US stocks opened higher on Friday, led by gains in technology shares, as the artificial intelligence trade attempted to regain momentum after a volatile stretch.
The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.5%, while the S&P 500 added 0.4%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 176 points, or 0.4%.
The rally was driven in part by Oracle, whose shares jumped more than 5% after reports that TikTok agreed to sell its US operations to a new joint venture that includes the software company and private equity firm Silver Lake.
The move marked a reversal for Oracle, which had been under heavy pressure earlier in the week.
Investor sentiment toward the stock had deteriorated following reports that the cloud infrastructure provider had lost a key financial backer for one of its large data centre projects.
That development weighed on broader sentiment around artificial intelligence infrastructure spending and dragged down other stocks tied to the theme, including Broadcom and Advanced Micro Devices.
Friday’s rebound helped ease concerns that had rippled across the sector, though semiconductors as a group remain about 6% below their recent highs.
Chipmakers find support
Elsewhere in the AI ecosystem, Nvidia shares rose 1.9% after Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the Trump administration is reviewing whether the chipmaker could resume sales of advanced AI processors to China.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said he would allow Nvidia to ship its H200 chips to “approved customers” in the country.
Micron Technology also extended its recent rally, climbing more than 4%.
The stock had surged 10% in the previous session after the memory chipmaker delivered strong revenue guidance for the current quarter.
Micron said “demand is substantially higher than supply for the foreseeable future,” a message that reassured investors after several sessions of unease around the durability of AI-related capital spending.
Together, the moves helped restore confidence in parts of the semiconductor space after a period marked by profit-taking and concerns over valuation.
The gains followed a positive turn in the previous session, when both the S&P 500 and the Dow snapped four-day losing streaks.
Fed official flags CPI distortions
On the macroeconomic front, New York Federal Reserve President John Williams said that November’s inflation data may have been distorted by technical factors related to the US government shutdown earlier in the fall.
“There were some special factors of practical factors that really are related to the fact that they weren’t able to collect data in October and not in the first half of November,” Williams said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
He added that those issues “pushed down the CPI reading, probably by a tenth or so.”
Williams said the consumer price index data, which showed inflation rising at a 2.7% annualised rate last month, may carry a downward bias because much of the data was collected during a period of widespread sales.
Economists polled by Dow Jones had expected a 3.1% reading.
“It’s hard to know… when we get to December date, I think we’ll get a better reading of how much that distortion, how big the effect was,” Williams said. Still, he noted that some categories not affected by those technical issues showed encouraging signs.
“Some of the data that we’re seeing is actually pretty encouraging in the sense of the CPI news, and I think it represents a continuation of the disinflationary process we’ve seen,” he said.
Investors will continue to weigh those signals alongside corporate developments as the year draws to a close.
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