Global smartphone purchases have collapsed. Worldwide smartphone shipments dropped -22.0% YoY in Q3 2026, to 255.3 million units, their largest quarterly decline on record. Samsung's shipments fell -5.8% YoY, to 57.8 million units, while Apple's declined -4.0% to 57.3 million units. At the same time, Xiaomi shipments fell -29.2% YoY to 30.7 million units, Oppo dropped -34.5%, to 25.6 million units, while Vivo fell -31.5%, to 19.1 million units. This comes as memory costs have surged +350% since last year, driven by AI-related demand, putting further pressure on smartphone manufacturers. As a result, soaring component costs are forcing vendors to raise prices and reduce budget-focused offerings, with consumers increasingly keeping their existing devices for longer. Global smartphone sales are contracting amid surging prices.

BREAKING: Broadcom, $AVGO, is seeking more than $50 billion in financing for OpenAI’s custom AI chip, which the firms are developing together, per WSJ. Apollo and Blackstone are among the lenders Broadcom has talked to about participating in the deal. The financing is intended to help Oracle bridge the gap between when it has to pay for the hardware and when its cloud computing revenue starts coming in.