Judith Murphy

Judith Murphy is a financial journalist and market analyst covering AI, technology stocks, and emerging market trends. She has contributed to multiple financial publications and brings a data-driven approach to her coverage of the technology sector and its impact on global markets.

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Judith Murphy · Jun 25, 2026 · 10:13 PM

Moody's warns that the data center boom is creating fiscal risks governments cannot ignore

Moody's Ratings has flagged that the data center construction boom is generating real credit risks for state and municipal governments, with electricity and water demands straining local infrastructure. At least 14 states have considered or enacted moratoriums in 2026, and nearly half of all US data center projects now stall at the permitting stage, creating a supply bottleneck that could constrain AI infrastructure deployment even as hyperscaler spending hits record levels.

Judith Murphy · Jun 25, 2026 · 4:28 PM

North Korea stole $1.5 billion from Bybit and Iran's central bank quietly spent it

Blockchain analysis from TRM Labs traced Bybit hack proceeds, stolen by North Korea's Lazarus Group in February 2025, through CoinEx to wallets linked to Iran's central bank and the IRGC. The Wall Street Journal reported on June 25 that Iranian entities moved $3.84 billion through CoinEx since 2019, exposing years of compliance failures at exchanges that operate beyond the reach of U.S. and EU enforcement.

Judith Murphy · Jun 25, 2026 · 11:23 AM

The Netherlands is fighting Washington's chip war on two fronts and ASML is why

Judith Murphy · Jun 25, 2026 · 6:19 AM

Bitcoin's drop to a 20-month low is testing whether the institutional adoption story was ever real

Bitcoin fell to a 20-month low this week, trading near $60,000 as U.S. spot ETFs recorded $5.4 billion in outflows and markets priced in a near-50% chance of a Fed rate hike. With Bitcoin's correlation to the S&P 500 hitting 0.96, the macro-hedge narrative that drove the 2025 rally is under serious strain.

Judith Murphy · Jun 25, 2026 · 1:53 AM

Micron's $41 billion quarter confirms the AI memory supercycle is nowhere near done

Micron Technology reported Q3 FY2026 revenue of $41.46 billion and adjusted EPS of $25.11, both well above consensus, driven by sold-out high-bandwidth memory orders. Q4 guidance of $50 billion and SK Hynix's simultaneous $29.4 billion US listing bid signal the AI memory supercycle is accelerating, not peaking.

Judith Murphy · Jun 24, 2026 · 9:28 PM

The AI model that broke into NSA systems is now the one the NSA cannot use

Anthropic's Mythos 5 reportedly penetrated nearly all NSA classified systems during a red-team exercise on June 11, 2026. The Trump administration responded the next day with an export control directive that forced Anthropic to shut down both Mythos 5 and Fable 5 globally, cutting off the NSA analysts who had been using the model. The episode is the first known case of U.S. export controls applied directly to a deployed AI model, and it exposed a gap the government has no clean answer for.

Judith Murphy · Jun 24, 2026 · 5:40 PM

Seltz raises $12.5 million to build the search layer that agentic AI actually needs

Seltz, a nine-person US/Italy startup, has closed a $12.5 million seed round to provide AI agents with purpose-built web search infrastructure. The company rebuilt its crawler, index, and retrieval models from scratch in Rust, returning queries in under 200ms with structured, ad-free results designed for retrieval-augmented generation pipelines.

Judith Murphy · Jun 24, 2026 · 1:14 PM

AIP and Brookfield are both bidding for Stack Infrastructure's Asia operations and the $30 billion price tag explains exactly what AI has done to data center valuations

Blue Owl Capital is exploring a $30 billion-plus sale of Stack Infrastructure's Asia-Pacific data center operations, with AIP, the BlackRock and Microsoft-backed consortium, and Brookfield Asset Management both in the bidding. The deal signals that institutional capital is now treating scarce hyperscale capacity in constrained Asian markets as a defensive infrastructure asset, not a growth bet.

Judith Murphy · Jun 24, 2026 · 7:32 AM

MoEngage acquires Aampe to put a dedicated AI agent behind every single customer

Judith Murphy · Jun 24, 2026 · 5:30 AM

How to Build a Sales Funnel for a Startup That Actually Converts

How to build a sales funnel for a startup is one of those questions that generates endless generic advice and very little honest guidance on what actually converts. This piece walks through each stage, from targeting and lead generation through to close, with real conversion benchmarks and named tools a two-person team can actually use.

Judith Murphy · Jun 24, 2026 · 12:34 AM

The CLARITY Act is closer to law than crypto has ever been, but the hardest part is still ahead

Judith Murphy · Jun 23, 2026 · 6:32 PM

The global tech sell-off is a reckoning with AI valuations that were always going to come

A two-day rout in global technology stocks has wiped hundreds of billions from the sector, with SpaceX shedding $900 billion from its peak, Samsung and SK Hynix falling more than 12%, and Nasdaq 100 futures sinking 2.69% as investors demand proof that AI infrastructure spending will generate real returns.

Judith Murphy · Jun 23, 2026 · 8:54 AM

California drivers are suing BP, Walmart and Marathon for using an AI tool to fix gas prices

California drivers filed a class-action lawsuit against BP, Marathon, 7-Eleven, Walmart and Albertsons, alleging their shared use of Kalibrate Fuel Systems' AI pricing platform inflated gas prices by up to 22 cents a gallon. The case is one of the first filed under California's new AB 325 law banning shared pricing algorithms, and its outcome could determine whether AI vendors share antitrust liability alongside the operators who use their tools.

Judith Murphy · Jun 23, 2026 · 8:12 AM

AI Financial Modeling for Startups Is the CFO Alternative That Actually Works

AI financial modeling for startups has made investor-grade projections genuinely accessible to early-stage founders who lack the budget for a CFO. Tools like Causal, Claude, and Runway can close the gap between a founder-built model and a finance hire, but only if you understand what a real model is supposed to do and where AI assistance runs out.

Judith Murphy · Jun 23, 2026 · 4:29 AM

Oracle cut 21,000 jobs to fund its $50 billion AI buildout and workers say they trained their own replacements

Oracle has confirmed eliminating roughly 21,000 roles as part of a $2.1 billion restructuring reserve, with workers documenting that they were asked to train AI systems before being let off. The cuts are the financial mechanism behind the company's $50 billion AI infrastructure commitment for fiscal 2026, making Oracle the first major enterprise software firm to formally link a five-figure headcount reduction to AI displacement.

Judith Murphy · Jun 22, 2026 · 9:32 PM

Five Eyes agencies warn that AI-powered cyberattacks are months away as the US moves to lock down frontier models

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance has warned that frontier AI models capable of dramatically escalating cyberattacks are months away from broad accessibility, not years. The warning arrives alongside the US government's unprecedented export ban on Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, a move that cut allied governments off from frontier access while raising unresolved questions about enterprise liability and startup resilience.