April most definitely has not been the cruelest month for US chip giant Intel or its shareholders.

The stock is on a remarkable run that’s made it the best performer in the S&P 500 for the month, posting a gain of nearly 43% shortly after 11 a.m. ET Friday. That’s outdone AI darlings like Sandisk, Lumentum, Ciena Corp., Coherent, and Seagate Technology Holdings.

In fact, the monthly view actually underplays the extent of the stock’s performance. Over the eight sessions that ended yesterday — which includes March 31 — the stock was up just shy of 50%. That’s by far its best eight-day streak over the last 30 years.

Investors have eaten up Intel’s announcements this week of partnerships, first with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Terafab project, and separately, with Alphabet on developing custom chips for Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure needs.

More broadly, the seemingly relentless demand for computing capacity and chips related to AI seems to present, at least, the prospect of Intel actually solving the long-standing problems at its contract chipmaking business — known as a foundry — that have weighed on the business for years.

Oh, being partially nationalized by the US government amid an increasing global focus on ensuring secure supply chains for crucial technologies like semiconductors probably doesn’t hurt either.

(In case you're keeping track, the US bought a nearly 10% stake in Intel for about $8.9 billion in late August of last year. Today, that stake is worth about $27 billion.)

Investors were selling Palantir shares again on Friday, with the stock falling as much as 6% before stabilizing, thanks to an assist from the White House.

At its worst moments, the sell-off put the retail favorite on track for its worst weekly loss (more than 16%) since February 2021.

But Palantir has powerful friends: President Trump posted on Truth Social celebrating the company’s “great war fighting capabilities,” sending the stock higher, though it remained in the red.

The overall negative sentiment seems to stem from Anthropic’s powerful new AI models, at least judging from the latest epistle from Palantir bull Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities:

“Anthropic released a new product around multi-agent orchestration, which continues to add more headwinds to the software sector. While Anthropic is hitting a new scale with the company now at $30 billion [annual run rate], up from $9 billion at the start of the year, we believe this is not at the expense of PLTR’s business as the company continues to accelerate both its US commercial and government businesses.”

Of course, the specter of AI undermining of other software companies has been a well-established theme for months. And it’s clearly at play in the market on Friday, with Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Figma, and Atlassian continuing to get clocked on negative AI implications.

But the recent inclusion of Palantir among the pack of potentially replaceable software providers is newer, with the view popularized by well-followed market commentator Michael Burry’s pronouncement — since deleted — that Anthropic is “eating Palantir’s lunch,” which seemed to contribute to the downdraft for Palantir today.

The stock dove through its 50-day moving average in recent days, underscoring the sputtering momentum for what has been one of the market’s biggest winners over the last couple years. Long-term holders are still up massively, with the stock up about 1,400% over the last three years.

CoreWeave struck a multiyear deal with Anthropic to rent data center capacity to build and deploy its Claude AI models, the company announced Friday.

The company did not specify how much the deal is worth. The stock, which has swelled more than 20% in the past month as of yesterday’s close amid a string of positive news, is up another 4.5% in premarket trading as of 8:45 a.m. ET.

CoreWeave announced on Thursday that it has expanded its deal to provide AI compute to Meta. The company, which initially booked a $14.2 billion deal with Meta in September, will now provide an additional $21 billion worth of services to the hyperscaler. Separately, CoreWeave announced two bond offerings on Thursday as well.

CoreWeave also recently disclosed that it would borrow $8.5 billion backed by its chips and Meta’s AI compute purchases. The unique financing arrangement helped secure a lower interest rate.

TSMC is up more than 2% in premarket trading after the world’s largest chipmaker reported a 35% jump in first-quarter revenue, beating Wall Street expectations on continued strong demand for AI chips.

Revenue from January through March rose 35% year over year to NT$1.13 trillion ($35.6 billion), marginally topping consensus estimates of NT$1.12 trillion. March revenue alone surged 45% from a year earlier.

The strong top-line figures suggest that demand for TSMC’s chips — used in everything from smartphones to massive data centers — remain robust, with strong order momentum from major customers including Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom, even as concerns rise that the Middle East war could dent global AI infrastructure spending.

Price hikes for its advanced chips may have also contributed to the sales beat.

The company is set to report first-quarter earnings on April 16, alongside updated guidance for the current quarter and full year.

Shares have gained roughly 30% year to date.

Sandisk spiked Thursday as Bernstein boosted its earnings estimates for the company, with analysts raising their price target to $1,250 from $1,000, the most optimistic view of the 23 analysts polled by Bloomberg.

The gains come amid a fairly subdued day for broad indexes and other AI memory plays like Micron, Seagate Technology Holdings, and Western Digital.

