Zadad Money

ASML stock is up around 5% this morning, and it's already up 25% for 2026.

Now, one thing to note, despite the strong earnings, the company did announce that they plan to cut 1,700 jobs, which is roughly 4% of their workforce, mostly in the Netherlands, but some here in the US as well.

Management said the cuts are about streamlining the company and improving agility as they scale up production.

One other thing to watch when it comes to ASML is China.

China is still their biggest market, accounting for roughly 36% of their sales last quarter, but that's expected to drop to around 20% going forward because of export restrictions.

ASML can't sell their most advanced machines to China due to US-led trade controls, so Chinese chip makers have been stockpiling older equipment while they still can.

So that could impact ASML's revenues moving forward.

Now, speaking of China and AI, there are new reports saying that the Chinese government is allowing some of China's biggest tech companies like ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to buy NVIDIA's H200 AI chips.

According to Reuters, these companies have been cleared to buy more than 400,000 of NVIDIA's H200 chips.

And that's a big deal because the H200 is one of NVIDIA's most powerful AI chip.

And it was previously blocked by the U.S.

government from being exported to China.

but the US government approved the export of these chips weeks ago, but then the Chinese government decided to block the import of these chips in order to prop up their own domestic chip makers.

Well, now these Nvidia chips are allowed to be legally imported into China, and Nvidia stock is up around 2% this morning as a result.

By the way, probably not a coincidence, Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, was in China this week, so I'm sure he has something to do with this.

Let's shift gears and talk about Amazon.

They also just announced layoffs this morning.

The company plans to cut about 16,000 corporate employees, marking the second big round of job cuts in just a few months.

Amazon has now eliminated roughly 30,000 corporate roles in three months, which is about 10% of its white collar workforce.

Now, Amazon says this is part of an ongoing push to strip out bureaucracy and flatten the organization.