If you’re spending this Monday morning thinking about Friday, you’re not alone. Wall Street is, too, if perhaps for different reasons.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics will report May’s employment figures at the end of the week, offering investors and economists insight into a labor market grappling with uncertainty over artificial intelligence, tariffs, the war with Iran and more. Still, the job market has been showing signs of momentum: April and March surpassed analysts’ expectations, and the ADP weekly data continues to look better than at the end of 2025.

“Healthcare continues to be a robust source of demand for labor, though construction, retail trade and professional services have also been hiring in recent months,” says Ross Mayfield, an investment strategist at Baird. “Outside of the information sector, the job market looks solid enough, even with consumer sentiment near record lows.”

AI Anxiety

AI adds another wrinkle to jobs reports nowadays. While we’ve long been fed fictional nightmares about being replaced by robots at work, reality is starting to look somewhat scary, too. Last month, for instance, New York City Comptroller Mark Levine published a report warning that the city must act now to prepare for potential AI-driven job losses. Some companies are hesitant to cop to AI-related layoffs, while others are letting tech take the blame when it’s not deserved, making it hard to understand the actual impact on the labor market.

“We believe AI is acting as a headwind to new hiring rather than a driver of mass layoffs,” says Thomas Urano, co-chief investment officer at Sage Advisory. “If that dynamic is structural, it means payroll prints can stay soft even without a traditional recession signal.”

Of course, this all complicates how the Federal Reserve, responsible for maintaining economic stability and maximizing employment, reads the labor market. If AI is structurally thinning the hiring pipeline, the Fed may need to rethink what a healthy payroll number looks like, Urano adds. Speaking of the Fed, it doesn’t have a job we’d want:

• The central bank will be closely watching this week’s jobs report as it considers how to bring down still-high inflation. As of Friday, the CME’s FedWatch tool showed a 98.8% chance that the Fed will keep rates steady during its June meeting. A cut doesn’t look possible until at least next year, per the tool.
• “Another strong nonfarm payrolls report would only serve to confirm what the market has been pricing for weeks now: More rate cuts from here are highly unlikely,” absent a financial crisis or recession, Mayfield says. “The bar for raising rates still seems fairly high, but an extended pause should be the base case for investors.”

What Else to Watch: Investors will also be looking for some insight on business activity via today’s Institute for Supply Management manufacturing data release, and the state of the economy via the Fed Beige Book on Wednesday.

The fast-multiplying demand for AI computing power has raised fears of a crunch that could outdo the fanciest cereal in the organic aisle at Trader Joe’s.

It has also created a mouth-watering opportunity for specialized cloud providers renting out high-end AI computing power. The best known of these so-called neocloud companies, whose customers are spared the costly task of buying and maintaining physical hardware, is Coreweave.

On Neocloud Nine

Demand for their services is multiplying as resources are disproportionately captured by hyperscalers: Epoch AI calculated that Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle owned 71% of global AI compute as of April, up from 63% in early 2024. Even they are facing constraints: Some AI researchers at Google have had to join the queue for access to its cloud resources, leading a handful to quit and launch their own ventures. Developers at smaller firms and in crucial sectors including defense, science, education and healthcare could end up on the wrong side of a bottleneck.

Neoclouds’ earnings growth underscores the market’s potential. Last month, Coreweave, the largest independent neocloud company, reported its first-quarter revenue doubled to $2.1 billion. Its shares are up 53% this year, while rival IREN is up 68%. Dutch neocloud Nebius, however, is making the most noise of late:

• Situational Awareness, a buzzy Silicon Valley hedge fund run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, last week disclosed a 5.6% stake in Nebius worth roughly $2.8 billion.
• Nebius revenue rose 684% to $399 million in its latest quarter and, with shares up 176% this year, its $58.6 billion market cap as of Friday narrowly trails Coreweave’s $59.7 billion.

The companies face shared hurdles. They’re losing money (Coreweave $740 million in its latest quarter, Nebius $100 million) and will have to contend with the depreciation of their GPU equipment over time and the expectation that compute prices will fall as data centers scale.

History Lesson: McKinsey analysts noted last fall that, during the Cloud 1.0 era in the early 2000s, there was a similar wave of fast-growing firms that plugged compute gaps. Once hyperscalers expanded their own capacity, almost all of them ended up “acquired, sidelined, or forced into niche roles,” they wrote. Well, two weeks ago, Google and Blackstone announced they were launching their own compute-as-a-service joint venture, and last week, Mark Zuckerberg said his Meta, the only US hyperscaler not in the cloud business, could “definitely” start renting out computing resources as it builds out its own capacity. Gulp.

Honey, they shrunk the smart ring.

Oura ring stacks are about to look a lot less chunky after the smart ring-maker announced it downsized its newest wearable by 40%. It’s a feat of shrinkage that Oura said involved redesigning essentially all of the ring’s plumbing (mechanical, electrical, optical, battery and sensing).

The Oura Ring 5 apparently won’t sacrifice performance for size, with the company touting its longer battery life and more accurate sensing. A slew of other new features includes a type of activity detection that Oura said is better at detecting low-impact workouts like Pilates, as well as GLP-1 tracking and insights.

Oura is also partnering with Counsel Health to offer optional AI health advice for an unknown cost on top of the Ring 5’s $6-per-month subscription.

Do One Thing, Do It Well

Oura basically makes one product: its rings, plus accessories like chargers. The Finnish startup has dominated the smart-ring scene since launching its first product in 2015. After raising more than $900 million in an October round led by Fidelity Management & Research, Oura had a valuation of $11 billion and said this month that it should have more than 5 million paid members by the end of this quarter.

The pressure’s on to keep up its pace after Oura confidentially filed last month for an IPO:

• Oura is launching its newest ring earlier in its product lifecycle than usual. While the gap between the Ring 3 and Ring 4 was three years, Oura halved that wait to about 1 and a half years for the Ring 5.
• Oura announced the Ring 5 a day before rival RingConn’s Gen 3 started heading to doorsteps. Ultrahuman’s Ring Pro, meanwhile, is set to start shipping in mid-July.

Protective Oura: Ultrahuman’s market share in the US more than doubled from 2024 to the second quarter of last year, IDC Research told TechCrunch. But its shares plummeted to single digits later in the year after Oura pursued a patent-infringement case against the India-based company that led to the US effectively banning shipments of Ultrahuman’s rings. This year, Ultrahuman plans to stage a comeback after US Customs and Border Protection cleared its new model.