To The Moon

Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Applied Materials, and Other Tech Stocks in Focus Today

Technology stocks are set to end the week in a quiet fashion as the market retreats from recent record-high levels.

Futures for the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 were up 0.1% early on Friday. The $NASDAQ(.IXIC)$   closed down 0.3% on Thursday.

$Microsoft(MSFT)$   got a mixed message from regulators on Friday. The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority said it had closed its inquiry into the company's partnership with French artificial-intelligence company Mistral, finding that the deal doesn't qualify for investigation.

However, the European Union's executive body, the European Commission, said that it was requiring Microsoft to provide adequate information on risks stemming from generative artificial-intelligence features in Bing, its search engine, by May 27.

Microsoft shares were up 0.4% in premarket trading.

Microsoft isn't the only company in the commission's sights. The commission said Thursday that it is opening formal probes into Meta Platforms' Facebook and Instagram platforms, including their use of algorithms that officials said may stimulate addictive behavior in children.

$Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$   shares slipped 0.3%.

CoreWeave, an AI cloud-computing start-up backed by $NVIDIA Corp(NVDA)$   , has raised $7.5 billion from investors including Blackstone, Carlyle Group, and BlackRock, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Nvidia shares were down 0.2%.

Despite better-than-expected results for its latest quarter, Applied Materials shares edged 0.1% lower.

The chip-equipment company reported fiscal second-quarter net income of $1.72 billion, or $2.06 a share, on Thursday. That compares with $1.58 billion, or $1.86 a share, in the same period a year earlier.

Applied Materials' revenue came in at $6.65 billion, essentially flat with the $6.63 billion that the company posted a year before, whereas the FactSet consensus was for $6.54 billion.

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