U.S. equity markets are scheduled to open today (Saturday) at 16:30 Israel time. Futures are already reflecting sustained investor interest in large AI models and the heavy infrastructure spending that supports them.
New Model Releases and Product Moves
Moonshot AI (Beijing) released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-source model positioned as one of the largest in the world. Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI researchers, launched Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter open-weight multimodal reasoning model. Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics ER 2, an embodied-reasoning system designed to let robots plan multi-step physical tasks and interact with the real world.
xAI announced a new model focused on physical-world understanding and manipulation, aimed at robotics and autonomous systems. Alibaba rolled out Qwen3.7 Flash, a vision-language model with a 1-million-token context window priced at just three cents per million input tokens.
Regulation and Policy
The EU AI Act’s transparency obligations for general-purpose AI models begin on August 2, 2026. The bloc also opened a €10 billion tender for seven AI “gigafactories.” In the United States, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled possible sanctions on Chinese models “distilled” from U.S. technology. More than 1,100 employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta signed an open letter calling for government support to pace automated AI research.
Corporate and Market Moves
NVIDIA is reportedly in discussions for a $250 billion financing backstop to support an OpenAI 10-gigawatt data center in Ohio. Anthropic is preparing for a potential IPO as early as October. Microsoft Azure surpassed $100 billion in revenue, while Amazon increased equipment spending to $220 billion with a $496 billion AWS backlog.
Markets are expected to open with attention focused on the infrastructure and regulatory implications of the latest model announcements. Futures point to continued interest in the major AI names, tempered by caution ahead of the European regulatory timeline.
Why It Matters
Rapid scaling of frontier models combined with multi-hundred-billion-dollar infrastructure commitments is placing pressure on supply chains and capital markets. At the same time, the EU’s phased implementation of the AI Act could affect release cadence for U.S. developers.
The Bottom Line
Today’s opening is likely to center on how investors digest the new model wave and the first reactions to Europe’s transparency rules. Futures signal ongoing engagement with AI infrastructure plays, but also a wait-and-see stance until more details emerge on both the regulatory and financing fronts.
