Meta Platforms and most other US stocks are rising following a rush of profit reports from some of the country’s most influential companies, but drops for Nvidia and Microsoft are keeping the market in check.
The S&P 500 was up 0.1 per cent in afternoon trading, as four out of every five stocks in the index climbed. The Dow Jones was up 57 points, or 0.1 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3 per cent lower. The Australian sharemarket is set to climb, with futures at 5.05am AEDT pointing to a rise of 59 points or 0.7 per cent at the open. The ASX jumped by 0.6 per cent on Thursday.
Most stocks climbed, but losses for Nvidia and Microsoft weighed on Wall Street. Credit: AP
Meta Platforms was one of the stronger forces pushing upward on indexes after rising 1.5 per cent. The company behind Facebook and Instagram delivered a better profit for the end of 2024 than analysts expected. Perhaps just as importantly for the market, it also talked up its artificial-intelligence efforts and said it will continue to invest in the space.
That calmed some worries that a Chinese upstart, DeepSeek, had raised when it said it developed a large language model capable of competing with the world’s best, without having to use top-flight chips. That raised questions about whether all the investment underway for AI chips, data centres and electricity are really needed and sent a shock through markets at the start of the week.
The AI boom has been a primary reason the US stock market has hit repeated records in recent years, and the threat has hit stocks like Nvidia particularly hard. The chip company that’s become the symbol of the AI frenzy fell 3.9 per cent Thursday and was one of the heaviest weights dragging on the S&P 500.
Loading
The only stock to pull more heavily on the index was Microsoft, which fell 6.2 per cent. The Redmond, Washington-based giant topped analysts’ expectations for profit in the latest quarter, but the focus was instead on the slower-than-expected growth in its cloud computing business, which is a centrepiece of its AI efforts.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also continued to talk up AI following DeepSeek’s disruption.
“DeepSeek had some real innovations,” he said, and it is good to have efficiency gains and lower prices in AI development because it “means people can consume more and there’ll be more apps written.”
