The Rundown - Meta Signs $27B Deal with Nebius, Peloton Enters the Gym Business

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Market update for Monday March 16, 2026Check out the Public app for incredible investing tools and to support the show (LINK)Follow us on Instagram (@TheRundownDaily) for bonus content and instant reactions.In today’s episode:• Meta signs a massive $27B AI infrastructure deal with Nebius as the company reportedly considers layoffs and delays its next AI model• Peloton launches new commercial bikes and treadmills for gyms in an attempt to revive growth• Market movers: Micron jumps on AI memory expansion while Public Storage falls after a $10.5B acquisition deal• Fun Fact: FedEx overtakes UPS in market value for the first time ever

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Monday, March 16th. And today's episode will tell you about meta's latest AI infrastructure deal and potential layoffs at the company. We'll also break down Peloton's latest attempt to save the company. Then stick around to the end of the show to learn a wild stat about FedEx and UPS. We got a great show for you today.

Let's go Markets are coming off Their third weekly loss in a row The S&P 500 fell 1.6% last week While the NASDAQ was down 1.3%. And zooming out, the S&P 500 has lost More than 3% since the start of the year Well, the NASDAQ is down nearly 5% for the year.

Stocks are now at their lowest point since November. So it's not been a great stretch for the stock market. Obviously, the conflict in the Middle East is the main market story right now. We are now in the third week of the war with Iran, and the Strait of Hormuz is still close to traffic, which is disrupting the global supply of oil and sending prices higher. Oil prices are back above $100 per barrel. Brent Crude, which is the global benchmark finished last week around $103, while the U.S. benchmark WTI is sitting just under $100. So the war with Iran and the status of the Strait of Hormuz is going to

continue to drive the market here. There seems to be some sort of development on Sunday President and Trump called on other countries like China to help the U.S. secure and reopen the strait. So we'll see what ends up happening there. But as I record this episode on Monday morning, oil prices are starting to trade down a bit. So we're probably in for another volatile week of trading. The thing is, if oil prices continue to stay elevated, then it's going to make things more expensive. And higher oil prices could mean a resurgence of inflation, which is going to put the Federal Reserve in a tricky spot when it comes to cutting interest rates.

We're actually going to be hearing from the Fed this week. There's a Fed meeting on Wednesday. Now, they're expected to hold interest rate steady at this meeting, but it'll be interesting to see what they have to say about their projections for the rest of the year, given the war and the rising oil prices. So we're going to be talking more about the Fed this week and keeping an eye on the oil markets, so make sure you guys are subscribed for the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines.

Starting with Meta. Meta just announced yet another massive AI infrastructure deal. This time, it's a 20,000. $27 billion deal with the Neo Cloud provider Nebius to secure AI computing capacity for the next five years. This is one of the biggest single infrastructure contracts meta has ever signed, and it comes on top of the $3 billion deal they signed with Nebius just last year. So investors love this for Nebius. The stock is up more than 10% this morning at the time of this recording.

And if you zoom out, the stock has gone up 350% in the last 12 months. Now, let's talk more about meta because they've been very aggressive with their AI spend. They plan to spend $600 billion on data centers by 2028 and up to $135 billion this year alone. And it looks like in order to pay for some of this massive AI spend, the company is looking to reduce headcount. There was a report in Reuters this morning that Meta is looking to potentially lay off 20% of its workforce. Meta has around 79,000 employees. So we're talking potentially 15,000 jobs being cut. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he's seeing AI tools, allows small.

teams to do work that used to require big teams. And by the way, this AI layoff isn't just a meta thing. Amazon cut 16,000 jobs in January. So the message across the big tech companies is the same. They're spending more on AI infrastructure and spending less on people. Now, the other problem that meta is having when it comes to AI is that their own AI model is apparently pretty bad. The New York Times reported that Meadows model code named Avocado is not performing as well as models from Google, Open AI, and Anthropic. Meta's model was supposed to come out later this month, but now it's being delayed till at least May.

