SK Hynix reportedly eyes U.S. memory play

0:00Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Breakfast, where we cover the top news for investors every morning. We've made it to the middle of the trading week today is Wednesday, September 16. I'm Julie Morgan. South Korea's SK Heinex is reportedly in talks with Intel about a deal that would see it manufacture memory chips on US soil for the first time. According to Reuters under one potential scenario, SK Heinex would lease part of Intel's long-plan chip making facility in Ohio. Under another scenario, it could form a venture with Intel and major cloud firms that are keen to lock in memory chips supplies. However, sources in the report said potential opposition from Seoul could be a major hurdle. One of the sources described the talks as exploratory and stressed that no decisions have been made, adding that SK Heinex might also consider other ways to structure the deal. SK Heinex said in a statement to Reuters that it is reviewing various measures, including

1:03establishing additional production basis to strengthen the competitiveness of its memory business. Intel declined to comment but said it is continuing with investments in Ohio to ready the site. Amazon Web Services said it is unable to restore access to its cloud computing facilities in Bahrain, and one of its data hosting zones in the United Arab Emirates more than six months after they were struck by Iranian drones. AWS wrote in a status update, the damage to our infrastructure span multiple availability zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand. Availability zones refer to groups of data centers in the same region. The next status update won't comment or early next year. AWS's customers in the affected areas have migrated their workloads to other regions, using backups were available. The Federal Open Market Committee is widely expected to raise its benchmark rate by a quarter

2:05percent. Goldman Sachs believes the FOMC will proceed with the hike primarily to avoid the negative market reaction that would likely follow if rates were kept on hold. However, Michael strain director of economic policy studies and senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute said he does not believe a majority of the FOMC has materially changed disassessment since July, leading him to expect the central bank to leave rates unchanged. We don't have to wait too much longer to find out which way they'll go. The Fed will make the rate announcement at 2 p.m. today and the chairman will hold a press conference at 2.30. Due to this, we have one programming note. Wall Street lunch with Kim Khan will be published later today after the rate announcement and presser. According to the CME Fed watch tool, the probability of a 25 basis point rate hike stands at 92.5 percent compared with 7.5 percent odds of maintaining the current rate.

3:07Now if we look at a few other articles that are trending, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg joins the CEO of NVIDIA in pushing back against AI slowdown. The EU is set to propose social media restrictions for kids under 13. And retail traders chase cyber options but skip the stocks. On our catalyst to watch for the day, on semiconductor is holding an analyst day, and we have investor days at Oscar Health, Copper's and Salesforce. On Wall Street stock end expatures are in the green. Crude oil is down 1.6 percent at 104 a barrel. Brink crude is down 1 percent at 107. The footsie 100 is up 0.4 percent and the DAX is up 0.1 percent. FTAI aviation is on our biggest movers list. FTAI is up 2 percent after the aircraft leasing an aviation services company authorized

4:10a new $500 million share repurchase program. And a couple of items on today's economic calendar before the FOMC announcement and press conference at 8.30 a.m. retail sales and at 10 a.m. the Housing Market Index. That's it for today's Wall Street breakfast. Thanks for listening. To take full advantage of seeking alpha, join the highest quality community of real investors discussing stocks and ETFs at seekingalpha.com slash subscriptions. I'm your host Julie Morgan. Go out and make it a great day.