Evening digest: China growth slows, Nvidia makes AI buy, Bitcoin slips

Global markets and policymakers faced a turbulent start to the week as Australia mourned a deadly antisemitic attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, and China reported fresh signs of economic slowdown.

Nvidia moved to deepen its AI infrastructure with a key acquisition, and Bitcoin slid below $87,000 amid heavy liquidations.

The developments underscore rising geopolitical, economic, and market uncertainty heading into year-end, with investors turning cautious across equities, crypto, and global growth outlooks.

Australia mourns deadly Bondi Beach attack

Australia is reeling after one of the country’s deadliest mass shootings in nearly three decades, following a terrorist attack at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Sunday.

Authorities say 16 people were killed when a father and son opened fire on a crowd of around 1,000 people gathered for the event.

The older suspect, a 50-year-old man, was killed at the scene, while his 24-year-old son was critically injured.

Between 40 and 43 others were wounded, including two police officers. Victims ranged in age from just 10 to 87.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned the attack as an antisemitic “act of pure evil,” saying the country is united in grief and anger.

He also signaled that the government would look at strengthening gun laws further, building on the sweeping reforms introduced after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.

China's growth slows as demand weakens

China’s latest economic data points to a continued loss of momentum as the year winds down.

Industrial output grew 4.8% in November compared with a year earlier, slightly lower than October’s 4.9% and short of the 5% economists were expecting.

That marks the slowest pace in about 15 months. Consumer activity looked even weaker.

Retail sales rose just 1.3%, a sharp drop from 2.9% in October and well below forecasts, making it the softest reading since China scrapped zero-COVID restrictions in late 2022.

A steep 8.5% fall in car sales was a major drag.

Investment isn’t offering much support either. Fixed-asset investment fell 2.6% over the January–November period, reflecting ongoing stress in the property sector and the toll it’s taking on household confidence.

Nvidia buys Slurm developer SchedMD

Nvidia is making another strategic move to strengthen its AI infrastructure stack, announcing the acquisition of SchedMD, the company behind the open-source Slurm workload manager.

SchedMD, based in Utah, was founded in 2010 by Slurm’s original developers, Morris Jette and Danny Auble.

The firm has around 40 employees and works with major customers such as CoreWeave and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Nvidia has partnered with SchedMD for more than a decade, and the company says Slurm will continue to be distributed as open source following the deal.

At its core, Slurm is the software that helps schedule and manage massive computing jobs across large data centers, exactly the kind of workloads needed for high-performance computing and training large generative AI models.

By bringing Slurm in-house, Nvidia tightens the integration between this widely used scheduler and its own hardware, while complementing its proprietary CUDA software platform.

Bitcoin slides below $87,000

Bitcoin took a sharp dip on Monday, sliding below the $87,000 mark in what was a quick but painful move for the market.

In thin holiday trading, the world’s largest cryptocurrency fell nearly 2% to around $86,751, its lowest level since early December, wiping roughly $40 billion off its market value, which now sits near $1.73 trillion.

The drop quickly snowballed.

According to Coinglass, about $200 million in leveraged positions were liquidated within an hour, and almost all of that, around $197 million, came from long bets.

As stop-losses kicked in and forced selling accelerated, the downside pressure intensified.

The weakness wasn’t limited to Bitcoin. Ethereum, Solana, and XRP all fell between 3% and 4%, reflecting a broader risk-off mood across crypto markets.

Traders pointed to a mix of factors behind the selloff, including caution ahead of key US economic data and fading enthusiasm around expectations of crypto-friendly deregulation tied to Donald Trump.