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AI Daily Brief — 3 April 2025

The Liberation Day reciprocal-tariff schedule announced after market close yesterday gutted chip stocks on the opening bell. NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom and Micron all cratered as the Street repriced AI-infrastructure risk. Underneath the macro carnage: Midjourney’s first new base image model in nearly a year and Runway’s $308M Series D at $3B.

Top stories

  • NVIDIA stock falls 7.6% intraday on Liberation Day tariffs. HSBC’s Frank Lee downgraded NVDA from Buy to Hold and slashed his price target from $175 to $120. Semiconductors received a carve-out from the reciprocal duties, but the White House said chips would be ‘addressed separately’ in a future action. via Nasdaq
  • Sweeping chip-sector sell-off. AMD -8.9%, Broadcom over -10%, Micron -16%, TSMC -7% as investors priced in higher input costs for AI servers and potential follow-on chip-specific tariffs. via Yahoo Finance
  • Midjourney releases V7 — first new image model in nearly a year. Three flagship capabilities: default-on personalization, Draft Mode (~10x faster, ~half the GPU cost of standard), and Omni-Reference for consistent character/object rendering across images. Better text rendering, hands and body coherence. via TechCrunch
  • Runway raises $308M Series D at $3B valuation. Led by General Atlantic with Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, NVIDIA and SoftBank participating. Total funding now $545M. Capital earmarked for AI research, hiring, and Runway Studios. Lands days after Gen-4 unveiling and four days before Gen-4 Turbo. via TechCrunch
  • Big Tech wipes 5-13% as Nasdaq logs worst session in years. Meta, NVIDIA, Apple and Amazon fell between 5% and 13%. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite registered one of their worst single-day declines in years as the Liberation Day schedule (10% universal base Apr 5; reciprocal rates Apr 9) took hold. via Wikipedia
  • AI-server BOM exposure to tariffs comes into focus. Even with the semiconductor carve-out, AI servers contain non-chip components (PCBs, cooling, power, racks, optics) sourced from tariff-hit countries. The 32% Taiwan and 34% China duties (effective Apr 9) raised expected BOM costs for hyperscaler buildouts — a structural threat to the Stargate-scale capex trajectory. via Euronews

Who shipped

Midjourney shipped V7. Runway announced its Series D. Frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI) stayed silent on the day — all eyes on the tariff rout and the generative-video money flow.

Open-source pulse

No major open-weights drop dated Apr 3 — both Midjourney V7 and Runway Gen-4 are closed.

Money, infra & hardware

Runway’s $308M / $3B raise positions the company as an AI-Hollywood challenger amid a class-action copyright suit from artists. General Atlantic’s investment thesis framed Runway as a ‘world simulator’ bet, drawing NVIDIA’s strategic capital despite the litigation risk.

Quiet corners

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta and xAI all quiet on the model side. No notable arxiv landmark. The Anthropic Max plan launch was still six days out (Apr 9).

By the numbers

  • -7.6% / -8.9% / -10% / -16% — NVDA / AMD / AVGO / MU intraday drops
  • $308M / $3B / $545M — Runway Series D / post-money / cumulative funding
  • 10x / 50% — Midjourney V7 Draft Mode speed / GPU cost savings
  • Most-mentioned company: NVIDIA

Compiled by AI Feed’s editor from verified web sources for 3 April 2025.