Major indexes closed sharply higher on Thursday, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index surging more than 8%. Microsoft (MSFT.US) shares jumped 15.5%, adding approximately $450 billion to its market capitalization in a single day, marking the largest single-day market cap gain for any stock in history. U.S. Treasury yields remained under pressure, with the 30-year bond yield hovering near 2007 highs following the Federal Reserve's decision to hold interest rates steady.
U.S. Stock Market: At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 613.92 points, or 1.19%, to 52,208.06; the Nasdaq Composite gained 679.24 points, or 2.78%, to 25,122.18; and the S&P 500 increased 121.48 points, or 1.66%, to 7,437.63. Micron Technology (MU.US) gained 18%, SanDisk (SNDK.US) rose 26%, SK Hynix (SKHY.US) advanced 17%, and Nvidia (NVDA.US) added over 2%. The Nasdaq China Golden Dragon Index climbed 1.05%, with iQIYI (IQ.US) rising 4%.
European Markets: Germany's DAX 30 gained 164.94 points, or 0.65%, to 25,613.70; the UK's FTSE 100 fell 11.52 points, or 0.11%, to 10,896.89; France's CAC 40 rose 77.37 points, or 0.92%, to 8,485.64; the Euro Stoxx 50 added 96.51 points, or 1.54%, to 6,345.35; Spain's IBEX 35 jumped 357.73 points, or 1.84%, to 19,748.03; and Italy's FTSE MIB gained 637.89 points, or 1.24%, to 52,081.00.
Asian Markets: Japan's Nikkei 225 rose 0.71%, while South Korea's KOSPI index fell 1.23%.
U.S. Dollar Index: The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the greenback against six major currencies, fell 1.01% to 99.868 in late trading. At the New York close, the euro traded at $1.1535, up from $1.1452 the previous session, and the British pound stood at $1.3476, up from $1.3364. The dollar weakened against the Japanese yen to 158.93, from 163.32; against the Swiss franc to 0.8040, from 0.8149; against the Canadian dollar to 1.3996, from 1.4040; and against the Swedish krona to 9.5189, from 9.6434.
Cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin rose over 1% to $64,700, while Ethereum gained more than 0.6% to $1,920.
Crude Oil: Light sweet crude oil for September delivery fell 87 cents to $83.59 per barrel, a decline of 1.03%. London Brent crude for September delivery dropped $1.71 to $89.03 per barrel, a decrease of 1.88%.
Precious Metals: Spot gold traded at $4,105.65, and spot silver was at $59.09.
Macro News: OpenAI announced price cuts for two GPT-5.6 models on Thursday, citing improved system efficiency for the supporting models. The company will reduce the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20%. Luna now costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, while Terra is priced at $2.00 per million input tokens and $12.00 per million output tokens. OpenAI stated that these price reductions are already reflected in the billing rules for Codex and ChatGPT Work. However, the most powerful version, GPT-5.6 Sol, will not see a price cut. OpenAI also indicated it will offer faster options for GPT-5.6 Sol in the API. The company is currently engaged in fierce competition with firms like Anthropic to deliver the best models. As next-generation reasoning models consume significantly more tokens in longer-running agent tasks, both OpenAI and Anthropic have adjusted their pricing, rate limits, and other usage policies. Citadel has acquired a significant portion of the large AI stock holdings from Situational Awareness. According to reports, Situational Awareness, a $24 billion hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, suffered heavy losses and quickly sold a substantial part of its $16 billion public equity portfolio to Citadel. Sources say the fund held emergency negotiations with multiple investors on Wednesday evening to discuss selling its large public market holdings. Situational Awareness also holds stakes in several private companies, including a $5 billion position in Anthropic. The fund will continue to operate as a private investment firm. Over the past 24 hours, at least three multi-billion dollar hedge funds have engaged in negotiations with Situational Awareness to facilitate the transaction.
Company News: Apple's total revenue slightly exceeded expectations, but Greater China revenue disappointed, leading to a 4% drop in after-hours trading. Apple (AAPL.US) reported fiscal third-quarter revenue and profit that surpassed Wall Street estimates, driven by strong demand for iPhones and MacBooks amid a wave of consumer electronics price increases. Revenue rose 16.4% year-over-year to $109.42 billion, slightly above the consensus estimate of $108.65 billion. Earnings per share were $2.02, including $0.11 from tariff refunds, but still beat the adjusted estimate of $1.89. iPhone sales surged 21.7% to $54.25 billion, exceeding analysts' expectations of $53.86 billion, serving as the primary growth engine and setting a record for the third quarter, a period typically slow due to anticipation for new fall models. This year, global memory chip shortages pushed up prices for Macs and iPads, inadvertently stimulating customers to purchase iPhones early. Apple has not yet raised prices for its flagship iPhone, but Wall Street widely expects a price adjustment at the September fall launch event. However, Apple's Greater China revenue for the fiscal third quarter was $18.82 billion, below the market estimate of $19.67 billion. Services revenue was $30.74 billion, also missing the $31.22 billion forecast. Amazon.com (AMZN.US) shares surged over 8% in after-hours trading after its second-quarter cloud business revenue exceeded expectations. Thanks to a surge in corporate spending on artificial intelligence, Amazon's second-quarter cloud business revenue growth surpassed market expectations, indicating that its massive investments are yielding results. The company reported that revenue from its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), jumped 37% to $42.2 billion in the second quarter, while analysts had predicted growth of 31.21%. This positive performance may help alleviate some concerns about the huge capital expenditures by tech giants on AI (expected to exceed $700 billion this year), which have put pressure on the cash flows of these traditionally cash-rich companies and raised worries about potential overcapacity. Total Q2 revenue was $200.6 billion, compared to the market consensus of $196.42 billion. However, Amazon's Q3 revenue outlook of $197 billion to $202 billion fell short of the market estimate of $204.07 billion. Meta Platforms committed to spending nearly $700 billion in the future on data centers and other areas. Meta Platforms (META.US) stated it has committed to investing nearly $700 billion in the future through long-term and short-term agreements for AI data centers and cloud computing. In a regulatory filing on Thursday, Meta said its total irrevocable contractual commitments amount to $349.3 billion, primarily related to third-party cloud service agreements, servers, and network infrastructure. Meta described this as a conservative estimate. The company also has $347 billion in unfulfilled lease commitments not yet reflected on its balance sheet, with $68 billion added in July alone. Payments for these leases are expected to begin in 2027 and 2028. These costs are in addition to existing leases and mainly cover data centers, colocation services, and certain network infrastructure. Several banks are in talks to provide a $15 billion loan to Anthropic's data center project, with support from Google. According to reports, a data center developer collaborating with Anthropic is in advanced discussions to borrow $15 billion to build a massive data center campus and power plant in Texas. Google is expected to provide financial guarantees and chips. Under the proposed agreement, a syndicate led by Morgan Stanley would provide the loan to Nexus Data Centers for the campus in Hubbard, Texas, which will include an on-site natural gas power plant capable of generating 1.6 gigawatts of electricity. The deal could be announced as early as today. Sources say that to help Nexus secure debt financing, Google has guaranteed billions of dollars in lease and power payment obligations for Anthropic in case the startup defaults. However, Google's support is limited, covering only the minimum amount needed for banks to complete the financing. These guarantees cover four data center lease contracts signed by Anthropic and the corresponding power purchase agreements, with electricity supplied by the on-site plant serving the campus.
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