Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Wednesday, January 7th. In today's episode, I'll tell you why data storage stocks are soaring right now. Also break down the latest fundraising numbers from XAI. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how much traffic is down at ChatGPT since Gemini 3 was launched.
We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks were setting records on Tuesday with the S&P 500 and NASDAQ both gaining 0.6%. That was enough to push the S&P to its first record close of 2026. The Dow Jones continues to outperform as well, jumping 1% yesterday and closing above 49,000 points for the first time ever, which is cool, but like I still don't care about the Dow.
Now, what I do care about though, is what's happening with memory and storage stocks, because these companies are absolutely ripping right now. Yesterday, SanDisk was up 28%, Western Digital was up 17%, and Seagate was up 14%. to buy a hard drive or a flash drive or an SD card, you've probably heard one of these companies.
Chapter 2: What factors are causing storage stocks to surge?
But the big reason that they're ripping right now is because of comments from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. At NVIDIA's keynote at CES on Monday, Jensen stressed that AI isn't just about GPUs anymore. It's also about memory and storage. He said the storage market is largely unserved and could become one of the biggest hardware markets on the planet as AI usage expands.
So those comments from Jensen sent these storage stocks flying yesterday. Now there was already hype building around these names. These were some of the best performing names last year as well. And it looks like the rally isn't slowing down anytime soon.
I think we might have to do a deep dive on these storage companies because storage prices increasing from AI will impact other things like the price of phones and computers. So that might have to be a future deep dive that we do. Now, speaking of things that are ripping, investors continue to rush into metals like gold, silver, and copper.
Gold is near record highs right now, and both copper and silver did hit record highs yesterday, with silver hitting $80 an ounce for the first time ever. So there is a pretty interesting setup in the market right now.
This market rally is broadening out beyond just mega cap tech names, but at the same time, investors are still hedging by buying hard assets like gold and silver due to geopolitical uncertainty. Now, remember, on Friday, we are getting the December jobs report, which will be the first big macro data point for the year.
We'll break down that jobs report and everything else happening in the markets every morning. So if you're new here, it's a great time to get subscribed to the podcast to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines. starting with Discord.
Discord has confidentially filed for an IPO, officially kicking off the process, but the company is still debating internally whether they actually want to go public. Discord was founded back in 2015. They built their identity as a place for gamers to hang out over text and voice chat. But since then, they've grown way beyond just gaming.
They have more than 200 million monthly active users now, with servers covering everything from investing to music to random niche hobbies. The company was last valued at around $15 billion in a 2021 funding round, and they famously turned down a $12 billion acquisition offer from Microsoft that same year.
In hindsight, I bet they wish they took that deal because I'm not sure how much Discord is going to be valued at once they hit the public markets. Now, over the past year, Discord has clearly been IPO curious. They switched CEOs back in April of last year as part of a plan to put the company on path for an IPO.
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