GS Johnstone GS TMT SPEC SALES Muse mania and readacross debate IFX Springer Sunrise

GS Johnstone - GS TMT SPEC SALES: Muse mania and readacross debate; IFX & Springer at German Conference; Sunrise debate over surther cuts 22 Sep 2026 Sean Johnstone · Goldman Sachs · TMT Specialist Sales Tue 22 Sep 2026, 3:13am ET

GS TMT SPEC SALES – Tuesday 22nd September Overnight markets moved firmly back into risk-on mode, led by AI and semis. META (best day in 17 months) most talked about name yesterday (now +17% over the past 9 sessions) and the CPU complex was the standout, with ARM +17%, Intel +12%, AMD +10% and Qualcomm +10%. The tape looked like a sharp transition back into a more thematic AI regime, with investors regrossing parts of the AI trade after a choppy period, although the speed of the move also triggered plenty of “too far, too fast” debate. AMD crossing the $1tn market-cap mark and joining Dell/HPE among large-cap AI winners at all-time highs reinforced the message that select pockets of the AI infrastructure trade can still work, even if positioning and macro remain sources of volatility. The trigger was Meta’s Muse, which made the consumer-agentic AI theme feel much more tangible and incoming calls were all about Muse & Instinct (Muse not available outside the US yet but Instinct is – both getting rave reviews from those I talk to using them. - just 3 weeks after its launch, Instinct reported it already had >100k users, w/ its private valuation jumping from $2.25B to a targeted $10B in a month .) Muse has fundamentally shifted the market narrative from passive, token-generating chatbots to active, "agentic" systems. Unlike traditional large language models that merely generate text, Muse executes complex, multi-step actions—such as booking travel, negotiating bills, and managing schedules—by running inside an isolated cloud virtual machine equipped with its own sandboxed browser. Because these agentic workflows require continuous web browsing, API calls, and multi-step execution, they are significantly more CPU- and inference-heavy than basic text queries. Investors quickly connected this trend to an impending wave of demand for advanced processors, networking equipment, cloud hosting, and security APIs, revitalizing the broader tech hardware supply chain. Early download performance highlights why investors are treating Muse as a massive strategic inflection point.

Third-party estimates indicate that Muse is substantially outpacing the historical early mobile launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in the US and Canada. Over its first 12 days on iOS, Muse garnered 1.8 million regional downloads and achieved 642,000 daily active users in the US, outperforming ChatGPT's early metrics of 1.3 million downloads and 231,000 daily active users. Meta’s massive distribution advantage across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook provides a ready-made channel to scale Muse to billions of users, giving it an unprecedented competitive edge in user acquisition over traditional startups. The rise of agentic commerce will potentially restructuring web traffic and is creating a sharp divergence in industry read-throughs. Near term the clear winners are infrastructure providers, security platforms, and agent enablers . In contrast, transaction-heavy platforms and online marketplaces face the immediate threat of disintermediation. However that said last week Shopify (+7%) was seen as at risk and yesterday it rallied after expanding its agentic-checkout partnership with Muse ..... countering previous concerns that AI

agents would bypass established payment gateways. Meanwhile, Amazon’s decision to block Muse from browsing and shopping on its storefront underscores an intensifying battle over who owns the customer relationship. ( The Verge ). This tension is driving defensive product cycles across the industry. This is just the start and OpenAI is reportedly fast-tracking its own consumer-agent capabilities to actively defend its ecosystem and compete with Meta's Muse and xAI's Grok. in many way we have had the ability use these type product since OpenClaw but the wrapper on Muse and Instinct have made them available to the masses rather than just geeks.... Beyond retail and search, the emergence of frictionless AI agents poses a unique…