Starship Problems Persist | Consumer Stress Grows | IPOs Face Regulations

U.S. futures moved higher as the tech rally continued into Friday morning. 

The S&P 500 is now approaching its longest winning streak since 2023. AI, aerospace, and robotics names stayed strong globally. While SoftBank extended gains on growing optimism around its AI exposure.

Brent crude remained elevated above $103, showing investors still doubt a lasting Iran resolution. Treasury yields eased slightly, helping growth stocks stabilize after recent volatility.

AI enthusiasm remains dominant across markets. Falling yields are supporting risk appetite again, but elevated oil prices continue limiting broader confidence.

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Nvidia (NVDA) posted $81.6 billion in quarterly revenue and announced a $1 trillion GPU sales forecast through 2027. But the number that actually matters from the earnings call was not in the results. It was Jensen Huang's projection for where AI infrastructure spending goes next.

Huang said AI capex is currently at $1 trillion and heading toward $3 to $4 trillion annually by decade's end. Wall Street's current consensus sits at $1 trillion by 2028. That is not a rounding difference. It is a factor of four. Someone is significantly wrong.

Cloud revenue trends support Huang's direction. Alphabet cloud grew 63 percent last quarter. AWS grew 28 percent. Azure grew 40 percent. All three are accelerating.

What the Gap Means

This is not a debate that gets settled in an argument. It gets settled in earnings reports.

The Resolution

Any hyperscaler raising full-year capex guidance above its current implied run rate next quarter confirms Huang's trajectory. That revision is the first hard data point in a very big disagreement.

SpaceX filed its S-1 Wednesday naming Starship first among the company's risk factors. The company has spent $15 billion building it. Thursday evening, Starship failed its pre-IPO launch test when a hydraulic pin on the launch tower did not function correctly.

The timing is hard to ignore. The IPO's biggest named risk failed to launch the day after the document describing it as a risk went public. The roadshow starts June 4. That is 12 days away.

A retry could come as early as Friday. After 11 launches over three years, Starship has still not flown a single customer satellite. NASA is counting on a Starship variant for a 2027 moon landing.

The Roadshow Math

A successful Starship launch before June 4 partially restores the narrative. No successful launch means the roadshow opens with zero successful V3 flights and the IPO's largest risk unresolved. 

Pre-IPO secondary market pricing for SPCX shares is the fastest signal of how much the $1.5 trillion valuation is riding on a single rocket.

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A record 39.1 million Americans are expected to travel by car this weekend. But that is also the smallest annual increase in over a decade, and 67 percent of travelers say gas prices are directly affecting their plans. 

Gas nationally is at $4.56. That is 45 percent above pre-war levels. Inventories have fallen for 14 consecutive weeks, every single week of the Iran war. GasBuddy says $5 per gallon is possible if Hormuz stays closed through summer.

The consumer thread from this week closes here. Home Depot flagged softness. Target beat but warned. Walmart confirmed the Q1 tax refund cushion is gone and said Q2 will be harder.

What the Data Shows

The consumer who looked resilient in Q1 enters summer without any cushion. The gas price that tested them in Q1 is higher now and supply is tighter.

The Threshold

$5 per gallon converts Walmart's Q2 warning into a broad Q2 demand problem. The AAA weekly price update every Monday is the fastest read on whether that scenario is arriving or easing.

Trump postponed his AI executive order Thursday afternoon, hours before the signing ceremony. "I didn't like certain aspects of it," he told reporters. He said he was worried it could block U.S. AI leadership.

The order would have required government evaluation of AI models for security vulnerabilities before public deployment. It is now shelved with no new timeline.

The timing could not be more loaded. SpaceX filed its S-1 this week. OpenAI is expected to file soon. Anthropic is heading toward October. Three companies collectively valued near $4 trillion are preparing public filings into a regulatory framework that no longer exists.

The Vacuum

No executive order means no defined rules for AI liability, oversight, or model evaluation. For IPO investors, undefined regulation is its own kind of risk. A signed order before the June 4 SpaceX roadshow closes that gap. No order means the prospectus risk factors write themselves.

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The Commerce Department announced $2 billion in grants to nine quantum computing companies this week, taking equity stakes in each one. This is now the third sector in six months where the government has deployed this playbook, following semiconductors and rare earth magnets.

IBM (IBM) received $1 billion and surged 12 percent. GlobalFoundries (GFS) got $375 million and jumped 15 percent. D-Wave Quantum (QBTS), Rigetti Computing (RGTI), and Infleqtion (INFQ) each received $100 million and gained 30 percent or more.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna compared quantum to where AI chips were a decade ago. If he is right, the companies getting funded today are at the same stage Nvidia was in 2016. That sentence is doing a lot of work.

What the Pattern Means

The government is not just funding these sectors. It is becoming a shareholder in them.

The Next Round

A quantum executive order reportedly in preparation could include procurement preferences or export restrictions. Either provision changes the valuation of the companies that just received grants faster than the technology itself will.

The week made AI a public market event and immediately stress-tested the assumptions behind it.

Huang's $4 trillion capex forecast has a factor-of-four gap with consensus. Starship failed its pre-IPO test. Gas hits Memorial Day at a four-year high. The AI executive order got pulled. And the government quietly became a quantum investor while everyone was watching everything else.

The loops did not close. They compounded.