On Monday afternoon, the US stock market experienced mixed results. The S&P 500 saw a modest increase of approximately 0.3%, and the Nasdaq rose by about 0.7%, driven by a series of AI-related deals boosting megacap tech stocks. In contrast, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by over 180 points. Nvidia shares advanced nearly 3.5%, while Microsoft's stock remained relatively unchanged after the company confirmed it had obtained export licenses to supply Nvidia-class GPUs to the UAE and secured a separate multi-year GPU cloud contract valued at around $9.7 billion. Meanwhile, Amazon's stock surged nearly 5%, following reports of a multi-year partnership worth approximately $38 billion with OpenAI, which will significantly rely on massive GPU deployments.
The materials and real estate sectors underperformed after the ISM manufacturing index came in below expectations at 48.7, indicating weaker demand in the manufacturing sector. Among the decliners, Apple fell by 0.8%, Meta by 0.9%, and Broadcom by 1.2%.
In other corporate news, Kimberly-Clark's stock plunged by over 13.5% following the announcement of an approximately $48 billion offer for Kenvue, which consequently saw its stock soar by over 15%. Investors remained focused on corporate earnings, looking forward to reports from AI-adjacent companies such as Palantir, which are scheduled for this week.
