• Markets: Stocks jumped yesterday, as investors awaited the US trading debut of South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix (more on that below). But AstraZeneca couldn’t get in on the fun after a clinical trial for a heart disease drug missed its targets.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Adobe Stock

Wall Street AI bulls are more hyped than a teen who is about to see BTS perform live. Americans are getting the ability to invest in South Korea’s second-most-valuable company today as SK Hynix, a $1 trillion memory chipmaker, lists on the Nasdaq, seeking to amplify the windfall from its central role in the AI supply chain.

Though memory chip stocks (including SK Hynix’s shares listed in Korea) have dipped in recent days, its stock is still up more than 600% in the past year. Bloomberg reported that preliminary orders for its shares exceeded supply by seven times, a sign that many US investors are bullish on its growth spurt.

Memory manna

SK Hynix’s bread and butter is supplying advanced memory chips—a vital ingredient in AI data centers—to customers like Nvidia. Because the scramble for advanced memory chips has also pushed up prices for its more basic products used in smartphones and PCs, SK Hynix’s profits surged almost fivefold in the first quarter of 2026.

While analysts say memory chip demand booms are prone to busts, they expect the memory crunch to persist until at least 2027. And access to the deep pockets of American investors will give SK Hynix financial fuel to keep growing supply:

• The company is looking to raise around $28 billion for aggressive expansion in South Korea and the US, including the construction of a chip factory in Indiana.
• But analysts warn that it might take years for the new factories to start churning out chips.

The IPO gives Americans another option on the memory menu besides SK Hynix’s stateside competitor, Micron, and its biggest South Korean rival, Samsung. Some analysts note that SK Hynix’s initial stock price may be lower than Micron’s, given the different expected earnings of the two companies.

Looking ahead...SK Hynix’s fortunes are expected to be a mirror for the AI boom overall. The listing will also gauge interest for other major upcoming IPOs, like those of Anthropic and OpenAI.—SK

      

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World

Tour de headlines

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🇮🇷 Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei buried in his hometown. The burial in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city, took place early this morning local time, marking the conclusion of processions that began on Saturday. The US and Iran were expected to engage in talks toward a final deal after Khamenei’s funeral. While this week’s incidents between the two nations led President Trump to say the ceasefire was “over,” he also said he would allow negotiations to continue. Iran’s foreign minister said in a post on Telegram that he had held a phone call with Pakistan’s army chief, who is one of the war’s main mediators.—HVL

💻 Meta says its new AI model is really good at coding. In a bid to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI, Meta announced Muse Spark 1.1, an AI model that “improved substantially” on coding performance vs. the previous version, the Facebook parent company said. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg that pricing for the model will be “very aggressive and attractive,” calling the cost of rival products “very extreme.” Elsewhere in the AI-verse, Anthropic launched its version of Spotify Wrapped for Claude, and OpenAI released GPT-5.6.—AE

🏚️ Home sales unexpectedly fell in June. Sales of existing homes in the US slipped 2.4% despite economists projecting a 0.7% increase, the Wall Street Journal reported. The national median home price also rose to $440,600—an all-time high. The data puts a damper on what had been a relatively strong spring for the housing market, with easing mortgage rates from the winter suggesting that it was emerging from a yearslong slump. But the war in Iran has contributed to rates once again surging. Economists have now adjusted their 2026 forecast down from 4.13 million home sales to 4.10 million, though that’s still a 1% improvement from last year.—AE

GOING UP?

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An increasingly popular way to ease the housing crisis just developed some cracks. Some financiers are rethinking their involvement in office-to-apartment conversions after the largest US project of this kind risked partial collapse earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Officials stabilized the former Pfizer headquarters that gave midtown Manhattan a major scare, but enthusiasm for future conversion projects could be on shakier ground. The WSJ spoke with infrastructure- and real estate experts, who now expect to see:

• More expensive builders’ insurance and stricter regulatory reviews, which could cause monthslong project delays.
• Softer appetites for complex office conversions. With the lead developer planning to add floors, a rooftop pool, and other expansions to the Pfizer building, its steel beams buckled under the added weight from the widening of ~15 upper levels, the developer told the WSJ.

