Individual traders purchased a net $22.7 million worth of SpaceX shares in the first hour of trading, the third-highest opening-hour total in the 37 sessions since its market debut, the report said citing Vanda Research.

“This tells us that retail dip-buying has not stepped back after the earnings sell-off — they’ve become even more opportunistic,” Vanda Research said in a note.

The financial data firm said Wednesday was on track to become SpaceX’s second-strongest day of retail net buying since its debut if the pace continued. The record was set on June 16, when net purchases reached $144.6 million.

SpaceX has not recorded a single day of net retail selling since its June 12 IPO, the largest in US history, which priced the stock at $135 per share. The shares fell as much as 12.9% and slipped below $110 in early trading, less than two months after the company’s blockbuster debut.

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The sell-off came as investors questioned how long profits from Starlink could continue funding SpaceX’s costly investments in data centres and Nvidia chips. The company said its AI revenue more than tripled from a year earlier and announced several new cloud-computing agreements, even as quarterly AI-related capital expenditure climbed to $15.8 billion.
Overall trading remained robust, with more than $10.5 billion worth of SpaceX shares changing hands as of 11:47 a.m. ET, according to LSEG data.

SpaceX was the most purchased US stock among retail investors on Wednesday, according to Vanda, followed by chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices. AMD shares were last down 6.5% following its quarterly earnings report.

A founder told me last year that his best quarter in three years came right after he cut his content calendar in half. Fewer posts. Fewer campaigns. Fewer emails competing with each other for the same inbox. Revenue went up. His team thought he’d lost his mind, right up until the numbers came in.

That story gets people’s attention because it sounds like the opposite of everything marketing departments are built to do. More output usually reads as more effort, and more effort usually reads as more results, at least to a board that’s judging activity because activity is easier to measure than clarity. But I’ve watched enough companies over-produce their way into irrelevance to know the founder wasn’t lucky. He was right, for a specific reason most people miss.

Restraint Is Not a Strategy on Its Own

Here’s the part that gets left out when this story gets repeated at conferences: doing less only works once a brand already knows exactly what it’s saying and to whom. Cutting volume before that foundation exists isn’t restraint. It’s laziness or apathy wearing a strategy costume, and it fails just as fast as over-producing does, just more quietly.

The founder I mentioned had already done the unglamorous work. He knew precisely who his buyer was, what that buyer’s actual pain point was, and the specific language that buyer used to describe the problem before they ever found him. Once that clarity existed, every off-strategy post was diluting a message that was already landing, not reinforcing it. Cutting volume didn’t create the growth. It stopped getting in growth’s way.

Contrast that with a company that hasn’t done that work yet and decides to “simplify” its marketing by posting less. That company isn’t being disciplined. It’s disappearing, and it will read its declining numbers as proof the market has moved on, when the real cause is that nobody ever knew what to say in the first place.

The Order Matters

This is why the sequence at BrandBossHQ is not negotiable. Research and story come first. Tactic and volume decisions come after, never before. A brand earns the right to do less only once it has proven, through real customer language and a defined narrative, that what it’s already saying is working.

Most companies have this backwards. They think of output as the strategy (assuming any message is a good one that will grow their business), then cut it the minute budgets get tight – without ever considering whether the content they were creating was in any way relevant, meaningful or unique to their audience in the first place.

This approach effectively cuts the legs out from under your marketing effectiveness from the start. Doing more, or less, of what was never strategically sound in the first place isn’t going to make up for its irrelevance. It’s just going to waste time and money and convince leadership that ‘marketing never works’ in the first place, which isn’t true at all.

Before you go making a decision about whether to create more or less content, or whether to add or subtract marketing channels (paid, social, traditional, guerrilla, or otherwise) make sure your message is grounded in something that your target audience actually cares about – then measure for engagement efficiency, not just output for output’s sake.

Because more or less isn’t going to matter when no one was listening to begin with.

To find out whether your brand has earned the right to do less, visit BrandBossHQ.

