Superstar stock Nvidia is helping to prop up the U.S. market on Thursday, and indexes are rising after a rough run.
The S&P 500 was up 0.5% in early trading, coming off a painful stretch where weaker-than-expected reports on the U.S. economy knocked the index off its record set last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 139 points, or 0.3%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.7% higher.
Nvidia, which has grown to become one of Wall Street’s most influential stocks, helped support the market with a 0.6% gain. Even with that modest rise, it was still one of the strongest forces pushing upward on the S&P 500 because of its massive size, second only to Apple on Wall Street.
Nvidia rose after delivering both profit and revenue for the latest quarter that topped analysts’ expectations. Such a performance has become routine for the company, whose chips are powering the surge into artificial-intelligence technology, but this was Nvidia’s first profit report since DeepSeek shook the entire AI industry.
After the Chinese upstart said it developed a large language model that can compete with the world’s best without using the most expensive chips, Wall Street had to question all the spending it assumed would go into Nvidia’s chips and the ecosystem that’s built around the AI boom, such as electricity to power large data centers.
Nvidia’s performance for the latest quarter, along with its forecasts for upcoming results, were “good enough to keep the debate moving in a positive direction,” according to analysts at UBS led by Timothy Arcuri.
That helped offset a 3.7% drop for Salesforce, which topped analysts’ profit expectations for the latest quarter but gave forecasts for upcoming revenue and other financial measures that fell short.
Also weighing on the market was President Donald Trump’s latest announcement on tariffs. He said “the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled” for imports from Canada and Mexico. He also said he would add an additional 10% tariff on Chinese products on that date.
Such tariffs could push up prices for U.S. households when inflation has already shown itself to be stubborn to ease. Wall Street has been mostly hoping that such threats are merely talk and leverage that Trump will use in negotiations with other countries before ultimately inflicting less pain on the economy than feared.
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But even if that were to happen, all the talk about tariffs by itself has been enough to get U.S. households to feel much more nervous about the economy and their finances. That’s dangerous if it causes them to pull back on their spending, which has been one of the linchpins keeping the U.S. economy out of a recession.
In the bond market, Treasury yields were ticking higher after initially oscillating following Trump’s tariff announcement and a couple reports on the U.S. economy.
One gave an updated estimate on how the economy performed during the last three months of 2024. It left alone the government’s estimate for overall economic growth, which was solid, but it also raised its estimate for a measure of inflation during the quarter.
A separate report said more U.S. workers applied for unemployment benefits last week. While the number is still nowhere close to where it’s been in past recessions, it was still at a three-month high.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.30% from 4.26% late Wednesday.
In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed across Europe and Asia. Germany’s DAX lost 1%, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 added 0.3%.
