U.S. stock futures traded higher before Friday’s open on Aug. 21, according to Bitget market data. Dow futures were up 0.56%, Nasdaq 100 futures rose 0.63%, and S&P 500 futures added 0.43%.
Premarket trading in major technology stocks was mostly positive, based on data from BIT (bit.com). AMD, Tesla, Micron Technology, and Intel each rose more than 1%. SpaceX, Nvidia, Meta, and Alphabet Class A were each up close to 1%.
Crypto-linked stocks also moved broadly higher in premarket trading. Strive climbed more than 7%, Strategy gained nearly 7%, Circle and MARA Holdings rose more than 5%, Coinbase and Robinhood added close to 5%, and Bitmine Immersion Technologies advanced more than 3%.
Premarket headlines
1. OpenAI said its first Nvidia Vera Rubin racks are now in place and already running the company’s training stack. The company said: 「This is an important step in expanding our compute capacity, and it will support OpenAI’s next generation of frontier AI pretraining.」
2. Samsung Electronics said it plans to return as much as 110 trillion won, or about $79 billion, to shareholders in 2026. That would account for roughly half of free cash flow and marks the largest shareholder return plan on record for a South Korean company.
3. Elon Musk said SpaceX’s next test flight may be delayed until the end of the year.
4. Great Hill Capital founder Tom Hayes recently laid out a bearish view on Berkshire Hathaway’s future investment performance. He said the conglomerate built by Warren Buffett is unlikely to beat the S&P 500 over the next 10 years and argued that its era of generating long-term excess returns has ended.
Hayes summarized his bearish case around the law of large numbers, the eventual end of Buffett personally leading the company, and capital allocation challenges tied to Berkshire Hathaway’s size.
5. DeepSeek released a new multimodal model. The company said the model’s text capabilities are on par with DeepSeek-V4-Flash and cover agents, reasoning, and world knowledge.
6. A Morgan Stanley analyst team led by Eric Woodring said that, based on the latest Sensor Tower data, App Store net revenue was down 0.6% year over year month-to-date through Aug. 17. Compared with June, the growth rate slowed by 170 basis points.