Wall St eyes best day as Anthropic’s IPO filing propels AI stocks
NEW YORK: The S&P 500 and Nasdaq were set for their biggest one-day gain in more than a month on Monday as tech stocks advanced after Anthropic’s IPO filing put AI back in focus at the start of a week packed with corporate earnings and the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate decision.
Anthropic disclosed steep losses and red-hot revenue growth in its filing for a US initial public offering, laying out its ambition to build AI systems capable of reshaping the global economy despite the high costs of developing the technology.
The AI lab is pushing ahead with its listing plans even as a once-busy fall IPO calendar has thinned out, with market volatility prompting companies to delay offerings.
“It’s a challenging environment to say the least exactly when this IPO will take place, but there’s a lot riding on not only the company, but the AI industry,” said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth in Fairfield.
Semiconductor and chip-related companies, widely viewed as some of the biggest winners of the AI boom, were leading the gains. The broader Philadelphia chips index was up more than 3 percent after a turbulent few weeks.
Anthropic’s filing arrives as investors increasingly scrutinize the payoff from AI spending. About a third of S&P 500 companies are scheduled to report earnings this week, including hyperscalers Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon.com, whose results would be parsed for signs if the hefty AI investments are translating into growth. The focus follows a subdued reception to earnings from AI-linked megacaps last week. Meta disappointed investors after raising its annual AI spending forecast again and saying it would sell new stock to help pay for it, while Tesla also came under pressure following its results.
Meta said on Monday it plans to raise up to USD95 billion in equity to fund its AI-related expansion of data centers, cloud computing power and other infrastructure. Its shares were last up 0.2 percent.
The AI trade has come under pressure this month amid concerns that debt-funded spending may become harder to justify in the face of rising borrowing costs.
Sentiment, however, improved a bit on Monday as neocloud firms such as CoreWeave and Nebius, which have been at the center of the AI storm, reversed initial losses to trade higher.
Other AI-linked companies, including photonic product makers Lumentum and Coherent, along with server makers Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, were among the best-performing stocks.
At 11:30 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 168.52 points, or 0.32 percent, to 52,383.68. The S&P 500 gained 70.17 points, or 0.92 percent, to 7,693.85, while the Nasdaq Composite advanced 325.16 points, or 1.25 percent, to 26,280.50.