votes on Thursday and is expected to lift its deposit rate a quarter-point to 2.50%.

Oracle and Adobe both report after Thursday's close in New York. For Oracle the line to find is how much of that cloud backlog has converted into billed revenue and what the capital spending bill looks like beside it; for Adobe, whether subscription growth is holding as AI tools crowd into its market. Closer to home, the Reserve Bank of Australia decides on 29 September, where NAB expects a quarter-point rise to 4.60% — though Westpac became the last big bank to shift its call on Tuesday, and now has November as its base case.

The kiwi slipped for a third straight session to US$0.5853, taking USD/NZD up to 1.7085, while the Australian dollar barely moved and left USD/AUD at 1.3854. The split is still about what each central bank does next rather than what it has just done: markets read the Reserve Bank of New Zealand as being in no hurry after this month's increase, while a fourth Australian rise this year is very much alive.

Back tomorrow, with a session that only has one day of news in it.