Mary, another former content writer whose name we’ve changed, says her employer encouraged the use of AI as a productivity tool.

Instead of making her job easier, she says it created additional responsibilities.

“We had to edit more, fact-check more because the data AI produced was inaccurate,” she says. “Technically it was more work for us.”

Like Lisa, she was later made redundant.

Companies are under pressure to implement AI, to reduce costs and increase productivity, experts say.

Teleperformance, the world’s largest call centre operator and one of the Philippines’ biggest private employers, has said AI offers an opportunity to augment rather than replace its workforce.

The company expects AI to handle routine interactions while human agents move into more complex roles.

Teleperformance has also said it plans to retrain employees.

Accenture has similarly said that generative AI will reshape almost every job rather than eliminate positions.

The firm has promised to invest billions of dollars in AI capabilities and workforce training.

Concentrix – which is the biggest outsourcing firm in the Philippines – says its AI systems should remain under human oversight and has committed to training employees in the new technology.

Some Filipino managers are uneasy about AI and want to slow down adoption, according to Paul Quintos, from the University of the Philippines-Diliman.

They are concerned about how much of the domestic workforce might be displaced.

“But there’s tremendous pressure from foreign clients to adopt AI,” he says. “It’s a major cost-cutting measure.”

Philippine outsourcing companies compete directly with rivals in India and elsewhere for contracts from multinational corporations.

Increasingly, those clients expect suppliers not only to provide cheaper labour, but also to integrate AI into the services they deliver.

The ASA told the brand to stop using the ad and “ensure that their future marketing communications were socially responsible”.

Founded by siblings Jade Camber and Grant Goulden in 2013, Jaded London has amassed 1.5 million Instagram followers and is particularly popular among young people.

Its clothes are stocked in shops including Selfridges and Urban Outfitters and it made £51m of sales in the year to June 2025.

Responding to the watchdog, Jaded London argued it was “not clear” the model was holding a cigarette because it was slimmer than normal and “did not appear to be lit”.

The company also argued it was “less prominent than other elements of the image, such as the model’s clothing and accessories”.

However, it said it “understood why it was best to avoid images of models holding cigarettes” and would not use smoking content in future ads.

At the time of writing, Jaded London’s Instagram feed contained several other images of people smoking while wearing its clothes.

A spokesperson for the ASA told the BBC it was unable to comment on whether the other posts broke the rules without them going through its formal process.

“We’d always encourage anyone who has a concern about an ad they’ve seen to report it to us,” they added.

Jaded London was approached for comment.

Nvidia shares climbed to $219.78 by mid-morning Wednesday, up 3.70%, after SpaceX confirmed the chipmaker would serve as the exclusive hardware provider for the space and technology company’s future artificial intelligence infrastructure, a deal that expands Nvidia’s reach beyond the traditional data center customers that have driven its rapid growth in recent years.

The gain came even as several of Nvidia’s chipmaking peers, including AMD, Intel and Micron, traded lower Wednesday, a divergence that traders attributed directly to the newly disclosed SpaceX partnership rather than broader sector-wide momentum.

SpaceX Commits to Nvidia Exclusively

The announcement came during SpaceX’s first earnings call as a newly public company, where Chief Executive Elon Musk confirmed the company would standardize its artificial intelligence infrastructure entirely on Nvidia hardware. The decision hands Nvidia another major AI customer and extends its opportunity into new categories of infrastructure investment beyond the hyperscale cloud providers that have historically represented the bulk of its data center revenue.

SpaceX’s own results underscored the scale of its ambitions in this area. The company reported second-quarter capital expenditures of $18.4 billion, with roughly $15.8 billion, or about 86% of that total, directed toward expanding AI computing and cloud infrastructure. SpaceX said it expects to have more than 2 gigawatts of AI computing capacity online by the end of 2026, with that figure growing toward 10 gigawatts in 2027, while the broader power and cooling infrastructure supporting those systems is being designed to eventually handle between 15 and 20 gigawatts of capacity. Musk also used the call to preview upcoming updates to the company’s Grok AI models, saying Grok 4.6 would launch the following week, followed by Grok 4.7, with Grok 5 expected before the end of the year.

