The biggest AI story of the morning: the U.S. has cleared sales of Nvidia's H200 AI chips to roughly 10 major Chinese firms including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com — up to 75,000 chips each. However, Beijing has signaled Chinese firms should hold off on purchases, pushing homegrown alternatives like Huawei instead. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined Trump's delegation at the last minute after a personal call from the president, boarding Air Force One in Alaska. Trump reportedly negotiated a 25% revenue share arrangement on the chip sales.
Source: Yahoo Finance — Link
AI chipmaker Cerebras priced its IPO at $185 per share — above the expected range — raising $5.55 billion in the largest U.S. IPO of 2026. The order book closed roughly 20x oversubscribed. Cerebras, which focuses on inference workloads rather than training, counts OpenAI as a major customer via a $20 billion-plus computing deal signed in January. Shares begin trading today on Nasdaq under ticker CBRS.
Source: Seeking Alpha — Link
The Nasdaq climbed 1.20% to 26,402 and the S&P 500 rose 0.58% to 7,444 on Wednesday, both fresh record closes, as semiconductor and megacap tech stocks powered through a hotter-than-expected PPI inflation print. The Dow slipped 0.14%. Oil at $102/barrel on Strait of Hormuz disruptions kept inflation fears alive, but tech momentum proved unstoppable.
Source: Yahoo Finance — Link
Nvidia closed at a record $225.83, up 2.29%, as AI enthusiasm and the China summit news lifted the stock. The company's market cap now exceeds $5.3 trillion, keeping it at the top of the global leaderboard. Nvidia earnings are due May 20, adding to the near-term catalyst pile.
Source: Yahoo Finance — Link
Apple shares hit an intraday high of $300.49 on Wednesday before closing at a record $298.87, up 1.4%. The milestone was fueled by strong iPhone 17 demand, fiscal Q3 revenue growth guidance of 14-17%, and a fresh $100 billion share repurchase authorization. Wedbush's Dan Ives has the Street-high price target at $400.
Bank of America analyst Madeline Brooks upgraded Akamai from Neutral to Buy and raised the price target from $130 to $175, arguing the company is being revalued as an AI infrastructure play rather than a legacy CDN. Akamai's Cloud Infrastructure Services segment grew 40% year-over-year, driven by AI workloads and edge inference. A recent $1.8 billion, seven-year cloud contract underscored the pivot.
The iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF (IGV) is down 35% from its highs and 28% lower in 2026 as investors flee traditional SaaS names on fears that agentic AI tools — particularly Anthropic's Claude Cowork — will let enterprises build in-house replacements. ServiceNow is down 42% YTD, Salesforce -30%, Adobe -27%, and Microsoft's software segment has lagged at -16%. Analysts remain split: 90% still rate NOW a buy with 57% upside to the $137.50 median target.
Source: CNBC — Link
AMD CEO Lisa Su now projects the server CPU market will exceed $120 billion by 2030, up from a prior 18-20% annual growth estimate to 35%+, driven by exploding demand from AI agents that require a near 1:1 CPU-to-GPU ratio. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon projects AMD could hit $20 EPS by 2028 — two years ahead of prior expectations. AMD stock sits at ~$412, up roughly 66% YTD.
Source: Benzinga — Link
Morgan Stanley strategist Mike Wilson raised the firm's year-end S&P 500 target from 7,800 to 8,000, citing "strong results and ongoing AI adoption" as key catalysts. The index closed Wednesday at 7,444, implying about 7.5% upside to the new target.
Micron Technology bounced nearly 5% on Wednesday to ~$809, approaching its 52-week high of $818.67. The stock is up 137% year-to-date, powered by an unprecedented AI-driven memory chip super-cycle — HBM demand from data centers has created severe supply shortages. Micron gained nearly 40% over the last five trading sessions alone.
Source: Seeking Alpha — Link