Bernstein’s more bullish view comes after a surge in prices of NAND flash memory based on AI demand. (NAND flash is used for long-term data storage and is also a key input to consumer products like phones and other devices.)

“Memory prices continue to surprise to the upside with NAND showing the strongest increases and continued acceleration,” Bernstein wrote.

The analysts — led by Mark C. Newman — raised their base case for next fiscal year’s adjusted earnings per share by 58% to $144, from $91. (That new forecast now blows away the Wall Street consensus estimate of $94.07, per FactSet.) The new price target implies a gain of roughly 50% from where the stock is currently.

Bernstein analysts even threw out a “blue-sky scenario” price target of $3,000 for Sandisk, should an even more bullish scene play out for both earnings and market valuations.

Up nearly 250% this year, Sandisk has been the best-performing stock in the S&P 500. It reports earnings on April 30 after the close.

Quantum technology firm Infleqtion is booming in early trading after announcing that it would be providing upgraded quantum hardware to the International Space Station as part of a cargo mission slated to launch as early as Friday.

The equipment “is designed to support the stable and simultaneous production of dual-species quantum degenerate gases using rubidium and potassium atoms, one of the long-standing scientific objectives of the mission,” per the press release, and will expand the Cold Atom Laboratory’s ability “to investigate ultracold matter and demonstrate advanced quantum sensing in space, under real operating conditions.”

After the close on Wednesday, the company said it was targeting sales of $40 million this year, which if achieved would have revenue growth accelerating to 23% from 12% in 2025.

“Space remains a particularly important market for us in a major area of growth,” CEO Matt Kinsella said during a conference call on Wednesday, highlighting that the company has partnered with NASA for over a decade.

Read more: Infleqtion CEO Matt Kinsella on how the newly public quantum computing company is “following in the footsteps of Nvidia”

CoreWeave announced that it’s significantly boosting its sales of AI computing capacity to Meta.

The neocloud will now provide an additional $21 billion in AI compute to the social media giant through December 2032.

CoreWeave had previously booked a $14.2 billion deal back in September that included an option to expand the commitment, which has been exercised with today’s announcement along with new compute purchased.

Shares jumped in premarket trading, but gave all that advance and then some to trade down 3.5% as of 10:10 a.m. ET.

CoreWeave recently closed a financing deal that management billed as the first of its kind, as it was backed by its chips and Meta’s AI compute purchase. This ability to effectively borrow Meta’s superior creditworthiness helped CoreWeave reduce its cost of debt.

Separately, CoreWeave also announced that it intends to issue $3 billion in senior convertible notes due in 2032 and $1.25 billion in senior notes due in 2031 in separate private offerings.

“As spending on AI infrastructure continues to accelerate so does the need for additional debt funding, with both Meta and CoreWeave likely to continue to tap debt markets as their cloud capacity agreement expands,” wrote Bloomberg Intelligence credit analysts Robert Schiffman and Alex Reid.

Update (10:34 a.m. ET): A previous version of this post erroneously stated that the $21 billion deal was inclusive of the prior $14.2 billion in purchase commitments.

STAAR Surgical rose more than 20% in premarket trading after it gave preliminary Q1 sales numbers that crushed Wall Street expectations, which it attributed to booming sales in China and the Americas.

The company, which sells eye implants, said in a press release published Wednesday that it expects to report revenue north of $90 million in the current quarter, compared to the $73 million analysts polled by FactSet are currently penciling in.

The company said sales in China “accounted for the majority of the increase in net sales, along with continued double-digit growth in the Americas.” It also noted that sales in the Middle East “were negatively affected by significant geopolitical and macroeconomic challenges, resulting in a decline in sales in parts of those regions.”

The stock is up nearly 21% as of 6:25 a.m. ET, having fallen more than 11% from the start of the year to yesterday’s close.

Quantum computing firm Infleqtion said it’s aiming to book $40 million in sales this year as it released its 2025 results after the close on Wednesday.

That would be an increase of roughly 23% compared to the $32.5 million in revenues the company generated in 2025, and would mark an acceleration from growth of 12% last year.

The seller of quantum sensors and computers went public via a SPAC in February after carrying a pre-money valuation of $1.8 billion (well below other pure-play peers like Rigetti Computing, IonQ, and D-Wave Quantum).

“We did $29 million in revenue in 2024, and then we announced that we did $50 million of booked and awarded business in 2025. I think that sets a good foundation for significant revenue growth going forward,” CEO Matthew Kinsella told us in February. “I’ve always deeply believed that we need to develop that muscle of commercialization.”