That being said…one of the project’s main lenders is still “very bullish” on office-to-residential conversions, he told the WSJ. Similarly, others consider the near-collapse to be a mere anomaly that won’t foil future conversion plans.

Zoom out: The US started this year with ~90,000 new units in progress from office-to-apartment conversions—a 28% increase from last year, according to RentCafe. New York City commands the biggest share of that pipeline.—ML

      

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MORE LIKE CHEAT GPT

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In the scandal heard ’round the Ivy League, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano accused his students of using AI to cheat on a take-home exam, and said the school was “meek” when presented with evidence.

And that evidence includes an abnormally large number of students with a masterful understanding of welfare economics and social choice theory:

• Serrano’s class swelled from the usual 30 pupils to 86 after announcing his course would have take-home exams.
• The average score on the take-home midterm was 96%, when it typically fell between 65%–80%.
• Serrano alerted students to his AI suspicions and decided to make the final in-person and worth 80% of the final grade.
• The average score on the final was a “historic low” of 48.6%.

A university spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that Serrano still “has not provided the necessary details” for the school to take action.

Serrano decided to administer the take-home tests in response to students expressing anxiety over being in a classroom following a mass shooting on campus during finals week last December.

A worrying trend: In a recent survey, 29.9% of Princeton students admitted to cheating with AI on an exam or assignment. A New York Times essay from a recent Stanford graduate said AI has become a “fact of life” at the school.—DL

      

Reader poll

Dave’s sports desk

Yahoo is launching college fantasy football

Nick Iluzada

On Fridays, the Brew’s Dave Lozo looks at a sports business story that says a lot more than just the final score of a game.

Starting this fall, everyone can have a fresh reason to root against Notre Dame. Yahoo Sports announced yesterday that it’s launching a version of fantasy football with college teams and players.

The new way to get mad at college students comes after Yahoo reported a record number of fantasy football users last season. The college format will have slight differences compared to the NFL version:

• Only schools from the Power 4 conferences (Big 10, SEC, Big 12, ACC) and independent Notre Dame are eligible.
• You can draft an entire team’s offense and rack up points with Georgia when they play nobodies the first two weeks.

There isn’t an official gambling aspect to Yahoo’s offering, as individual player props on NCAA athletes are restricted in most states. But nothing prevents users from playing for prize money with friends.

More ad revenue: Yahoo said that Coca-Cola will be integrated “throughout the experience.”—DL

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Quiz

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s Weekly News Quiz has been compared to making an observation while watching a sports broadcast and the commentator saying the same thing five seconds later.

It’s that satisfying. Ace the quiz.

News

What else is brewing

• PepsiCo posted weaker-than-expected quarterly earnings as a result of “consumer budgets tightening due to rising inflationary pressures,” its CEO said.
• Bonnie Tyler, the ’80s pop star who sang “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” died at 75 from an illness.
• Netflix, Disney, and YouTube are interested in buying the US TV rights for the 2030 World Cup, which could cost as much as $2 billion, CNBC reported.
• OpenAI’s No. 2 executive, Fidji Simo, told staff yesterday that she would not be returning from an extended medical leave and that she would become a part-time advisor to the company, according to the Wall Street Journal.
• Moana, the live-action remake of the animated Disney film, has a 37% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is on track to disappoint at the box office.
• An outbreak of diarrhea-causing parasites grew to more than 1,000 cases across Michigan and Ohio, authorities said.

recs

• The 23 best burritos in America, according to The Infatuation.
• What a sleep expert eats for better sleep.
• The Atlantic’s story on “The End of Reading” that everyone (who still reads) is talking about.
• The hair cream that holds curls without that crunchy feeling.**

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Play

Jigsaw: This edition of our picture puzzle takes you to the Ninja Warrior Dog Competition. Yes, that is a thing. Play the Jigsaw here.

Friday trivia

Move a single letter from one word to the other to make a pair of synonyms (or near synonyms).

1. Rode / Can

2. Font / Farce

3. Tory / Stale

4. Self / Shill

Answer

1. Rod / Cane
2. Front / Face
3. Story / Tale
4. Shelf / Sill

(Source)

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: sill, meaning “a flat, horizontal piece, usually of wood, forming the base of the frame of a window.” Thanks to Faj from Chicago, IL, for the suggestion. Submit another Word of the Day here.