Meta Platforms closed Friday with its biggest one-day gain since April 2025, rising about 6% after the company detailed plans for a new AI cloud unit and its own data-center chip, and Wall Street began treating the social-media giant as a serious contender in cloud computing. The rally, driven by Meta’s disclosure of a business it calls Meta Compute and an in-house chip project code-named Iris, capped a week in which the stock climbed nearly 15%, its best five-day run since early 2024 and the top performance among the Magnificent Seven. It helped push the major indexes to weekly gains heading into Monday’s open.
The broad market ended Friday higher across the board. The S&P 500 rose 0.42% to 7,575.39, the Nasdaq Composite added 0.29% to 26,281.61, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 149.60 points, or 0.29%, to 52,637.01. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq notched weekly wins after a choppy stretch dominated by renewed U.S.-Iran tensions and questions about how much investors should pay for anything tied to artificial intelligence. The Dow slipped about 0.5% on the week. Traders spent much of Friday watching ceasefire talks in the Middle East and the Wall Street debut of a major foreign chipmaker, but the session’s clearest signal was the market’s willingness to reward AI spending when a company can show a path to earning it back.
Market movers
Meta was the headline act. The company’s plan to sell excess computing power and hosted AI models through Meta Compute pushes it directly against Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, turning what had been a feared cost center into a possible new revenue line. Iris, the company’s own AI chip, is slated to begin production in September, part of a build-out toward roughly 14 gigawatts of computing capacity next year. The move drew a wave of bullish analyst notes. Wolfe Research kept an Outperform rating and an $800 price target, estimating that every gigawatt of compute Meta monetizes at a $25 billion run-rate could lift earnings per share by about 20%, while cautioning that 2026 capital spending could approach $200 billion, well above the roughly $160 billion Wall Street had penciled in. Erste Group upgraded the stock to Buy from Hold, citing superior growth and margins. Bank of America maintained its Buy rating and pointed to an internal Meta memo, reviewed by Reuters, suggesting the company may be building AI capacity at a far lower cost per gigawatt than analysts expected. Citizens trimmed its target to $800 from $825 but stayed constructive.
The day’s other big story was SK Hynix, which made its Nasdaq debut Friday in the largest-ever U.S. listing by a foreign company, raising $26.5 billion. The South Korean memory-chip maker, a key supplier to Nvidia, opened at $170 a share, roughly 14% above its offer price, and finished up about 13%. Nvidia itself gained around 4%, helping lead the S&P 500 higher, though the new listing pressured domestic memory names like Micron Technology as investors weighed fresh competition for their dollars. Elsewhere, Circle Internet Group rose 8.2% after winning federal approval to operate as a trust bank, WD-40 climbed 11% on strong quarterly results, and EquipmentShare surged 17% after raising its full-year outlook. On the downside, Delta Air Lines fell 2.8% as rising fuel costs overshadowed an earnings beat, Ionis Pharmaceuticals dropped 7.6% after a late-stage heart-drug trial with partner AstraZeneca failed, and Brookdale Senior Living slid 7.4% on weak June occupancy.
Commodities and volatility
Oil prices eased Friday as traders parsed conflicting signals out of the Middle East, with President Donald Trump at one point declaring the U.S. ceasefire with Iran over before noting that talks would continue. Tankers have continued moving through the Strait of Hormuz despite renewed hostilities, keeping a lid on crude. Gold fell 0.47% to $4,112.62 an ounce, and the yield on the 10-year Treasury ticked up to 4.56%. Market volatility stayed relatively subdued through the week even as headlines whipsawed, a sign that investors are treating the geopolitical risk as a slow-burning backdrop rather than an immediate threat to earnings.
The week ahead
Monday opens the heart of second-quarter earnings season, with big banks leading off and investors hunting for evidence that consumer spending and corporate profits are holding up against sticky inflation and higher-for-longer rates. Meta itself reports on July 29, a date that now carries added weight given Friday’s re-rating. Traders will also keep watching the Middle East, where any breakdown in the U.S.-Iran ceasefire could send oil higher and rattle the AI-led rally that carried markets into the weekend. For now, Meta’s surge has handed Wall Street a fresh reason to believe the AI trade still has room to run.
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