A Broader Market Rally Provides Additional Support

Nvidia’s advance also came amid a broader rally across global equity markets tied to easing geopolitical tensions surrounding the Strait of Hormuz and growing optimism over continued artificial intelligence infrastructure spending. Global risk appetite rebounded significantly this week, with major asset classes strengthening in tandem as risk premiums declined following the de-escalation in U.S.-Iran tensions, alongside cooling inflation expectations and continued strength in AI-related capital spending.

That rally extended well beyond U.S. markets. Japanese and South Korean stock indexes opened sharply higher Wednesday, driven by an overnight rally in U.S. technology and semiconductor shares. South Korea’s SK Hynix rose 7%, Samsung Electronics gained more than 4%, Japan’s SoftBank surged 9%, and Kioxia climbed 7%, reflecting broad-based enthusiasm across the Asian semiconductor supply chain that feeds into the broader AI infrastructure buildout Nvidia sits at the center of.

A Disappointing Year So Far, Despite Wednesday’s Gain

Despite Wednesday’s rally, Nvidia’s stock has trailed the broader market for much of 2026, a departure from the pattern of the past three years, when the company’s shares consistently outpaced the S&P 500 during the first half of the year. Prior to Wednesday’s gain, Nvidia had risen only about 2% for the year, compared with roughly a 7% advance for the S&P 500 over the same period, according to recent market analysis.

That underperformance has come even as Nvidia’s underlying business has continued to benefit from the ongoing AI data center buildout, with the company’s graphics processing units widely regarded as the industry standard for AI computing workloads. Nearly every major company operating in the artificial intelligence space runs at least a portion of its computing workloads on Nvidia hardware, a dynamic that has continued to support demand even as the stock’s valuation has cooled somewhat from its earlier highs.

Looking Ahead to Nvidia’s Own Earnings

Nvidia is scheduled to report its own second-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Aug. 26, an event that some market analysts have pointed to as a potential turning point for the stock after its relatively muted performance so far this year. Wall Street analysts are expecting revenue growth of approximately 96% for the quarter, according to recent estimates, with some analysts suggesting the company’s historical pattern of exceeding expectations could push that growth rate back into triple digits.

Continued signals from major AI hyperscalers about sustained or increasing capital expenditure plans have reinforced investor confidence that current AI infrastructure investment levels are likely to persist well into 2027, according to recent market commentary, helping ease earlier concerns among some investors about a potential plateau in AI-related spending.

Technical Signals Remain Constructive

From a trading perspective, Nvidia has continued to show relatively strong technical momentum in recent sessions. According to market data compiled through Tuesday, the stock carried a Buy Candidate rating from one closely tracked technical scoring service, with the rating unchanged from the prior session’s evaluation. Since a buy signal was first identified earlier this week, the stock had already risen more than 2% heading into Wednesday’s session, even as some technical indicators pointed to increasingly overbought conditions following the stock’s recent advance.

Nvidia’s market capitalization stood at approximately $5.133 trillion as of Tuesday’s close, reflecting the company’s continued position as one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world, underpinned by its central role in the ongoing global buildout of artificial intelligence computing infrastructure.

A Widening AI Customer Base

The SpaceX partnership adds to a growing list of major technology companies and infrastructure operators that have committed to building out AI capabilities on Nvidia’s hardware platform, reinforcing the company’s position at the center of the broader AI investment cycle even as competition from rival chipmakers continues to intensify. With SpaceX’s own AI infrastructure ambitions scaling rapidly and additional capacity commitments already outlined through 2027, investors are likely to watch closely for further details on how quickly that partnership translates into concrete revenue for Nvidia in the coming quarters, alongside the company’s own upcoming earnings report later this month, which is expected to offer the clearest signal yet on whether the current AI infrastructure spending cycle remains as robust as recent corporate commentary suggests.