The S&P 500 was muted on Thursday as losses in tech heavyweights Microsoft and Nvidia countered earnings-led gains for Meta and Tesla, while investors parsed a slew of corporate earnings a day after the U.

Tesla stock rises on optimism over the electric-vehicle maker’s growth projections, Microsoft’s Azure growth misses estimates, Meta’s fourth-quarter profit handily tops forecasts, and UPS says it will be reducing volume with Amazon.

Data center technology spending skyrocketed 34 percent in 2024, according to Synergy Research Group. It is soaring past a half a trillion dollars in the first month of 2025 as banks and technology vendors vie to build out massive AI compute.

Meta Platforms and most other U.S. stocks are rising Thursday following a rush of profit reports from some of the country’s most influential companies, but drops for Nvidia and Microsoft are keeping the market in check.

Retail investors bought a net $562 million of Nvidia stock on Monday, the largest single-day inflow in at least 10 years, VandaTrack said.

Nvidia is launching its next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs today, but it’s also releasing an exciting update for existing RTX GPU owners. A new GPU driver (572.16) allows you to force DLSS 4 inside games or apps that don’t currently support it, providing improved image quality and even less VRAM usage in some cases.

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, companies started spending billions on GPUs to train AI models. Nvidia led the market for graphics processing units (GPUs), so it was the right company at the right time to deliver monster returns to investors.

Nvidia shares' 9% recovery Tuesday was the second-best day in terms of market cap added for any company ever—but the company faced another selloff Wednesday.

Microsoft, MSFT, CEO Satya Nadella is expected to talk about DeepSeek, Stargate, Azure, Copilot, AI, GenAI and more on the tech vendor’s 2Q 2025 earnings call.

In its own research, DeepSeek said it had “distilled” models from its R1 system based on other open-source systems. Unlike OpenAI’s closed systems, some models such as Meta’s Llama are open-source and freely available for use.

Nvidia is the gold standard and leading provider of the graphics processing units (GPUs) used to train and run AI systems. The company is believed to control as much as 98% of the data center GPU market, according to semiconductor analyst firm TechInsights. If AI models can be trained on lower-cost, inferior chips, Nvidia has a lot to lose.