(Getty Images)

Market Wrap

Stocks rise amid optimism around US peace plan for Iran

Gains in technology supported the broader market rally.

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 all rose amid renewed hopes that the conflict in the Middle East could draw down after it was reported late Tuesday that the US sent Iran a 15-point plan to end the war. Reports that Iran would not accept the plan seemed to dampen the rally, but the market remained cautiously optimistic.

Every sector finished higher except for energy, which fell alongside oil prices, settling at $90 a barrel on Wednesday.

Moving higher:

Arm Holdings soared after announcing Tuesday evening that it would create a new AI chip in partnership with Meta. Arm’s CEO said it’s expected to generate $15 billion in annual revenue by 2031.
Nvidia, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, ON Semiconductor, and NXP Semiconductors all got a bump from Arm’s rosy revisions to its outlook.
Fundrise Innovation Fund, a publicly traded venture fund that owns stakes in private companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, continued to rally as the gap between the value of its stock price and its underlying assets grows.
EchoStar jumped on a fresh report about the supposedly imminent IPO filing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s commercial space behemoth, SpaceX.
Shares of JetBlue spiked following a Semafor report that the airline is exploring merger partners.
Cipher Digital leapt on news that the firm signed a new data center lease and secured a $200 million revolving credit facility.

Moving lower:

Memory stocks Sandisk, Micron, Seagate Technology Holdings, and Western Digital sank after Alphabet’s Google Research group published details of a new algorithm known as TurboQuant.

Max Knoblauch5h

JetBlue surges following report it is exploring potential merger partners

Shares of JetBlue spiked more than 15% midday Wednesday following a Semafor report that the airline is exploring merger partners.

The company has explored Washington’s regulatory temperature around a potential merger with United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and Alaska Air, per the report. When Semafor reached out to JetBlue regarding the exploration, it declined to comment.

JetBlue’s attempt to acquire budget rival Spirit was blocked by the Biden administration in 2024.

Exclusive: JetBlue explores potential merger partners

JetBlue’s attempt to acquire budget rival Spirit was blocked by the Biden administration in 2024.

Matt Phillips6h

Sandisk, Micron dive as Google Research unveils AI algorithm to reduce memory demands

This might be an unfortunately memorable day for the memory trade.

Memory stocks Sandisk, Micron, Seagate Technology Holdings, and Western Digital sank Wednesday after Alphabet’s Google Research group published details of a new algorithm known as TurboQuant.

Per Google’s extremely technical release, TurboQuant is an algorithm that allows for a data technique called “vector quantization” to be used while addressing the issue of so-called “memory overhead,” allowing data in AI models to be compressed without reductions in accuracy or requiring retraining, while reducing the memory storage requirements at data centers.

And that outlook seems to be enough for the market to be sending memory stocks down for the day.

TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression

And that outlook seems to be enough for the market to be sending memory stocks down for the day.

J. Edward Moreno6h

Fundrise’s venture fund extends rally, trading more than 2 dozen times above asset value

Fundrise Innovation Fund, a publicly traded venture fund that owns stakes in private companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, is continuing to rally as the gap between the value of its stock price and its underlying assets grows.

Shares of the fund, which uses the ticker VCX, closed at $314.99 on Tuesday and rose to $533 by Wednesday morning — a nearly 70% jump for the day and a more than 1,500% increase in the value of its stock since it went public on March 19.

Fundrise’s vertiginous price action underscores just how hungry retail investors are for exposure to high-flying private companies, even at increasingly eye-watering implied valuations.

Fundrise’s venture fund, which owns private tech giants like Anthropic and SpaceX, surges as retail investors pile in

Fundrise’s vertiginous price action underscores just how hungry retail investors are for exposure to high-flying private companies, even at increasingly eye-watering implied valuations.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

Matt Phillips

Matt Phillips7h

Chip stocks lifted by Arm’s barn-burner revenue projection hike, Meta deal

Chip stocks rose early after chip design firm Arm Holdings announced a massive upgrade to its long-term forecasts for sales at an investor event Tuesday evening, following earlier news that it’s partnering with Meta to create “a new class of data center chips” — the company projected the new chip alone will generate $15 billion in annual revenue by 2031.

Nvidia, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, ON Semiconductor, Microchip Technology, and NXP Semiconductors all got a bump from Arm’s rosy revisions to its outlook.

Why? Basically, the speech that Arm CEO Rene Haas delivered at its Arm Everywhere event in San Francisco supports the idea that “agentic AI is expanding the TAM for server CPUs which should drive server unit growth upside,” as HSBC semiconductor stock analyst Frank Lee put it in a note Wednesday.

In other words, the rise of AI will equate to a permanent step up in chip demand from AI data center servers — also known as an increase in the total addressable market, or TAM. So, you know, higher chip stock prices.

Arm says its in-house AI chip will generate billions in revenue