Friday's top US stock by trading volume was NVIDIA (NVDA), closing up 4.03% with turnover of $30.751 billion. Reports emerged Friday that the Trump administration plans to ease export controls on the United Arab Emirates, clearing the way for its procurement of various advanced technologies including commercial satellites and semiconductors for artificial intelligence.
The report indicated that the U.S. Department of Commerce is set to issue a notification next week, essentially stating that the UAE now qualifies for more lenient treatment under U.S. export control laws due to its support for the U.S. stance in anti-Iranian conflicts.
Analysts stated that the easing of U.S. export controls would enable UAE-based companies to proceed with plans to purchase advanced AI chips from NVIDIA, AMD, and Cerebras Systems.
This agreement, reached between the U.S. and the UAE over a year ago, stipulates that these companies supply thousands of processors to the UAE state-backed tech leader G42 for use in new AI data centers being built in the region.
Second by volume was Micron Technology, closing down 1.24% with turnover of $30.423 billion. Micron Technology has firmly established itself as one of the biggest potential winners in the AI infrastructure space by 2026, triggering a collective "panic buying" wave among Wall Street analysts who have significantly revised their valuation models. Driven by robust demand for data center memory, several top research firms have dramatically raised their price targets, pushing the expected range to unprecedented levels between $1,200 and $1,500.
This wave of aggressive upward revisions comes as Micron Technology stock approaches its all-time high above $1,000 per share, officially entering the trillion-dollar market capitalization club.
The core logic behind the substantial price target increases is not particularly complex: demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and traditional dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) from AI servers is exceptionally strong. With the construction of advanced wafer fabrication plants taking at least 12 months, the entire industry is facing a structural supply shortage, with demand far outstripping production capacity.
Third by volume was Meta Platforms, Inc. (META), closing up 5.97% with turnover of $26.816 billion. As market optimism regarding CEO Mark Zuckerberg's AI strategy continues to build, Meta Platforms stock surged on Friday, extending its weekly gain to 14.8%, marking its strongest weekly performance since the beginning of 2024.
Just three months after launching its first self-developed foundational large language model, Muse Spark, Meta this week unveiled two major AI product announcements in succession. On Tuesday, the company launched the image-generation AI model Muse Image, aimed at attracting creators and advertisers to its paid subscription services. On Thursday, Meta officially released Muse Spark 1.1, focused on autonomous agent tasks and computational load for code development scenarios.
The series of new product releases this week demonstrates that Meta is making a full-fledged push into the AI large model race, directly competing with early leaders like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Alphabet (GOOG). This move also reflects the company's strategic shift to diversify its revenue streams beyond its reliance on advertising, while confirming substantial progress in research and development at the Meta Superintelligence Lab led by Alex Wang.
Following this consecutive rally, Meta has now recovered all its year-to-date losses and is currently up over 2% for the year. However, the Nasdaq index has gained 13% over the same period, indicating the stock's performance still lags significantly behind the broader market.
Fourth by volume was SanDisk, closing up 3.10% with turnover of $19.449 billion. The stock gained 9.8% for the week.
Fifth by volume was SK Hynix-WI (SKHYV), closing up 12.76% with turnover of $18.212 billion. On July 9 local time, memory chip giant SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion through an American Depositary Share (ADS) issuance, marking the largest U.S. initial public offering by a foreign company. SK Hynix priced 177.9 million ADSs at $149 each, representing 1.779 million Korean ordinary shares, at a 3.1% premium to the closing price of its ordinary shares on the Seoul market.
The ADSs began trading on the Nasdaq on July 10 under the ticker "SKHYV."
This fundraising amount surpasses Alibaba's $25 billion financing in 2014, making it the most notable semiconductor capital event in global markets this week.
Seventh by volume was AMD, closing up 2.04% with turnover of $11.368 billion. ARK Investment Management CEO Cathie Wood executed a significant portfolio adjustment on Thursday, with her funds aggressively increasing their holdings in Meta Platforms stock while further reducing their stake in chip giant AMD.
Eleventh by volume was Intel, closing down 2.40% with turnover of $7.681 billion. The stock declined 8.7% for the week.
Twelfth by volume was SpaceX, closing down 4.51% with turnover of $6.756 billion. The stock fell on four of the five trading days this week, resulting in a cumulative weekly loss of over 10% and reducing its market capitalization below $1.9 trillion.
Analysts generally believe that SpaceX's near-term growth is primarily dependent on terrestrial AI infrastructure rather than its more futuristic concepts like "orbital AI." Its recently signed annualized $28 billion compute capacity contracts already generate revenue far exceeding its rocket launch and Starlink businesses. However, they caution that these contracts contain termination clauses and do not represent stable revenue. In the long term, orbital AI is estimated to require over a decade of development, reliant on breakthroughs in Starship technology. Analysts expect terrestrial compute power to remain the company's main profit driver until at least 2030.
Seventeenth by volume was Palantir, closing down 1.74% with turnover of $3.912 billion. DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria upgraded the stock from "Neutral" to "Buy" on July 2 and raised his price target from $165 to $175. This target price implies over 30% upside potential from the previous closing price.
Nineteenth by volume was Applied Materials, closing up 2.35% with turnover of $3.721 billion. The company's CEO stated on July 9 that chipmakers have provided equipment demand forecasts for the next two years or even longer to secure expansion, suggesting the AI-driven investment boom may last longer than anticipated.
Recently, institutions including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Susquehanna International Group have raised their price targets for the company, with Susquehanna setting a high target of $900. Institutions are broadly optimistic about its positioning to benefit from the expansion of AI compute infrastructure. Over the past week (July 2 to July 9), the stock's price fluctuated within a range of nearly 20%, declining initially before rebounding.
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