AstraZeneca, PepsiCo, Salesforce, Levi lead premarket movers

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Thursday that the company cut memory specifications on its next-generation Optimus robot chips to scale production, after Micron said humanoid robots could require hundreds of gigabytes of memory each. In a post on X, Musk said Tesla cut the AI5 chip's memory in half to 72GB and the AI6 chip's memory by a third to 144GB, calling it the only way to get enough volume for Optimus production and saying it greatly reduces cost. He added the cuts should have a negligible effect on Optimus performance because memory bandwidth is a bigger limiting factor than total memory capacity. On Micron's fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call Wednesday, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said humanoid robots are expected to need more than 200 gigabytes of memory and multiple terabytes of storage per unit, similar to autonomous vehicles, and that physical AI could become a significant driver of memory and storage demand by the end of the decade. Tesla has reportedly placed its first large-scale component order for roughly 5,000 Optimus units and aims to eventually build 1 million units a year.

Amazon has signed a strategic, multi-year intellectual property agreement with Synopsys valued at more than $1 billion to accelerate chip design for Amazon Web Services. Under the deal, Amazon will serve as the lead customer for Synopsys' application-optimized silicon IP and expand its use of Synopsys' electronic design automation, simulation and agentic AI tools, building on a collaboration spanning more than 15 years. The agreement supports Amazon's purpose-built chips, including Nitro for cloud security and networking, Graviton for general-purpose computing and Trainium for AI training and inference, and Synopsys will adopt Amazon EC2 and Amazon Bedrock for its own product development in a two-way commercial relationship. Amazon's chips business has already surpassed a $25 billion annual revenue run rate, growing at triple-digit percentages year over year, with Graviton used by 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 customers and Trainium holding multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments from Anthropic and OpenAI. AWS revenues grew 37% year over year to $42.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, its fastest growth in 18 quarters, with segment operating margin expanding to 39.4% and a backlog of $496 billion. Amazon raised its 2026 cash capital expenditure outlook to roughly $220 billion from about $200 billion, primarily for AWS and generative AI.