So despite Zuck handing out nine-figure deals to hire a ton of AI engineers last summer, it just hasn't led through the breakthrough when it comes to their own AI model development. In fact, there was a report that Meta's AI leadership is now discussing temporarily licensing Google's Gemini to power their products

while they try to catch up and better build their own model. Now, I gotta say, meta stock hasn't taken much of a hair, hit, it's flat for the year. I think as long as meta's underlying advertising revenue continues to grow at the pace that it does, investors will be okay with all of meta's AI spending and give them time to figure out the AI stuff. You know, the same thing happened when meta was spending all that money on the Metaverse and now it's happening with AI. Let's shift gears and talk about Peloton. Believe it or not, the company is still in business and they're still trying to turn things around.

They just introduced a new bike and treadmill designed specifically for gyms. This product is part of Peloton's new lineup called the Peloton commercial series. Now, these aren't going to be the same machines you see in people's living rooms collecting dust. The hardware is being built by Precore, which is the commercial fitness equipment maker, Peloton acquired back in 2021 for $420 million. Precore will handle the hardware product development while Peloton will provide the software. And these machines will start shipping the gym partners later this year across the U.S., UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, and Austria.

You know, Peloton has been trying to expand beyond its core, at-home fitness business, which exploded during the pandemic and then crashed just as quickly once people started going back to the gyms. The business continues to struggle, according to the company's latest earnings report, it missed on both revenue and profit estimates. The bright spot, though, has been the commercial side of the business. That unit grew revenues by 10% last quarter, even while overall sales fell by 3%. A Pelotonous presence in commercial gyms thanks to partnerships with hotels like Hyatt and Hilton.

But I feel that they're going to have a hard time getting mass adoption to commercial gyms. I feel like these gym classes are going to want to push their own classes or trainers or equipment. So it's an interesting pivot from Peloton. We'll see if it works. But at this point, they might as well try anything. It is pretty crazy looking back seeing Peloton stock trading at $150 back in 2021 with a valuation of $50 billion. Today, the company's stock is trading under $4 with a market cap of less than $2 billion. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Micron shares are getting a pop this morning after the memory maker announced that it's expanding its manufacturing footprint in Taiwan with a second production site. Micron already purchased a chip

facility in Taiwan earlier this year for $1.8 billion and this new site will expand the company's capacity to produce DRAM and high bandwidth memory used in AI workloads and data centers. Now, shipments from this new facility are expected to begin in 2028, so it's a couple years away. The price of memory has shot up over the last few months as demand from AI has surged. In Micron's most recent quarter, memory chip sales nearly doubled year over year. There seems to be no signs of a slowdown here. We're actually going to be hearing from Micron later this week when they report their latest earnings on Wednesday. So we'll see what they have to say.

Investors seem to be pretty excited, though, shares of Micron are up around 5% this morning at the time of this recording. Now, on the flip side, shares of public storage are dropping after the storage company announced a massive $10.5 billion deal. to buy their rival national storage affiliates in an all-stock transaction. Public storage is trying to expand their footprint, and national storage has more than 1,000 self-storage facilities across 37 states, especially in the high-growth sunbelt markets like Texas, Florida, and Arizona. Public storage says they expect this deal to generate about 110 to 130 million in annual synergies once everything is integrated.

Investors aren't loving this for the company, though. Shares of public storage are down around 3% this morning at the time of this recording, while shares of national storage are up 28%. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. For the first time ever, FedEx is now worth more than UPS. Last week, FedEx market cap crossed $84.9 billion, edging out UPS as $84.4 billion. Now, I'll be honest with you guys,

I had no idea how much bigger UPS was compared to FedEx. Like, I always assumed they were pretty close in value, But no, until recently, UPS has been worth two to three times more than FedEx. But that's not the case anymore. Now, UPS still delivers more packages moving about 20 million parcels a day compared to 14 million for FedEx. But over the last couple of years, FedEx has been cutting costs and getting leaner and spitting off their freight business and focusing on high margin deliveries like healthcare. And as a result, the stock has gone up 40% in the last two years. UPS on the other hand has seen their stock drop 40% in the last two years as they deal with.

with higher labor cause and uncertainty around the relationship with Amazon, which has been their largest customer. Amazon is looking to cut off UPS and just do their logistics by themselves. So now FedEx has overtaken UPS to be the king of delivery. On a side note, I got to say FedEx's logo goes so hard with the arrow embedded between the E and the X. I mean, that is just an incredible logo. Shout out to the logo designer there. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did, and you have like five extra seconds,

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watching, and commenting. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow. Rosen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time. Let's play. Feel the fun with Play Ojo.

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