Bear going for fruit (Armen Nimani/Getty Images)

S&P 500 extends losing streak to five sessions

The benchmark US index tied its longest losing streak since April 2024.

8/21/25 3:25PM

The S&P 500 fell 0.4% and the Nasdaq 100 gave back 0.5% while the Russell 2000 outperformed with a 0.2% advance. The benchmark US index has now declined for five straight sessions, tying its longest losing streak since April 2024.

Every S&P 500 sector ETF declined outside of the commodity-linked energy and materials groups, with consumer staples faring the worst. That was in large part due to Walmart, which dropped 4.5% after the mega retailer missed quarterly earnings expectations for the first time in three years. Declines were led by First Solar, which fell 7%.

Paramount Skydance was a bright spot on the tape, jumping 14.6% as call option activity surged. Separately, the newly formed media giant is facing scrutiny in Washington.

Meta shares fell about 1.2% after The Wall Street Journal reported that the tech giant is freezing new AI hires without express permission from the company’s chief AI officer.

Coty shares sank 21.4% as investors digested the beauty conglomerate’s disappointing Q4 results, including a surprise profit loss.

Shares of Cracker Barrel dipped 7% as the Southern-themed restaurant chain’s new minimalist logo design sparked a flood of criticism from fans online.

Hertz shares fell 2.5% after Congress requested a meeting with officials to discuss the company’s controversial use of AI damage scanners.

Nio shares rose 9% following the popular Chinese EV maker unveiling the latest model of its ES8 electric SUV, which has begun presales.

HP Enterprise shares were up 3.7% after Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock, raising its rating to “overweight” (or buy) from “neutral,” and hiked its its price target to $28 from $22.

CoreWeave shares were up as much as 3% in premarket trading before closing the day largely flat, after quantitative trading and market-making firm Jane Street revealed a 5.4% stake in the company.

Luke Kawa9h

Google jumps, Nvidia and AMD fall on report that the search giant is in talks to sell “billions of dollars” of its custom AI chips to Meta

Google jumped in after-hours trading while Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices dropped on the heels of a report from The Information that has the search giant muscling in on the chip designers’ turf.

Per the report, Meta is in discussions with Google to spend “billions of dollars” to use its AI chips in the social media company’s data centers starting in 2027, and to begin renting access to Google chips from its cloud business next year.

Historically, Google has rented access to these chips through its cloud business rather than supply them directly to third parties. The report suggests that insiders believe a more direct foray could allow the company to grab a market share in chips amounting to about 10% of Nvidia’s annual revenue.

Google’s AI chips — TPUs, or tensor processing units — are having a moment. These semiconductors were used to train its latest genAI model, Gemini 3, which has received rave reviews, and are cheaper to use than Nvidia’s offerings. That’s sent the stock to record highs, surpassing Microsoft in market value along the way.

According to The Information, Meta is even mulling using TPUs for training, considered a much more demanding task, rather than just inference alone.

Shares of Nvidia and AMD, which sell GPUs for use in data centers, fell about 2% in postmarket trading, while Google gained around 2%.

During Nvidia’s conference call last week, CEO Jensen Huang was asked about the competitive threat posed by custom chips. He responded by talking up the difficulty of inference (“How could thinking be easy?”). That’s a not-too-subtle nod to the idea that his company’s GPUs will be the more effective solution compared to more cost-effective options. He also touted the company’s CUDA software as a selling point, because it’s more commonly used and therefore makes it easier for its buyers to go on and sell AI computing capacity.

Google has aimed to make its JAX software easier for developers over time by making its TPUs operable via open-source software tied to PyTorch (invented by Meta), overhauling how errors are reported, and introducing an extension that makes it easier to write custom code, among others.

Tasha Matsumoto

13h

Tech rally drives stocks higher as AI trade is back on

Stocks kicked off the holiday week with a tech-fueled rally, led by Broadcom.