Stock Futures Trade Slightly Higher as Investors Weigh Trump Shooting

Stocks are poised for a slightly higher open on Monday, the first look at how U.S. markets will react following the failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

Trump was recovering Sunday, a day after a shooting at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that injured Trump and left one attendee dead and two others critically injured.

Investors aren’t showing heightened concern, as far as moves in stock futures are reflecting on Sunday. At 6:46 p.m. ET, Dow Jones Industrial Average futures gained 60 points, or 0.2%, the S&P 500 futures rose 0.1%; and Nasdaq Composite futures were up 0.1%.

Republicans are converging in Milwaukee this week to formally nominate Trump as their party’s presidential candidate. The Republican National Convention is moving forward as an investigation into the shooting continues.

Futures also were extending a rally that has lifted stocks to fresh highs this year, fueled by earnings and a surge in tech shares.

Forty-five S&P 500 companies report earnings this week, including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs on Monday.

Bank of America , Charles Schwab , J.B. Hunt Transport Services , Morgan Stanley , Omnicom Group , PNC Financial Services Group , State Street, and UnitedHealth Group report earnings on Tuesday.

ASML Holding , Citizens Financial Group , Crown Castle , Discover Financial Services , Elevance Health , Equifax , Johnson & Johnson , Kinder Morgan , Northern Trust , Prologis , Steel Dynamics , Synchrony Financial , United Airlines Holdings , and U.S. Bancorp all report earnings on Wednesday.

Abbott Laboratories , Alaska Air Group , Blackstone, Cintas, D.R. Horton, Domino’s Pizza , Intuitive Surgical , KeyCorp , M&T Bank , Marsh & McLennan , Netflix , Novartis , Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , and Textron report earnings on Thursday.

American Express , Fifth Third Bancorp , Halliburton , Huntington Bancshares , Regions Financial , SLB, and Travelers report on Friday.

This week’s notable economic events include Monday’s release of the Empire State Manufacturing Survey by the New York Fed. Later today, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will speak at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly will speak at Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2024.

On Tuesday, the Census Bureau reports June retail sales data, and the National Association of Home Builders will release its Housing Market Index for July. Also Tuesday, Fed Gov. Adriana Kuglar will speak at the National Association for Business Economics’ Economic Measurement Seminar in Washington, D.C.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve will release the fifth of eight Beige Books with anecdotal information on current economic conditions from the 12 regional banks. Also Wednesday, the Census Bureau will report new residential construction statistics, including housing starts and building permits, for June.

On Thursday, the Philadelphia Fed will release the Manufacturing Business Outlook Survey for July; the Conference Board will report its Leading Economic Index for June; and the Labor Department will report initial unemployment claims for the week ended July 13. Also Thursday, the European Central Bank will publish a monetary policy decision. The ECB is widely expected to keep its target interest rate at 3.75%, after cutting it by a quarter of a percentage point in June.

On Friday, Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic will speak at a conference co-sponsored by the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and Atlanta, and New York Fed President Williams will speak at a panel on monetary policy at the Central Bank of Peru’s annual conference in Cusco, Peru, on the Rewiring of the Global Economy.

Austin, Texas, company Core Scientific went from bankruptcy to stock market darling this year by betting on two technologies: Bitcoin mining and AI data centers. Shares are up 400%.

But if given the choice of whether to invest more in one business over the other, executives answer without hesitating: the data centers.

“We really just value long-term, stable cash flows and predictable returns,” Chief Operating Officer Matt Brown said in an interview. The company began life as a Bitcoin miner. Even though Bitcoin has been a great asset lately, it’s very volatile. By comparison, Core Scientific can earn steady profits for years by hosting servers owned by companies that sell cloud services to AI providers, Brown said.

This year, you couldn’t go wrong betting on either. Bitcoin is up 116%, and data centers are in high demand because tech companies need them to power their AI applications.

The two technologies seem to have little in common, but they both depend on the same thing: access to reliable power. Core Scientific has a lot of it, operating nine grid-connected warehouses in six states with access to so much electricity they could serve several hundred thousand homes. Other Bitcoin miners have similarly transitioned to data center hosting , but few with quite so much success.

Core Scientific’s business didn’t look quite so good at the start of the year. The company started 2024 under the shadow of bankruptcy protection. It had too much debt on its balance sheet after going public through the SPAC process in 2022 and succumbed to a Bitcoin price crash. But the company’s fortunes quickly turned around after it emerged from bankruptcy on Jan. 23 with $400 million less debt.

The company started the year focused entirely on crypto mining, but quickly pivoted as it saw demand surge for electricity for AI data centers.

In June, the company signed a deal with a company called Coreweave to lease data center space for AI cloud services. Coreweave has since agreed to lease 500 megawatts worth of space. Core Scientific says it will get paid $8.7 billion over 12 years under the deal.

Privately held Coreweave is one of the fastest-growing companies behind the AI revolution. It was once a cryptocurrency miner, but has since transitioned to offering cloud services, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence. It’s closely connected to Nvidia , which has invested money in Coreweave and given the company access to its top-end chips. Coreweave expects to be one of the first customers for Nvidia ’s upcoming Blackwell GPUs.

Core Scientific’s quick success in this new world has surprised even the people who are driving it.

“Every once in a while I need to pinch myself, to see I’m actually not dreaming,” Brown said.

Core Scientific’s success does create a high bar for the stock to keep rising. The company is expected to lose money this year, largely because of a change in the value of stock warrants—an accounting shift that doesn’t reflect underlying earnings. Analysts see the company becoming profitable in 2025, when more of its data center deals start to hit the bottom line. They see EPS jumping tenfold by 2027. Shares trade at about 13 times those 2027 estimates.

The data center opportunity should only grow from here, as tech companies build more powerful AI systems. Of the 1,200 megawatts worth of gross power capacity Core Scientific has contracted, about 800 megawatts are going to data center computing deals and 400 megawatts toward Bitcoin mining.

Brown said the company has good relationships with its power suppliers and can potentially add more capacity without having to buy more real estate. It expects to be able to secure about 300 more megawatts worth of power at existing sites, perhaps by the end of the year.

It’s also in the hunt for new sites, including at “distressed” conventional data centers that have lost their tenants. Core Scientific has figured out how to quickly spiff up bare-bones data centers and turn them into high-tech sites with resources like liquid cooling equipment and much higher levels of electricity.

A single server rack in a standard data center might need 6 or 7 kilowatts of power. A high-performance data center can use as much as 130 kilowatts per rack; Core Scientific is working on increasing capacity to 400 kilowatts. The company likens the process of upgrading the warehouses to turning a ho-hum passenger vehicle into a Formula One racing car.

Core Scientific’s transformation from a broken-down jalopy to a hot rod has been a wild story. Its fate next year will depend on just how quickly the AI revolution unfolds.