US stock futures climbed Sunday night after a record-setting week left the Dow Jones Industrial Average just under 53,000. Futures tied to the Nasdaq 100 jumped 1.4%, while S&P 500 futures rose 0.5% and Dow futures inched up 0.1%.
According to Yahoo Finance, all three major indexes gained roughly 2% last week. The Dow posted its strongest close in months. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite matched those gains, capping what analysts described as a strong first half of the year driven largely by tech and AI stocks.
Not everything went smoothly. Micron Technology dropped 19% over the course of last week, part of a broader chip stock selloff on the Thursday before the Fourth of July holiday. CNBC reported that the selloff was triggered by a story from tech media outlet The Information, which reported that Anthropic is in talks with Samsung to manufacture a custom artificial intelligence chip. Trading volume was light that day due to the holiday, which made stocks more vulnerable to large swings. The report sent hedge fund managers scrambling, and stocks including Micron, Seagate, Western Digital, Sandisk, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all fell. Anthropic told TechCrunch, another tech news site, that it uses chips from Google, Amazon, and Nvidia for its computing power. TechCrunch said that Anthropic did not have anything to add regarding its own custom chip aspirations.
The broader chip sector has had a complicated first half. AMD and Intel both far outpaced Nvidia in the January through June period. AMD climbed 171% while Intel surged 278%, according to Yahoo Finance. Nvidia, by contrast, gained just 7.2% over the same stretch. Investors rotated out of Nvidia and into companies that had not yet captured as much of the AI rally. Intel appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its new chief executive officer just over a year ago to lead a turnaround strategy, and in its most recent quarter the company posted revenue growth of 7%, its sixth straight quarter beating its own expectations. The US government also took a 10% stake in Intel last summer, valued at roughly $10 billion.
The concentration of AI stocks within the broader market has drawn comparisons to earlier bubbles. The so-called AI Big 10 now make up 41% of the S&P 500, a level similar to the share held by tech and telecom stocks during the dot-com bubble.
Despite those concerns, analysts speaking to Yahoo Finance expressed continued optimism. Baird investment strategist Ross Mayfield said, "There's a lot working, it's a bull market driven by earnings and liquidity, and those are the kind of things that can keep this going into the 2nd half of the year, and probably, in my opinion, into 2027 as well."
JPMorgan analysts recently raised their year-end forecast for the S&P 500 to 7,800. That revision reflects confidence in continued earnings growth, particularly in the AI sector, heading into the second half of the year.
Investors will have several opportunities to gauge the health of the economy this week. Monday brings a series of index readings from S&P Global and the Institute of Supply Management covering the US service economy. On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve is set to release minutes from its first meeting under new chair Kevin Warsh.
