It’s AI mania in the stock market!
How else can you describe what we are witnessing? And if you message me on X to say the market action is 100% healthy, expect a no-reply. Come on, friends!
At a conference in Taipei early Monday, Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang said the company will drop a super PC chip in the fall that takes aim at Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD). Huang attaching the word “super” to a new product is akin to dumping lighter fluid on an open flame.
The news sent shares of tech players Arm Holdings (ARM), IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), and ServiceNow (NOW) ripping higher like a giant fireball.
IBM stock was even up 10% at one point in the week after a resurfaced video of President Trump praising CEO Arvind Krishna was perceived as new by the AI bulls.
But what Huang said about the potential of artificial intelligence is what the AI bulls lapped up. I won’t say these were new thoughts from the always-bullish Huang. They were more like updates to prior upbeat comments that arrive at an important moment for tech investors.
“Every company will have agents running inside,” Huang said. “Every company will see that agents will need its own operating system. Every company is asking us, ‘How do we run agents safely? How do we build agents for our own workloads?’ There are going to be so many agents. The world is no longer limited by the number of people. Those agents are going to use more tools than ever.”
Mania fuel!
This was just Monday morning.
Monday evening brought whopper AI news from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
A few days removed from Dell’s (DELL) stock exploding 32.6% following a monster quarter and guidance, Hewlett Packard Enterprise experienced the same market reaction.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s stock rose 16% on Tuesday following much better-than-expected results and upbeat guidance amid the AI infrastructure boom. HPE CEO Antonio Neri told me he is so confident in the AI demand outlook that he was OK issuing 2027 guidance — in June.
“There is real demand,” Neri said, pushing back on the narrative that we are headed toward a dot-com era crash. Neri said he doesn’t see any AI demand peak on the horizon.
Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco (CSCO) — a competitor to HPE — sounded just as upbeat in our chat a few weeks ago when a big quarter at Cisco sent that stock skyrocketing.
I heard zero tone change when I spoke with Snowflake (SNOW) CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy at the company’s annual partner conference in San Francisco. This was a few days removed from Snowflake stock exploding by more than 30% the day after its earnings report.
“AI is compounding Snowflake’s strengths in data,” Ramaswamy said.
As I said, mania-like action in all of these stock prices.
Not everyone shares my sentiment about the action, and I can appreciate the opposing view.
“I don’t think it’s a mania. Taxi drivers are not talking to me about AI server orders or GPUs yet. It hasn’t happened yet. So we’re not in the full mania phase yet,” EMJ Capital founder and veteran tech investor Eric Jackson said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid (video above). “People are buckling in. They are spending real dollars, unlike the dot-com period. And this thing [AI] is real. So there’s more to come.”
Bottom line: Be glued to the all-new Yahoo Finance AI hub that debuted this week. It’s an AI-driven market, and you can’t afford to be out of the loop — especially in a mania.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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