5 things to know before the stock market opens Tuesday

Here are the most important news items that investors need to start their trading day:

Stock futures slipped in premarket trading Tuesday, with futures tied to the S&P 500 down 0.4%, futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average off 0.2%, and futures tied to the Nasdaq-100 lower by almost 0.6%. The dip comes after all three major indexes rose on Monday. The S&P 500 advanced 0.63% during the opening session of the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.2%, and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.82%. Tuesday also marks the first day of the Federal Reserve’s two-day policy meeting. Follow live market updates.

Meet Nvidia‘s next generation. The chipmaker, on the back of a monster stock rally, introduced the platform for its newest artificial intelligence chips and software, called Blackwell. The first chip in the lineup, the GB200, will ship later this year and is billed to be even more powerful than the “Hopper” H100s and similar versions that have powered an AI-boom and related stock surge. “Hopper is fantastic, but we need bigger GPUs,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Monday. The company didn’t say how much the GB200 will cost, though H100s cost between $25,000 and $40,000 per chip, according to analyst estimates.

There’s a dangerous dynamic playing out in banking that’s left hundreds of institutions vulnerable, CNBC’s Hugh Son reports. An analysis by consulting firm Klaros Group found more than 280 banks have both high exposure to commercial real estate and sizable unrealized losses resulting from the Federal Reserve’s repeated rate hikes. Those challenges have left banks likely in need of private investment or consolidation. But M&A is hard to pull off right now, which means cracks may soon appear.

Volkswagen workers at a plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, have filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to hold a unionization vote. It’s a major milestone for the United Auto Workers in its push to organize workers at 13 automakers after its record-breaking contracts with Ford, GM and Stellantis last year. The UAW said a “supermajority of Volkswagen workers have signed union cards in just 100 days.” VW, which has more than 4,000 union-eligible employees at the Chattanooga plant, said it “fully” supports an NLRB vote.

Unilever is spinning out its ice cream unit, which includes popular brand Ben & Jerry’s. The division generated 7.9 billion euros (about $8.6 billion) in revenue last year, accounting for roughly 13% of the company’s total 2023 revenue. But the UK company said it believes the unit will operate better as a standalone business. It announced the separation as part of a restructuring plan to become “a simpler, more focused company,” which also involves about 7,500 job cuts.

— CNBC’s Brian Evans, Kif Leswing, Hugh Son, Michael Wayland and Karen Gilchrist contributed to this report.

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