Final Tally: Nasdaq Plays Comeback Kid After SaaS Funeral Gets Canceled… State of the Voltage

Well, Happy Tariff’s Day (once again), to all who celebrate… stonks got absolutely piecemealed like they were fighting prime McGregor after Trump… is what I thought I would be leading this email out with.

AI was supposedly seconds away from repossessing everyone’s job, Trump looked ready to start a war with Iran, and the Supreme Court had just clipped his tariff wings…

But instead of surrendering to the bears and drafting their resignation letters to capitalism, Commander Stonk gathered his brave (and yes, arguably overvalued) troops and mounted a counteroffensive.

And just like that, the tape flipped. The S&P caught back .8% of its losses from yesterday, as well as the Nasdaq (+1.1%) and Dow (.9%) playing comeback kid. 

So what changed?

For starters, AMD decided to remind everyone it still exists… and that hyperscalers are still very much in spending mode. Shares jumped 9% after Meta announced a multiyear partnership to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs across its AI data centers. Yes, gigawatts. As in power-plant levels of compute.

Meta didn’t stop at purchase orders either. The company structured a performance-based warrant for up to 160 million AMD shares, which means if AMD wins, Meta wins harder (pardon my english).

Meanwhile, the software space (which had been catching strays from the “AI will replace you” narrative courtesy of the fine folks at Citrini) suddenly decided it wasn’t actually roadkill.

DocuSign rose 3% after Anthropic announced that Claude Cowork can now integrate directly with DocuSign, as well as tools like Google Drive and Gmail. So instead of eliminating enterprise software, AI may end up plugging into it, automating workflows and making existing platforms stickier (snip snap snip snap energy).

That copoptimism spilled over to Marc Benioff’s baby (read: Salesforce), which climbed 4%, and ServiceNow, up 2%. Even IBM (which had experienced its biggest daily drop since Y2K fears) had itself a little bounce back (2%).

Outside of tech, the orange unhelpful aprons (aka: Home Depot) jumped 2% after delivering its first earnings beat in a year. The Dow appreciated the assist. Turns out, even in an AI-obsessed market, people are still buying lumber and light fixtures. Just don’t ask anyone what aisle electrical tape is in.

Then there’s the other half of the AI boom… the part that doesn’t show up in chip orders but definitely shows up in utility bills.

Lastly, stay tuned to this evening’s SOTU address, where a very energized Donnie Politics is expected to announce (and I’m sure it will be tremendous) a pledge requiring Big Tech to pay higher electricity prices in the communities where they’re building these absolutely massive, beautiful data centers. 

You can almost hear it now: “They’re using a lot of electricity, folks. A lot. Nobody’s ever seen power usage like this. And we’re going to make them pay. Very simple.”

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.

Market Gossip

>Early Tax Refunds Are Showing A 14% Increase, IRS Says (ZeroHedge): I used to pray for times like this.

>World Bank takes out $6bn loan insurance to boost its lending (Financial Times): Dave Ramsey is punching the air right now.

>Harvard-Led Study Says AI Can Predict 71% of Active-Fund Trades (Bloomberg): Be right back, about to go vibe-code an AI trading bot with Claude.

>Warner Bros weighing revised bid from Paramount as bidding war escalates (Yahoo Finance): Larry Ellison’s “Groundhog Day” continues.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta and Google as mentioned in the article.