Job Losses Aren't From AI
The Weekend Edition is pulled from the daily Stansberry Digest.
About that $100 billion OpenAI investment...
In early February, it looked like chipmaker and AI bellwether Nvidia (NVDA) may have been getting cold feet about its deal with OpenAI.
At that time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had been highlighting plans to invest "up to $100 billion" in OpenAI. But he never committed to investing the full amount.
And just a month later, it looks like the funding is done...
At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Wednesday, Huang said that investing the full $100 billion in OpenAI is likely "not in the cards," according to CNBC.
Nvidia has already invested $30 billion in the ChatGPT maker. And Huang says that might be where its investment stops.
Like in February, Huang tried to assure folks that the relationship between the two companies was fine. He said Nvidia is only finished investing in OpenAI because the company is going public later this year.
Still, Nvidia's funding was a big reason that investors thought OpenAI could sustain its $1.4 trillion spending plans. Now it may have to turn to retail investors for funding.
Stansberry's Investment Advisory editor Whitney Tilson continues to believe that OpenAI "blowing up" could pop the AI bubble. If another company or retail investors can't replace Nvidia's funding, that may very well be the case.
The latest on the labor market...
Payroll processor Automatic Data Processing (ADP) released its monthly hiring data for February on Wednesday.
On the surface, the numbers were good enough for the market. Firms added 63,000 jobs, beating Wall Street's expectation of 48,000 job gains. That was the strongest month for hiring since July, based on ADP's data.
But ADP revised January's reading down to just 11,000 job gains – half of the initial reading. And when you zoom out, hiring has slowed to a crawl...
Over the past 12 months, the economy has added only 418,000 jobs, according to ADP's data. That's just about a quarter of the 1.8 million jobs that were added in the 12 months prior.
Meanwhile, we also got news from the "firing" side of the labor market...
According to the monthly report from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, employers announced about 48,000 layoffs in February. That's down 55% from January and down more than 70% year over year.
ADP reported net job gains, meaning its numbers already reflect layoffs. But a lot of people are still losing their jobs compared with new hires.
The big news came yesterday, with a disappointing jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics...
The U.S. lost 92,000 jobs in February, compared to the rise of 60,000 analysts had expected. And the unemployment rate jumped to 4.4%, versus the expected 4.3%.
AI Is an Easy Scapegoat for Layoffs
And some sectors are definitely feeling the pain of job losses worse than others.
Job cuts in the technology sector are up 51% year to date in 2026 versus the same period in 2025. Layoffs have surged more than 140% in industrial manufacturing. And job cuts in the transportation sector are up 872%.
Many folks think these sectors are at the most risk from AI. We've seen the technology fears play out with the "SaaSpocalypse" in software stocks. Manufacturing jobs face risk from robotics. And autonomous driving could upend the transportation sector.
So far this year, businesses have cited AI as the reason behind 12,304 layoffs. That's well behind the number of jobs lost due to "market and economic conditions," which leads the way in 2026 with 38,506 cuts.
But AI's share of the total is growing. So far this year, employers have linked about 8% of all job cuts to AI – versus 5% in 2025.
And investors are rewarding almost any mention of AI efficiencies. As our colleague Steven Longenecker wrote last week for our parent company MarketWise, responding to Block (XYZ) cutting 40% of its staff...
Each time a CEO invokes AI and slashes headcount, their stock gets a sugar rush. Again, Block's stock jumped more than 20% overnight.
Salesforce (CRM) CEO Marc Benioff has been practically gleeful about replacing customer service workers with AI agents, saying, "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads."
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned employees last summer that AI would reduce the corporate workforce "in the coming years."
Just looking at these announcements, including Challenger's latest report, it can be easy to make AI a scapegoat for the labor market.
But it's not that simple...
In a blog post published Wednesday morning, the European Central Bank ("ECB") dove into whether AI was really behind all these layoff announcements. And it concluded that, for now, AI may be creating jobs rather than destroying them. From the ECB...
Companies that make significant use of AI are about 4% more likely to take on additional staff. In other words, AI-intensive firms tend, on average, to hire rather than fire. Much the same can be said of investment in AI: firms that invest in AI are nearly 2% more likely to hire additional staff than those that don't.
So at least over the next year, the ECB doesn't see any increased risk of layoffs from AI. But that changes over a longer time horizon. More from the blog post...
Indeed, a survey from the ifo Institute finds that many German companies expect AI to lead to some job cuts, albeit over a longer horizon of five years.
This Is Only the Beginning
As the world continues to spin, we need to start preparing for the next surprise.
And as our Ten Stock Trader editor Greg Diamond says, this wave of market volatility is just beginning (no matter what happens with the conflict in the Middle East).
But Greg doesn't suggest fleeing the market. He says you can leverage this uncertainty and potentially double your money over and over again in the weeks ahead.
Since 2018, when he joined Stansberry Research after working on Wall Street as a hedge-fund trader, Greg has been preparing subscribers for major market moves that "nobody" saw coming. And he's shown subscribers 41 chances to double their money or better.
Now, he's detailing his latest outlook in a free online event on Tuesday, March 10.
You'll hear more about how Greg's trading strategy works... his thoughts on the market... and his big prediction for the rest of 2026. You'll also hear from some of Greg's subscribers. Plus, Greg will share one of his favorite trading setups on a company positioned to capitalize on the coming wave of volatility – for free.
Click here to learn more and register for Greg's 2026 Market Crash Summit.
All the best,
Nick Koziol
Editor's note: Greg Diamond isn't just watching the markets... He says he has pinpointed the exact week stocks could reach their next major peak. His forecast comes from a controversial 118-year-old strategy that Wall Street dismisses as "voodoo science." But on Tuesday, he'll explain how it's signaling the market's next move.