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May 27, 2026
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Happy Wednesday! American Airlines plans to add SpaceX’s Starlink to around half of its main aircraft fleet. Dropbox founder Drew Houston will step down as CEO after nearly 20 years in that role. Memory chip maker Micron Technology's market value surpasses $1 trillion.
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American Airlines plans to start adding SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service to around half of its main aircraft fleet beginning early next year, the airline said on Tuesday. The deal will offer in-flight wifi on approximately 500 narrowbody Airbus planes, but does not include the American’s roughly 500 Boeing craft. It also excludes an additional approximately 500 smaller regional planes operated under the American Eagle brand. While some operators such as United Airlines have agreed to put Starlink in their entire fleets, American’s deal leaves room for the company to do deals with multiple satellite internet providers. That could eventually include Amazon’s Starlink competitor Leo, which has yet to launch commercial service but announced a deal with Delta Air Lines earlier this year.
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Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston said Tuesday that he plans to step down as CEO, ending one of the longest running tenures at the helm of a tech company. Houston said Ashraf Alkarmi would become co-CEO with him during a transition period, after which Houston would become executive chairman and Alkarmi would be the sole CEO. Dropbox shares fell over 3% Tuesday. Alkarmi was previously the senior vice president of the file-sharing provider’s core products division, including Dropbox Sign and Docsend. Houston had been CEO for nearly 20 years, a period that included the company’s 2018 initial public offering, its pandemic-era stock boom, two mass layoffs in 2023 and 2024, and the advent of AI-powered rivals. Houston said the company, which has a $6 billion market-capitalization, is “in a stronger position than it’s been in years.” Dropbox shares have been less affected by the downturn in software stocks than some of its peers. Dropbox stock has dropped around 5% so far this year, while a popular exchange traded fund of software stocks, IGV, has tumbled 12% as of Tuesday. In its most recent financial results for the three months through March 31, Dropbox reported revenue climbing nearly 1% from the previous year to $630 million, following three straight quarters of declines.
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Micron Technology crossed $1 trillion in market value for the first time Tuesday, as shares climbed 19% on rising demand for memory chips used in AI systems. It was Micron’s largest single-day gain since 2011. The rally came after UBS sharply raised its price target for Micron to $1,625 from $535, implying the stock could more than double from Friday’s close of $751. The bank cited long-term supply agreements with partially fixed pricing and said investors are likely to apply a higher valuation multiple as AI’s impact on the memory industry becomes clearer. The growing importance of memory chips for AI infrastructure is boosting the share prices of major suppliers. South Korea’s SK Hynix passed $1 trillion in market value on Wednesday, rising more than 13% in Seoul and extending its 12-month gain to more than 1,000%. Earlier this month, the market capitalization of Samsung Electronics, a consumer electronics and memory chip giant, also surpassed $1 trillion. Memory has become a critical bottleneck in the AI buildout because AI models need huge pools of fast memory to train, store and serve data alongside graphic processing units and other processors. The squeeze now extends across the entire memory complex, from high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators to conventional memories in servers for storage.
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ByteDance is considering more than doubling its capital expenditures this year to as much as $70 billion, as the Chinese tech giant ramps up its investment in data centers and other AI infrastructure, Bloomberg reported. ByteDance’s capex plans reflect the surging costs of compute in the AI industry worldwide due to chip supply constraints and skyrocketing token usage for AI agents and other applications. ByteDance, best known for its TikTok and Douyin video apps, is one of the leaders in China’s AI industry. It develops a wide range of AI foundation models and also operates China’s most popular AI chatbot app, Doubao.
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ServiceNow Chief Marketing Officer Colin Fleming said Tuesday that he is leaving the IT services software giant for OpenAI, where he will assume the role of CMO for its business segment. The executive worked for ServiceNow for two years and was previously a marketing executive at Salesforce for more than a decade. Fleming is the latest ServiceNow executive to depart for a frontier AI model provider. Last fall, ServiceNow exec Paul Smith left the $90 billion firm to join Anthropic as its chief commercial officer. Shares in ServiceNow and other large software providers have dropped sharply on investor fears over new competition from AI tools. At the same time, the large AI companies are going after the software budgets of big corporations.
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Qualcomm has reached a deal with ByteDance to supply chips for AI data centers to the Chinese tech giant, Bloomberg reported. The deal comes as Qualcomm, one of the world’s largest suppliers of smartphone processors, is trying to increase its presence in chips for AI computing. As part of the deal, ByteDance is procuring millions of chips known as application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, from Qualcomm, according to Bloomberg. These chips can help power AI applications such as agents. ByteDance will be one of the first customers for Qualcomm’s ASICs. Landing a high-profile customer like ByteDance could help accelerate the U.S. company’s expansion into AI infrastructure. ByteDance, best known for its TikTok and Douyin video apps, is one of the leaders in China’s AI industry. It develops a wide range of AI foundation models and also operates China’s most popular AI chatbot app, Doubao. The company has also been investing aggressively in AI infrastructure such as data centers and chips.
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