Weighing most heavily on the S&P 500 was superstar stock Nvidia, one of Wall Street's most influential companies. After initially rising at the open of trading following a better-than-expected profit report, Nvidia quickly slid to a loss of 2.8%.
Better-than-expected earnings reports have become routine for Nvidia, whose chips are powering the surge into artificial-intelligence technology, but this was the company's first since DeepSeek shook the entire AI industry.
After the Chinese upstart said it developed a large language model that can compete with the world’s best without using the most expensive chips, Wall Street had to question all the spending it assumed would go into Nvidia’s chips and the ecosystem that’s built around the AI boom, such as electricity to power large data centers.
Nvidia’s performance for the latest quarter, along with its forecasts for upcoming results, were “good enough to keep the debate moving in a positive direction,” according to analysts at UBS led by Timothy Arcuri.
But it apparently wasn't good enough to send Nvidia's stock higher, particularly given criticism that its price had already leaped too high, too quickly. After more than tripling two years ago, it more than doubled last year as its sales exploded.
The market also soured on Salesforce, which fell 1% despite topping analysts’ profit expectations for the latest quarter. Several analysts called the performance solid, and the company continued to tout its AI offerings, but it gave forecasts for upcoming revenue that fell short of expectations.
C3.ai, meanwhile, sank 5.9% despite likewise topping analysts' forecasts for profit in the latest quarter.
One AI-related company bucking the trend was Snowflake. The AI data cloud company rose 9.6% after delivering stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
It joined a wide range of stocks on the more staid end of Wall Street, ones that didn't grab as many headlines as AI-related companies in recent years.
A 1.8% rise for Berkshire Hathaway, the company run by famed investor Warren Buffett, was one of the strongest forces pushing upward on the S&P 500. The owner of Geico, BNSF railroad and other businesses has built a hoard of unused cash recently. The could indicate Buffett, who's famous for buying stocks when prices are low, may not see much worth purchasing in a market that critics say looks too expensive.
Gains of 2.1% for Visa and 1.5% for UnitedHealth Group also pushed strongly upward on the market.
Some investors have been waiting for other kinds of stocks to pick up the market's leadership baton from Nvidia and a handful of other high-growth, high-momentum companies that had dominated for years. Nvidia alone accounted for just over 22% of the total return for the S&P 500 index last year.
In the bond market, Treasury yields swung up and down following President Donald Trump's latest announcement on tariffs. He said "the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled" for imports from Canada and Mexico. He also said he would add an additional 10% tariff on Chinese products on that date.
Such tariffs could push up prices for U.S. households when inflation has already shown itself to be stubborn to ease. Wall Street has been hoping such threats are merely talk and leverage that Trump will use in negotiations with other countries before ultimately inflicting less pain on the economy than feared.
But even if that were the case, all the tariff talk has already been enough to get U.S. households to feel more nervous about the economy. That's dangerous if it causes them to pull back on their spending, which has been one of the linchpins keeping the U.S. economy out of a recession.
Such worries have created a rough run for the U.S. stock market recently, and weaker-than-expected reports on the U.S. economy knocked the S&P 500 off its record set last week.
They're also pressuring the Federal Reserve, which has few if any tools to help an economy when economic growth is slowing and inflation is rising at the same time.
Jeff Schmid, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said in a speech Thursday that he has "become more cautious" in his hopes that inflation will continue to ease. He also said that discussions with people in his district suggest “elevated uncertainty might weigh on growth” for the economy.
For now, at least, the U.S. economy appears to be in at least solid shape. The government on Thursday left alone its estimate for how the U.S. economy performed during the last three months of 2024, though it raised its estimate for a measure of inflation during the quarter.
A separate report said more U.S. workers applied for unemployment benefits last week. While the number is at a three-month high, it is still nowhere close to where it's been in past recessions.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.29% from 4.26% late Wednesday.
In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed across Europe and Asia. Germany’s DAX lost 1.1%, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 added 0.3%.
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AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
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