AI-related stocks rallied sharply on Friday as investors piled back into artificial intelligence and technology names amid hopes for progress in US-Iran negotiations and renewed momentum across Wall Street.
The broader market pushed higher, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite reaching fresh all-time intraday highs as traders reacted to signs that diplomatic efforts between the United States and Iran could still prevent a broader escalation in the Middle East conflict.
The S&P 500 rose 0.6%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite gained 1.1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hovered near flat levels.
President Donald Trump said Monday that talks with Iran were “proceeding nicely,” although he also warned the United States could move offensively if negotiations collapse.
At the same time, the US military confirmed it carried out what it described as “self defense” strikes in southern Iran targeting missile launch sites and Iranian naval units attempting to place mines.
Qualcomm, AMD, Intel and memory stocks lead gains
Among chipmakers, Qualcomm surged roughly 6% after expanding its partnership with Stellantis around Snapdragon Digital Chassis systems for next-generation vehicles.
Advanced Micro Devices climbed nearly 5% after chief executive Lisa Su said the company is working with Taiwanese partners to expand production capacity amid rising AI-related demand.
Several other semiconductor names also advanced strongly. Intel stock surged around 4%.
Additional gains spread across the broader semiconductor ecosystem, with Arm Holdings, Lattice Semiconductor and Marvell Technology all moving higher.
The strongest move came from Micron Technology, whose shares surged 17% and pushed the company above a $1 trillion market capitalization.
The rally was fueled by growing optimism around long-term memory-chip demand tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure buildouts.
Analysts at UBS recently argued the stock could more than double from current levels, citing the benefits of Micron’s long-term supply agreements and tightening memory markets.
Other memory-related names also rallied strongly.
Seagate Technology gained roughly 3%, while Western Digital jumped about 8%.
The Roundhill Memory ETF climbed approximately 12%.
Memory chips have become one of the hottest themes in semiconductors this year as supply constraints, AI server demand and rising high-bandwidth memory requirements continue reshaping the industry.
AI demand to remain strong
Meanwhile, Nvidia continued reinforcing its longer-term AI ambitions beyond graphics processors.
Chief executive Jensen Huang said over the weekend that Nvidia sees a future $200 billion CPU opportunity, including China, as AI workloads increasingly shift toward inference and agentic AI systems.
During Nvidia’s recent earnings call, Huang said the company’s new “Vera” CPU architecture opens access to a massive new addressable market beyond GPUs.
The rise of agentic AI — systems capable of autonomous reasoning and task execution — is broadening demand across the semiconductor ecosystem and increasing the importance of CPUs alongside traditional AI accelerators.
Nvidia is increasingly positioning itself not only as the dominant GPU provider, but as a full-stack AI infrastructure company spanning processors, networking, software and complete computing platforms.
The company remains at the center of Wall Street’s AI spending narrative as hyperscalers, governments and enterprises continue dramatically increasing infrastructure investments tied to artificial intelligence.
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