Main by morning: Anthropic expects first profitable quarter, SpaceX reveals losses

SoftBank shares soared nearly 20% after Nvidia's record report, Anthropic expects to generate $10.9 billion in revenue in the second quarter - more than it did all of last year - leading the company to its first quarterly operating profit, The Wall Street Journal and CNBC found out. Samsung, meanwhile, avoided a major strike amid rising demand for chips. On these and other topics - in our review of key events by the morning of Ma 21.

SoftBank shares soared nearly 20% in Tokyo after a strong report from Nvidia- such a rally added about $35 billion to the company's capitalization for the day, CNBC reports. Investors bet on further growth in the AI sector and the possible IPO of OpenAI, in which SoftBank has already invested more than $30 billion.

The rally also supported growth in Arm Holdings and Asian chip makers, from TSMC and SK Hynix to Tokyo Electron and Renesas. Nvidia, meanwhile, reported revenue growth of 85% and announced an $80 billion buyback, although CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged that the Chinese AI chip market has effectively been taken over by Huawei.

SpaceX has revealed its pre-IPO financials for the first time: the company reported revenue of nearly $18.7 billion for 2025, but posted an operating loss of $2.6 billion, Yahoo Finance writes. The main source of profit remains the Starlink network, which provides Internet access via satellites, while the AI division of SpaceX - which includes the xAI business and is now called "SpaceXAI" and deals with AI - brought multi-billion dollar operating losses ($2.47 billion in the first quarter of 2026 and $6.35 billion in 2025).

The IPO could value SpaceX at $1.8 trillion and become the largest offering in history. Investors are betting on the growth of Starlink, the development of the Starship spacecraft and Elon Musk's plans to create orbital data centers for AI, which the company intends to finance with raised funds.

Anthropic expects to generate $10.9 billion in revenue in the second quarter - more than it did for the whole of last year, CNBC reported, citing a source familiar with the situation and The Wall Street Journal. Thus, Anthropic, the company behind Claude's AI models, could reach quarterly operating profitability for the first time amid explosive growth in demand from enterprise customers and developers.

The startup is already negotiating a new round of financing with a valuation of about $900 billion and is preparing for an IPO in 2026, the channel notes. At the same time, Anthropic is actively building up computing capacity: the company has agreed with SpaceX to use the Colossus 1 data center for $1.25 billion per month until 2029.

Samsung avoided a large-scale strike: the union temporarily suspended the planned 18-day strike after new negotiations with the South Korean government, reports CNBC. Against this backdrop, the company's shares rose more than 7%, and the sector was further supported by a strong quarterly report from Nvidia.

According to Yonhap and Reuters, Samsung has agreed to increase bonuses for chip division employees and partially tie them to operating profits. South Korean authorities warned that the strike could cost the country's economy tens of trillions of won, given that Samsung provides nearly a quarter of the country's exports.

- Japan's broad Topix index was up 2 percent on May 21, while the Nikkei 225 was up 3.6 percent.

- Hong Kong's Hang Seng index was little changed, while mainland China's CSI 300 index rose 0.6 percent.

- In South Korea, the Kospi index was up 7.7% and the Kosdaq was up 5.1%.

- Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was up 1.6 percent.

- Futures on the S&P 500 and on the Nasdaq Composite were almost unchanged. Exchange contracts on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were down 0.1%.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor