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 · Jul 4, 2026 · 6:37 PM

How Much Equity to Give an Advisor at Your Startup, and When Not To

How much equity to give an advisor startup depends on stage and involvement, not flattery, and the real benchmarks run from 0.1% to 1%, vested over two years. This guide breaks down standard advisor equity percentages by stage, why vesting and written agreements matter more than the number itself, and how the FAST template changed the default negotiation.

Judith Murphy · Jul 4, 2026 · 1:45 PM

Amazon is quietly building the AI chips that power your Echo

Amazon's devices chief Panos Panay confirmed to CNBC that the company designs its own end-to-end AI chips for Echo and Fire TV hardware. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that strategy is about to expand to Kindle, Blink and Ring devices at a scale of 40 million units a year.

Judith Murphy · Jul 4, 2026 · 11:08 AM

Micron Breaks Ground on a $9.3 Billion Bet to Crack SK Hynix's Grip on AI Memory

Micron broke ground on a $9.3 billion Hiroshima expansion to build high bandwidth memory chips for AI processors like Nvidia's, backed by up to $3.2 billion in Japanese government subsidies. The plant, targeting 2028 shipments, is Micron's clearest bid yet to challenge SK Hynix's roughly 58 percent grip on the global HBM market.

Judith Murphy · Jul 4, 2026 · 12:09 AM

Alibaba Bans Claude Code After Hidden Anthropic Tracking Code Surfaces

Alibaba has ordered employees to stop using Anthropic's Claude Code by July 10, after a Reddit user's reverse engineering revealed the tool quietly checked whether users were tied to Chinese firms. Anthropic says the code was an anti-fraud measure connected to a separate dispute over Alibaba's Qwen lab allegedly using fraudulent accounts to distill Claude's outputs, and says it is already being removed.

Judith Murphy · Jul 3, 2026 · 2:19 PM

RustDuck Botnet Is Rewriting Itself Faster Than Researchers Can Track

XLab has tracked a small but rapidly evolving botnet called RustDuck since February 2026, and its speed of change, not its size, is what worries researchers. The malware hijacks routers, cameras and exposed servers through old exploits and password brute-forcing, then rewrites its own encryption every few months to dodge analysis.

Judith Murphy · Jul 3, 2026 · 10:24 AM

A Nuclear Reactor in Utah Just Powered an Nvidia Chip for the First Time

Valar Atomics powered an Nvidia Blackwell chip using electricity from its Ward 250 reactor in Utah on July 1, the first time a next-generation US reactor has run an AI chip. The two companies are now studying a 30-megawatt, nearly waterless nuclear data center as grid strain from PJM curtailments and Google's 37% electricity jump underscore AI's power crunch.

Judith Murphy · Jul 3, 2026 · 1:34 AM

Alibaba Times Its Qwen Price Cuts to Catch American Coders at Work

Alibaba has cut Qwen coding model prices by up to 80 percent during American work hours, deepening a price war with Z.ai and other Chinese labs. Microsoft reportedly told engineers to stop using Claude Code by June 30 after token costs reached $2,000 per engineer per month, and the discounts are aimed squarely at that pain point.

Judith Murphy · Jul 2, 2026 · 2:08 PM

Switch chases a $19 billion valuation as private money floods into AI data centers

Switch is raising nearly $2 billion at a valuation approaching $50 billion with debt, led by Andreessen Horowitz, as a step toward a possible 2027 IPO. The round highlights a growing split between private capital still chasing AI data center infrastructure and public markets punishing AI spending at Oracle and across the Magnificent Seven.

Judith Murphy · Jul 2, 2026 · 12:51 PM

What Is a Vesting Schedule in Startup Equity and Crypto Token Deals

What is a vesting schedule? It's the timeline that determines when startup equity or crypto tokens actually become yours, and the two versions protect very different people. Startup cliffs guard the company; crypto unlock calendars are a warning to everyone else holding the token.

Judith Murphy · Jul 2, 2026 · 5:16 AM

Robinhood Stops Renting Blockchain Rails and Builds Its Own

Judith Murphy · Jul 1, 2026 · 7:11 PM

Cisco is betting its whole workforce on AI agents while it cuts jobs

Cisco's internal assistant handles vacation requests and benefits questions across a workforce that has grown past 90,000, running on a platform that routes tasks across Azure OpenAI, Claude, Gemini and Cisco's own model. The rollout lands the same year Cisco cut nearly 4,000 jobs while redirecting spending toward AI.

Judith Murphy · Jul 1, 2026 · 2:05 PM

Goldman Sachs says Europe's grid and factory suppliers are cashing in on AI

Goldman Sachs has raised its STOXX 600 targets and now projects an 8% total return for European stocks in 2026, pointing to hyperscaler capex estimates near $527 billion as the driver. The bank's own research flags Siemens Energy, Schneider Electric, ABB and ASML as the physical supply chain cashing in on AI data center construction, even though none of them own the AI stack itself.

Judith Murphy · Jul 1, 2026 · 9:53 AM

ITG Priced Its Nasdaq IPO Below Range Even as the AI Infrastructure Boom Rages On

Oaktree Capital-backed ITG raised $312.2 million in its July 1 Nasdaq debut, but priced shares at $16, below its $19 to $22 target and well below the roughly $400 million offering it originally floated. The gap shows investors treating AI-adjacent infrastructure-services firms differently than chipmakers and hyperscalers.

$Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 to bring near-Opus performance to developers at a fraction of the cost$

Judith Murphy · Jul 1, 2026 · 7:02 AM

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 to bring near-Opus performance to developers at a fraction of the cost

Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026, a model that scores 63.2% on agentic coding benchmarks and matches Opus 4.8 on knowledge-work tasks, all at mid-tier pricing of $2 per million input tokens. The release signals a collapse in the gap between affordable and frontier-class AI performance.

Judith Murphy · Jul 1, 2026 · 2:42 AM

Former DeepMind researchers who beat professional poker players raise a $500 million Series A to trade stocks and crypto

EquiLibre Technologies, founded by the three former DeepMind researchers behind DeepStack, has raised a Series A at a $500 million valuation led by Creandum, the firm's largest single investment ever. The Prague startup is applying the same reinforcement learning architecture that beat professional poker players to trade stocks and crypto for quant hedge funds, claiming zero negative months since going live on crypto markets in 2025 and subsequently on equities. The round marks a sharp jump from

Judith Murphy · Jun 30, 2026 · 11:06 PM

How to Build a Startup Financial Model That Doesn't Lie

Startup financial models built on top-down market percentages give investors nothing to work with. Here's how to construct a bottom-up model from real unit economics that survives the questions every seed investor will ask.